The Walt Disney Co.’s $8.61 billion check to acquire Comcast's 33% stake in Hulu arrived on Friday, and Comcast president Mike Cavanagh told a UBS media investor conference in New York Monday morning (December 4) he expects there to be more money from the Hulu divesture coming in following an ongoing process to properly value the platform.
The “check cleared, it’s in the account,” Cavanagh said. “We expect, and certainly hope to get, more than that once the process ends. But it’s really just the beginning.”
The payment, initial or final, is timely, given Cavanagh's disclosure that Comcast and its NBCUniversal media division will lose $2.8 billion on building streaming assets in 2023. Cavanagh told investors that he believes those losses have peaked.
Notably, NBCUniversal now counts 30 million subscribers for its flagship streaming service, Peacock — more than three times as many paying customers as the platform had two years ago.
“Our primary focus is to figure out domestic and make sure that we continue to have the reach and relevance between linear and digital as we look several years down the road,” Cavanagh said.
At a time when several of NBCU’s peers have had the will to endure the heavy losses needed to build scale in emerging platforms, Cavanagh and his team seem to have their feet under them. Comcast shares were up more than 2% at the time this sentence was typed.
“We disclose what we ‘lose’ in Peacock for clarity, and it’s going to peak this year at $2.8 billion of losses,” Cavanaugh said. “But don’t forget the counternarrative of, what would it all look like if we weren’t trying at Peacock? You’d be asking a different set of questions, which is, where are the linear businesses going if you’re not trying to figure out a future for the powerful platforms you have?”
