← Decoder with Nilay Patel
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why did Comcast ever buy NBC?
01:02:52
Business Insider’s Peter Kafka on the Comcast split, and why the dream of content plus pipes keeps failing.
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- [00:01]
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Neeli Patel
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- [01:29]
Neeli Patel
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neeli Patel, editor in chief of the Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Peter Kafka, who is chief correspondent at Business Insider and host of Channels, a podcast about the media industry. It's a big week for the media industry. Comcast just announced that it's splitting itself up into the Comcast broadband company and the NBCUniversal Entertainment Company. That comes after the media giant spun out its cable assets like CNBC and MSNow into a new company called Versant earlier this year. Quick note before we start, by the way. Longtime Burch fans know we've been disclosing that Comcast NBCUniversal was an investor in our parent company, Vox Media, for years. Now that's all come to an end. Not only did that investment spin out with Versant, but Vox Media itself is splitting in two, and that Versant stake now lives inside of a shell company that is part of a joint venture with a Penske media corporation called pmx, and PM technically does not exist yet. It is all very complicated, and I promise I will sort out a simpler disclosure when all of these deals close, but for now, the upshot is the same as ever. None of these companies have ever told us what to do or say in our reporting, and we wouldn't let them if they tried. Which is good, because Peter and I have a lot to say about Comcast. He and I have been covering media and telecom as friends, peers and competitors for years now. And Comcast was the biggest bet on the idea that combining media assets like NBC with access and distribution like Comcast Broadband Network would somehow pay off. This idea, which you'll hear us loosely call Content plus Pipes, is irresistible to media and telecom people. They cannot stay away from it. AT&T tried content and pipes when it bought Time Warner. Verizon tried content pipes when it bought aol, and Yahoo. Hell, AOL itself tried content pipes when it bought Time Warner in the early 2000s. You might notice a trend here. All of these deals ended in disaster, but Comcast managed to hold it together with NBCU for 15 years, even though it could never quite explain what value there was in putting the content near the pipes. And as you'll hear Peter Peter say, this big split feels like the company finally admitting it never really had that answer and capitulating to Wall Street's demands. Peter and I talked a lot about what comes next for Comcast and nbcu. Both companies have existential choices ahead of them and face stiff competition, and it's unclear if there are more deals coming to either sell or acquire more assets. We also talked a lot about how we got here and why Content plus Pipes always crashes and burns. You'll hear us talk a lot about Net neutrality in that context. That's the idea that ISPs like Comcast have to treat all the traffic on their network Equ. They can't throttle Netflix and prioritize Peacock. The ability to do that might have been the entire economic basis of Content plus Pipes. But Peter and I disagree on whether it was regulators or the market that kept the Internet from turning back into cable TV in that way. This is a good one. As you'll hear, Peter and I really like talking to each other about this stuff. Okay, Peter Kafka on the Comcast split. Here we go. Peter Kafka, you're the chief correspondent for Business Insider, as well as the host of the excellent media industry podcast channels. Welcome to Decoder.
- [04:39]
Peter Kafka
Thank you, Nilai. Thank you for having me.
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Neeli Patel
I have to say, channel is excellent because I was just on it. That's how I know it's good.
- [04:44]
Peter Kafka
That was an excellent episode.
- [04:46]
Neeli Patel
Yeah. And so we're trading it back. But I'm really excited to talk to you about what's going on with Comcast, because it feels like you and I have spent our careers weaving in and out of covering Comcast around each other. You especially.
- [04:59]
Peter Kafka
Turns out we were stupid. We should have just slept for the last 15 years and woken up, and then nothing would have changed.
- [05:06]
Neeli Patel
One of my favorite moments of all of the weaving back and forth was it wasn't Comcast specifically, but you had Reed Hastings on stage at an All Things D or a code conference, and you asked him about net neutrality, which we will come to in the course of this conversation. And he was like, yeah, it's over. We're big enough. It doesn't matter anymore. And that's. In many ways, this was a pivotal moment in the history of Internet and content, because what he was saying was that he had reached enough scale so that the distributors, the power now had to come to his terms. And if you look back, I think you can trace almost everything that's happened to that moment. Netflix announcing to you that they were big enough that everyone had to deal with them.
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Peter Kafka
Yeah. It's funny because I always think of that as a classic, like, oh, nerds, or people who care about this thing that we said we cared about. That's fine. We've just moved on. Because there was a huge part of the Internet or Internet culture that was just despondent about the fact that Netflix had been their. Their sword carrier for this stuff and that they were done carrying swords. Shield.
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Ad Voice
Carrier.
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Peter Kafka
Shield. There's both.
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Neeli Patel
They have a sword industry.
- [06:08]
Peter Kafka
Yeah, but you put. You, You. You've nailed it. I mean, and we'll get into it. But I think Netflix is the great example of why this convergence dream that Comcast, among many others, chased doesn't. Is not material for 2026. And they're finally acknowledging that, yeah, everyone
- [06:26]
Neeli Patel
had to go to Netflix because Netflix had built enough audience. And I think that's where you can begin this conversation. It might be where you can end it right. The Comcast is going to break itself up into a content arm and a broadband arm, and maybe those two companies will work together and maybe they won't. But there's just a moment that I think you can point to and say, oh, this was inevitable. It was inevitable that the dream of the giant multinational conglomerate would have to unbundle itself. And we. We feel. I feel like we're in a time of great unbundling right now.
- [06:55]
Peter Kafka
Yeah, this is a classic cliche. The media. Media Bundles and rebundles. We're in the unbundling part of the, the pendulum shift. I'm sure at some point we'll move back to, hey, would it be, wouldn't it be great if we bundled? But yeah, I mean, the, the, the bankers and lawyers remain undefeated because they get paid no matter what. For every. You, you do a transaction, it makes no sense. You get paid to undo the transaction.
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Neeli Patel
Every time anyone says that to me, I'm like, why did I quit being a lawyer to be a journalist? I could have been getting paid on every, every one of these deals. Let's start at the very start. I, I jumped way into the weeds because it is true, you and I have covered Comcast together and around each other for so long. But let's just start at the start here. Comcast announced they're splitting itself up at a high level. What's happening here?
- [07:38]
Peter Kafka
So Comcast started splitting itself up earlier this year. It spun out what is now called Versant. That's their collection of cable networks that no one wants. And they split that off. And that was pure financial engineering. That was, hey, maybe if we get rid of this thing, this declining asset, Wall street will value us more because their stock really has been sort of mired for many, many years. That did not move the stock cut to last week. They announced, okay, we'll split ourselves up even more. We are now going to be what we were before we bought NBC Universe. We're going to be at Comcast, the company that sells you broadband connections to your home, and now some other stuff as well. That'll be one company. There'll be another company that is NBCUniversal, which is NBC, the broadcast network, Bravo, the cable network, for some reason, Peacock, the streaming network, the Universal Studios theme park business, big business, and the actual film and TV studio owned by Universal. So those are big assets and they're all entertainment. And for years and years and years, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts would get asked by all sorts of folks, why do you own a media company and infrastructure company? And he would have some answer that didn't really make sense. And the real answer is now, which is actually, we shouldn't have those two companies combined. They should be separate companies.
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Neeli Patel
Let's rewind just a little bit. Comcast buying NBCUniversal was a big deal at the time. And a lot of people made the argument that Comcast, NBC was the only company of its kind that actually worked, that every other company that had tried to smash together content and pipes kind of failed from the jump AT and T Time Warner I think is maybe the classic example of this.
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Peter Kafka
Yeah, they didn't even get started.
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Neeli Patel
Yeah, they were like, well this failed instantly. And AT&T would make crazy arguments about why it would work. That they were going to load clips of Game of Thrones on mid range Android phones and that would make people pick AT and T and they were
- [09:31]
Peter Kafka
going to have amazing data somehow and underpants now.
- [09:35]
Neeli Patel
Yeah, and it literally just like didn't work from the very beginning. There was an argument that Comcast, NBC Universal worked for a time. What was that argument?
- [09:43]
Peter Kafka
I don't know about that argument, honestly. Like it never worked in terms of there is a synergy between owning the pipes that distribute content and owning the content. Comcast did own some cable stuff before they went and bought nbcu, so that made sense to fold into nbcu. You can argue that NBCU performed well as an asset under Comcast. You know, again, that theme park business is a real business. They've invested a lot in that studio has ups and downs, but it's still a thing that exists and is valuable. But I don't think they've ever proven that there is some benefit from adding the content company to the distribution company, which is what, you know, a lot of people thought was going to happen when they, when they merged. It freaked out a lot of people. Oh, what happens if this big cable distributor now owns these cable networks? And in fact that was a real concern for the Department of Justice. They had all kinds of remedies and restrictions around that merger to prevent abuse. But in the end, I don't know that anything that Comcast, the cable, the pipes company was helped at all by owning the content or vice versa.
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Neeli Patel
And yet it persisted this long. I mean this is, we're 10, 15 years into this experiment. Why did it last so long if the thesis never made any sense?
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Peter Kafka
Great question. Comcast is a publicly owned company, but it's, it's really a family owned company. It's the Roberts family. Like a lot of these big media and now tech companies, they are essentially family run companies even if they're publicly traded. That's the New York Times. That used to be Viacom, it is now Paramount. We can keep going down the list. Wall Street Journal, the Murdoc again, publicly traded, controlled by one family. So it can be as simple as Brian Roberts saying, no, this is going to work. And mind you, they were still trying to expand their media business as recently as a few months ago they were bidding for part of Warner Brothers discovery. They were the third bidder in that deal. And they didn't try that aggressively, but they were, in theory willing to spend billions of dollars to expand that media company. I think it is probably as simple as after years and years and years of being told by Wall street, we don't value this asset. You own it all. We don't care about this giant media company you own. We only care about your broadband company, they finally said, okay, we will take you at your word, Wall Street. We'll split it up. And it's that simple. And why they stuck it out for 15 years. I mean, that's. We sort of. We do make fun of AT&T buying WarnerMedia and ditching it a couple years later. At least with AT&T, you can say they looked around and said, we thought we'd get rewarded by Wall street for this deal. The real, you know, they had this synergy plan for the AT&T Warner Brothers discovery. But the real answer was, we thought if we owned a media company, we would get valued like Netflix is valued. And Wall street, again, did not value it, did not reward at and t@ all for that deal. And they turned around and said, all right, let's just get out of here. And so you could argue that AT&T behaved more responsibly than Comcast did. And Comcast would argue, look, we just, we have behaved responsibly. We've grown this asset. The fact that we're splitting it up is just a technicality.
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Neeli Patel
Well, two things there. One, it's funny because Netflix is fundamentally valued like a tech company, not a media company. So everyone feels very confused about that just from the jump. And second, AT and T might have been more responsible fundamentally. The thing they did was they gave Zack Snyder millions upon millions of dollars to make a grayscale version of Justice League in four. Three, which is just one of the all time funniest telecom company investments in history.
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Peter Kafka
I think they had so many great deals. They did that friends reunion with poor Matt Perry all drugged up and. Sorry, that's actually kind of grim story. We shouldn't get into that. They generated a lot of entertainment for us, so that was good. Yeah. So give them credit for that.
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Neeli Patel
You and I stayed in business. But it is funny that AT&T Telecom company is more like a tech company on its face than a media company. And they chased a tech company evaluation by investing in media. And it feels like maybe Comcast wanted that same thing. And they, they actually got the benefit of running a media company people liked.
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Sponsor/Ad Reader
Yeah.
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Peter Kafka
And they bought it cheap. Right. They bought it cheap from, from ge. Again, conglomerates love media companies. And why, why did GE own a media company? What do they have to do with GE finance or any of the industrial. Nothing. They just wanted to own a media company company and they concluded that wasn't helping them either. So they spun it off at a fairly cheap price. And again, Comcast can say that deal has worked out well for us, you know, on our P and L. It just has not rewarded with the shareholders have not rewarded us for it.
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Neeli Patel
This kind of brings us to the immediate question. You're going to turn Comcast from one big company into two smaller companies. Is this designed to create value by having those smaller companies get bought themselves further split up? It seems like all the executives are saying that is absolutely not the plan. But it feels like an obvious next step.
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Peter Kafka
It feels like an obvious next step. So first of all, like you said, the Comcast folks have been asked about this and said absolutely not. We're not selling, we're not selling, we're not selling. Which can be absolutely what they mean and it can be absolutely what they mean up until the day they decide to sell one of those assets. There's tax implications that make it difficult for them to go and turn something around right away. So they might end up holding these things for some period of time before they decide to sell them. Think it's worth noting that if you're a Comcast shareholder, you're going to own 20% of this spun out company, but not for very long. They're going to sell that down. So to me that's a little bit of a tell. But the main reason flashed in my mind that this will be an M and A event is when Warner Brothers discovery was trying to financially engineer its way out of the whole the mess it had made with its AT&T deal. They were going to split their company up into the good company which was the HBO and the studio and the cable assets. And the idea was one, we'll dump the cable assets. Maybe that will make our existing stuff look more valuable to investors. Also there's lots of companies out there that want to buy HBO and or movie studio. There are no companies out there that want to buy hbo. Warner Brothers and a bunch of declining cable networks. Turns out they were wrong. There was Paramount, but the idea was they were splitting these things up to make them more sellable, to make them more attractive for sale. So two things can be true at once. They can say they have no intention of selling either of these assets. People think maybe Charter and Comcast as a combination on the other side. But they have now made them more acquirable if they want to do that.
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Neeli Patel
Let's talk about Versant for one second. That was the first thing they split off. You can see that they were just trying to cut costs there maybe most definitively in the rebranding of Ms. Now, upon which they spent approximately $0.
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Ad Producer/Creative Director
Right?
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Neeli Patel
Like the graphics package from that is straight out of Microsoft Paint. Like, zero effort was put towards rebranding Ms. Now. This thing is just.
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Peter Kafka
I will take your word for it because I cannot tell you I'm familiar with the graphics package.
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Neeli Patel
See, this is the. This is the reason they didn't spend any money on it. CNBC did a little bit better. They kept the NBC in the name because that's a. That's just a household brand. That might be the. The biggest piece of that puzzle is that CNBC is still doing well. What is the future of version? If all the cable channels that were distributed on Comcast network are declining, all of Paramount's cable channels are declining. It feels like that company has only one direction to go in unless it radically reconfigures itself for the Internet.
- [17:14]
Peter Kafka
That's what it seems like to me and anyone else from the outside. They go, if you thought the stuff was valuable, you would have kept it. Comcast has two responses to that. One is, hey, if we really thought this was a piece of shit, we would have loaded it up with a bunch of debt like AT&T did with Warner Brothers, which then prevented Warner Brothers from ever doing anything else after that. And we have not done that. That is true. If they really wanted to, like really just make that a garbage disposal of a company, they could have done that. And then I had Mark Lazarus, the CEO of Versanon there. He is aware that his cable assets are declining and his goal is to build them up with something else to take things that are declining, but they still throw off a lot of money, throw off less money each year. But the idea is, while that stuff is still making money, can we go and find other things that will generate more revenue for us? You know, you and I've been covering Comcast forever. The main thing I've done forever is watch old media companies try to struggle with new technology. And even when they can see the future, because some of them can't see the future, but eventually they all can sort of see the future. Okay, we know the future's over there. The existing business we have is over here. We have to keep running that business or we can't get to the new thing and they usually get screwed. They usually can't figure out how to go to the new place while staying in the old place because that would require some kind of time travel, right? Or a foot in each canoe is the easier metaphor. So that is what Versant is trying to do. We have this existing declining but profitable business. What can we turn that into? That's the pitch.
- [18:50]
Neeli Patel
We need to pause here for a quick break. We'll be right back.
- [19:01]
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- [22:32]
Neeli Patel
We're back with Business Insiders, Peter Kafka discussing the unbundling of Comcast. The reason I ask that is usually a foot in each canoe is great, but you got to turn down the money from the old canoe in order to go invest in the new money that you might make on the new platforms. Versant makes a lot of money because people have cable packages and they get paid for CNBC and Ms. Now and whatever else, regardless of.
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Peter Kafka
Regardless of whether they watches it. Yes.
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Neeli Patel
And this is maybe the greatest business model in history, right? Like, we're just doing the same.
- [23:02]
Peter Kafka
We're just doing the podcast for each other.
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Neeli Patel
This morning, listeners should know that Peter and I share a lot of history covering these companies. If it's not obvious by now, this is the greatest business model in history. You get paid no matter what. Just because people subscribe to a subscription bundle of cable channels, that business is not just in decline. For Versant, it's in decline overall. And you can see it because Comcast pay TV business is essentially in free fall. This is what's called cord cutting and it is just happening every single month at massive rates. I think they're at maybe 50% of their peak in 2008. They're like under 10 million pay TV subs. There's a lot of reporting. It says YouTube TV is now bigger, which is wild considering how expensive YouTube TV is.
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Peter Kafka
If you if YouTube TV is not bigger now, it will be. In a year or two, it will be the biggest pay TV company in America.
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Neeli Patel
Is there any way out of that beyond just cutting bait, because it feels like Comcast splitting off its access division, its broadband and pay TV division is a sign that that business is going away somehow or getting smaller somehow. And then Versant is tied to the economics of the pay TV business. Unless it can reinvent itself. All the cable channels are tied to the economics of the pay tv.
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Peter Kafka
Yes. You want to talk about Versa or you want to talk about Comcast, the broadband company?
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Neeli Patel
Well, I'm focused on the fact that this one company that had sort of intertwined economics is splitting itself into three and the economics are still intertwined. And I don't see how the pay TV business ever recovers. And if the pay TV business never recovers, the cable business at Versant can't ever recover. And so everyone has to pivot away from their core businesses.
- [24:38]
Peter Kafka
Yeah, Versant needs to be in a. Versant can't be in the worst. You're buying a package of Ms. Now and CNBC and the Golf Channel from us in five years. Right. They know that. I mean, they might still have a segment of that. Just like AOL still had a dial
- [24:52]
Neeli Patel
up business for years when I worked at aol, it was like a dirty secret that people, old ladies, were still paying for dial up.
- [24:59]
Peter Kafka
So that's like an interesting, you know, business school case study. Right. How do you, you know this thing is happening? What can you do? How can you extract value out of it? Will this thing be a standalone company for X number of years or will it then get combined to something else? Will some version of bending spoons buy it for the digital glue factory that is bending spoons? The Comcast part of it is pretty interesting because for several years now the Comcast argument has been we're not really a cable TV company anymore. In fact, we don't actually care if you buy cable TV from us, we're happy to sell it to you, but we really, all we want is for you to buy our broadband. And that is an awesome business. It is super high margin we have. They won't ever use these words either a monopoly or a duopoly. In almost every market we're in, if you want the Internet, you're getting it from us. And after that we don't care what you do. And that looked like an awesome business. And there was a point in which they formally crossed over and had more broadband subscribers than they had video subscribers. And that was a big moment. Like there. No, Comcast is not a cable TV company anymore. And so if you look at where they are today, that all makes sense if you see them shedding media. Their other problem though is that the broadband business is not as good as it used to be because there actually is competition now. There is fixed wireless from T Mobile and Verizon and I'm sure folks who listen to decoder have heard you talk about this in the past, but it went from being sort of a fringe idea to its real competition now. Now their broadband numbers, which used to go up and up and up every year, are now flat or sometimes down because they are facing real competition. So that's a problem for them. They are trying to sort of engineer their way out of that. But one thing they're doing on top of that is saying, I guess we should be in another business. Okay, why don't we sell wireless? If the wireless guys are going to sell broadband, we can sell wireless. So they are now building up a wireless business and there's no obvious synergy there other than if you're going to buy Internet from us, maybe you'll buy a phone connection as well. So it is not, it is not a clear cut sort of business as it used to be. Even like five years ago.
- [27:10]
Neeli Patel
That wireless business has always been a puzzle for me. They've tried it for many years in the markets they're in to bundle wireless, but they're always reselling someone else's network. Yes, right. They haven't built one of their own. Other big pay TV companies that have tried to build their own wireless networks and pivot their businesses have more or less fallen on their face. I'm thinking of Dish Network specifically here. They were supposed to be the big winners of the T Mobile and Sprint merger where the government literally engineered a deal for them to take over some spectrum. And part of Sprint's network Just Network just declared bankruptcy. This did not work. It is too hard to do at scale. Is Comcast going to try to build its own network in broadband? Are they going to keep reselling Verizon? Do they have a plan to be actually competitive here?
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Peter Kafka
I would assume that it's a reselling and bundling plan. You know, and I'm not, I'm not a spectrum expert by any means. So I'm not sure what's available, what, what they would need to be competitive in that market. They, you know, again, messaging is. We're a buyer, not a seller. All right, so if you're Comcast and you're running a broadband and wireless company, what would you buy that would make you more competitive? I don't know.
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Neeli Patel
I'm sure there are listeners right now who are screaming at me that the Dish Network we're going to stand up. A network plan was always a sham in order to collect spectrum assets and resell them our profit later, which is what happened, but still drove that company into bankruptcy. I'm very curious at the, the Comcast broadband division that's going to get split out has a plan to grow because I'm looking at the numbers, I think they lost 700,000 subscribers last year. That's a huge number. Their only way to grow is actually to grow outside of the markets they're in. So there's some talk that they'll combine with Charter, which doesn't operate in the same markets as Comcast. But that doesn't get you any economy of scale. Right. Running a bigger physical network doesn't get cheaper, it actually only gets more expensive.
- [28:59]
Peter Kafka
Their, their announced strategy to deal with these losses and this overall problem is we're going to operate it better.
- [29:05]
Google Health Ad Reader
Better.
- [29:06]
Peter Kafka
And that has to do with pricing and you know, deals and how we've been, how we've been selling and, and we're going to make the selling easier and all that. Sure, operate it better. But that's not a, it's, that's a fix the business, not grow the business plan.
- [29:21]
Neeli Patel
Every Comcast subscriber just heard their Internet provider say they're going to cut costs and operate leaner and thought about their customer service experience, I'm sure, and then thought about those cheaper fixed wireless plans. This is the, the, the conundrum they're in. They have to provide a higher quality service for less money.
- [29:36]
Peter Kafka
Is this the part of the story where we mentioned Elon Musk?
- [29:39]
Neeli Patel
Actually it's literally the next question. You're. We're doing the podcast together. This is great. SpaceX went public. The only part of that company that makes money is its telecom. Is it is starlink. So much so that there are rumors that they will buy T Mobile, which is hilarious to me because SpaceX chasing telecom economics with their fixed costs of launch and everything else they're doing. I don't know if the telecom economics can support it. But why?
- [30:05]
Peter Kafka
That's because you, that's because you're not smart enough. You don't have enough intelligence, you're not creative enough to understand what a galaxy sized TAM is. Yeah, I have no idea. I mean look, they're already competing with the T Mobiles and Verizons to sell, to sell you Internet access and they may well be combining may well be competing with Elon Musk again just Because Elon Musk enters a market does not mean he wins. We've now seen evidence of that several different times. But he's certainly a real player that they have to worry about.
- [30:36]
Neeli Patel
The Starlink premise, at least until now, is I will bring you broadband quality connectivity in places where no cable company would ever dare to spend the infrastructure investment of laying fiber. Comcast has big physical plants in cities mostly. I used to live in Chicago as a Comcast customer. It is true that Comcast was essentially a monopoly or duopoly in almost every apartment building in Chicago. And most people I knew just had Comcast. Starlink has to show up and compete there in ways that they can't yet. This is why people think they might buy T Mobile. Then the competition looks like, okay, you can get pretty fast access for the same or less money and then you're in a price war. I would say Comcast has done almost everything it can do in its history to avoid that kind of competition. Have they shown any signs of being able to, to meet that?
- [31:25]
Peter Kafka
No. I mean they've been facing real competition from the telcos and losing broadband subs. And what they've said is, okay, the people who are doing that aren't running that business anymore. We have new people running the business. Is the real answer there? I will say again, I really know very little about spectrum. I will say there are sober minded people who continue to think that the fixed wireless business has sort of a hard cap in terms of how many customers it can serve. That there's like literal, just sort of physical limits on what you can do with that. And so, and I think that's also probably Comcast hope is these guys can only get so big and then they can't sort of get into our markets beyond that. But that's also kind of the inverse of whatever cable TV executive was saying in, in 2010-15, which is, well, maybe cable TV subscriptions will slow a little bit, but they're not going to go to 50%. Yeah. And they're at 50%.
- [32:19]
Neeli Patel
The other hope that I hear is that Starlink does require fiber network on the ground. You can connect to satellites all day long where they got to hit a ground station. Then you need massive bandwidth on the ground to support all those customers. And maybe, just maybe, these ISPs will put themselves in the business, supplying the backhaul at high rates.
- [32:35]
Peter Kafka
I just can't believe we're still talking about ISPs in this 2026. But here we are.
- [32:39]
Neeli Patel
The whole world runs on these Things, man. It was inevitable that you and I would have this conversation. You thought this was boring. When I was obsessed with it in, like 2011, it was funny.
- [32:48]
Peter Kafka
I did a seven part, eight part narrative podcast about Netflix for the Vox Media podcast network several years ago. And I was like, oh, I've been following this company forever and I know the beats of it and I know what's important. And we're definitely going to spend one episode talking about Netflix's efforts to sort of Netflix's huge fight with Comcast, the one you brought up at the beginning, and how crucial it was for them to figure out how to move bits around the Internet more effectively and who was going to control how those bits were gated, etc. And this is nerdy stuff, but it was core to the company. And I would tell my. My colleagues about this and they just all just gave me a blank look. And no matter how many times I tried to retell the story, they gave me a blank look. My point is, no one wants, no one in my world wants to hear about Comcast fighting Netflix over the future of the Internet. But it was a big, big deal. Like, like you referenced, what, 2010 to 2015. It was like a five year. And they were angry. They were there. These guys were. They were at each other. Now they're business partners. But it seemed at the time that this was an existential problem for both of them. Who was going to control those pipes? Was there going to be a toll booth for the data that moved through those pipes? And the answer is, well, all right,
- [34:05]
Neeli Patel
so this does interest me. Here we go.
- [34:06]
Peter Kafka
This is.
- [34:07]
Neeli Patel
If you're listening to this, this has been Peter and I debating whether or not this is important or interesting for over a decade. So here's my argument for why it's important and interesting. If you're a Dakota listener, you had to know this was coming. The fight was whether Comcast and the other Internet providers could turn Internet access into cable tv, whether they could recapitulate that business model, which we have both agreed is the greatest business model in the history of the world. AT&T tried to do it. Comcast tried to do it. Literally every ISP tried to do it. AOL maybe did it the best. And that's why they bought Time Warner, right? You bought access from AOL over a phone line. You open the AOL app and it showed you content. And the idea that they could put economics around that content and preference, their own was the heart of AOL's entire purchase of Time Warner failed Disastrously, I think we should note. But that was their argument. The argument for Comcast, AT&T, whoever else, to buy content and put it on their pipes was that they would charge everyone else to reach you, the consumer, and give you their stuff for free. And then the economics of their stuff would increase in some way. Or in the most hopeful scenario, you would pick Comcast as your ISP because they had NBC and they would keep NBC away from Verizon or make NBC so expensive to access on Verizon that when the Olympics came around, it was cheaper for you to switch to Comcast than to pay the rates on Verizon.
- [35:31]
Peter Kafka
Or maybe more simply, they would just say, netflix, you have this great service. It only works if people can get on the Internet. So you're just going to pay us a little. A little. A little vig for each.
- [35:41]
Neeli Patel
Yeah. And that would get passed on to the consumer.
- [35:44]
Peter Kafka
Yes.
- [35:44]
Ad Producer/Creative Director
Right.
- [35:44]
Neeli Patel
And so, like, your rates as a customer of the Internet would vary in spectacular ways depending on who your ISP was. And this was the fear, and I think the reason in 2010, 2011, it was like an outrageous fear, was that all of the Internet platform startups realized that this was an existential threat to them. This is why Alexis Ohanian, who's the co founder of Reddit, styled himself as the mayor of the Internet and like, toured around the country on a bus, being like, we have to have net neutrality because if they can throttle Reddit, I won't be able to pay that vig. And it's the ISPs will determine what platforms succeed or fail. The moment I'm talking about when Reed Hastings said to you, we're big enough so that net neutrality doesn't matter anymore, one, and I think we all saw that it was over. But the reason I'm saying I knew then it was over for the ISPs and their media dreams was that consumers had picked Netflix and they would not tolerate the fee. So Netflix had enough leverage to say, no, our content is going to be on your networks whether or not you want it to be. And everyone else could just piggyback on Netflix and say, nope, YouTube has the same arrangement. If you have an AT&T network or a Comcast network, you charge your customers a fee and then you charge them more to access the things they want. That won't work. And this was the argument. It's the argument from all the FCC people. It's the argument from the Verizon executives who've been on the show ultimately came to nothing because the market demanded net neutrality.
- [37:09]
Peter Kafka
If you would ask a telco person about this during this entire time and they go point out one time where this has happened, where we have successfully extorted someone into paying us more for their, for, for, for access to our pipes. I think honestly the you, this was much more of a fight with the cable networks who wanted distribution. This is Bloomberg versus Comcast is a long, was a long, long running fight about whether what kind of carriage Bloomberg could get on Comcast owned pipes. And I think, you know, for the remaining companies that still have cable TV networks, that still was a big deal, right? Cable TV network has zero utility if you can't get it over someone's, if you can't deliver it to someone's tv. And that was a real problem. Although as I'm saying that none of that matters now because you can just distribute it via a digital service provider. But, but yeah, that was, that was, I think net neutrality mattered much more to the cable TV nets than it ever did to an Internet company.
- [38:07]
Neeli Patel
Well, I think the Internet companies all needed it to matter. They needed it to not be there so they could preference their own content. This is the argument that I'm making. If Comcast had a peacock and watching Peacock was free and watching Netflix incurred some additional charge. I think we all understand how Comcast customers probably watch more peacock today than they do, but they weren't allowed to do this. First because they all insist the market wouldn't let them. But secondly, maybe more importantly, that big complicated Comcast NBCU merger agreement, the regulator said you can't do that for some long period of time. So they weren't allowed to achieve their vision. AT&T tried this in weird ways. There was a time when HBO Max didn't hit the Data cap for AT&T subscribers and they got real spiky when I asked them about it. And then they turned it off because they realized that they didn't want that fight and it didn't matter because no one was using their AT and T phones to watch HBO Max anyway. There's something here where it could have played out differently, right? Where the self preferencing of the networks for their own content might have actually worked.
- [39:10]
Peter Kafka
I look back and I look at every attempt from every company to make you watch something you don't want to watch as opposed to pay for something you don't want to pay for. That's different. Like that's the cable bundle. We agree. Best business model ever. But get you to watch the thing that you don't want to watch on the service. You didn't want to watch it. The Internet says that doesn't work. You can. What you can do is say here's some free with ads. It's not great, but it's free and people watch it. That YouTube is that model, but so is. What is the Roku channel? Is it. Howdy. No, there's. It's actually, there's a. There's the Roku channel, which is free and it's just on your Roku TVs and it has a lot of. But it's free. And that is now a meaningfully sized Internet company. You can, you can Internet reasonably sized Internet video provider. So that can work. But you can't say you must watch Netflix or we're going to make Netflix $5 cheaper and thus you'll, you will have to pay for it. As compared to Peacock, we haven't ever seen that play out. And it's dumb to get overly optimistic and cheery about the Internet in 2026, but we have seen that at least the, you know. One thing though the overlords have not been able to pull off is to get us to consume things, get us to pay for video we don't want to pay for. That's the one little bit of freedom we still have.
- [40:32]
Neeli Patel
They're all, they're all moving, dad supported one way or another. Actually, you brought up Roku. The question I have is where. Where does the vertical integration begin and end? Right. Fox is buying Roku to get access to its distribution and its customers. And all of those TVs, that kind of vertical integration seem alive and well. Right. Netflix was in the market to buy Warner. Paramount might still be in the market to buy nbcu. NBCU might be in the market to buy some other stuff. That kind of integration seems like it's going to keep happening. But you get to the actual pipe, the actual Internet connection, whether that's wired or wireless, and that's the one that doesn't ever seem to work. Why do you think there's a big difference there?
- [41:11]
Peter Kafka
I don't know is the short answer. And also I'm pretty interested to see what happens with Roku and Fox, because Roku and Fox in a lot of ways is another one of the. Is another one of these content distribution plays that we have seen not work for more than 15 years, 20 years, 30 years. Right. Going back to AOL Time Warner, you could argue that this. There's just less levered onto this. It's a smaller deal. There's no grand Proclamations that this is going to connect everyone to everything. This is for a subset of Internet TV watchers. Another is just sort of practical. I think one of the reasons that Fox Roku may be constrained will be the same reasons that all these other companies were constrained, separate from regulation. It's that if you have this asset, if you have hbo, you want HBO to be distributed as widely as possible to as many people as possible. If you are privileging Roku customers in some way, that is likely to be counterproductive. It's not going to convince people to get Roku so they can get hbo. It's going to convince people to go, it's just a pain in the ass to get HBO if I also have to get it through Roku. And that's what happens time and time again with all of these content plus pipe deals, is that everyone realizes there. There's just nothing that we can keep that's proprietary that will convince someone to get our broadband through us. Right. Another version of this is Xbox. Right. People like playing Halo, but not enough to buy an Xbox so they can play that game. They want to play other games. Does that all make sense?
- [42:45]
Neeli Patel
It does. It's funny you brought up Xbox, because Xbox is the other famous example of Comcast.0 rating A service and people freaking out until they turn it off. Zero rating, by the way, is when some data doesn't hit your data cap and some does. Again, there's a. There's a long history of here of these companies trying it, trying to do the thing that would make the economics of owning the distribution and the content together work and then immediately meeting either market or regulatory backlash.
- [43:10]
Peter Kafka
Yeah, I think market in the end has been more important than regulatory.
- [43:13]
Neeli Patel
It's true that people want net neutrality, and it's funny that for as boring as it is, whenever you point out that the bad thing is happening, the market does freak out. And so you may not need the regulation because everyone's always so mad about it.
- [43:26]
Peter Kafka
You were on my podcast recently, you brought this up, right? That you can't have an iPhone without access to Instagram. Doesn't matter whether Apple, whether Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook like each other. They have to play nicely or nice enough to make that work. They both lose if it doesn't work. And again, I guess that's the market working.
- [43:48]
Neeli Patel
It's funny, you ask most cable subscribers or broadband subscribers, is this market working? Are you getting faster speeds for less money? And I think most of them would say no, but in very specific ways. It is competitive.
- [43:59]
Peter Kafka
What's also hilarious is every. And people say this on the Internet, but they say it in real life too. Now. I wish we could go back to the old days where you just got all your stuff for one company. It was called cable. Wouldn't that be funny? Ha ha ha. I'm like, yes, it'd be funny. And you hated it. Everyone fucking hated that model. Everyone who says we should go back to that model either was not alive or was not paying their bill back when that model existed or just memory wiped themselves. The Comcast, tci, whoever was your cable company was the most loathed company in the world because you hated them. Because they gave you shitty service and they made you buy things you didn't want. And now we're in a world where they might still give you shitty service, but you don't have to buy things you don't want from them.
- [44:41]
Neeli Patel
And every tech company thought they could take the living room by just putting a nicer user interface around your cable box because the cable box interfaces were so bad and so insulated from competition. And all of that failed against the miserable technology stack of cable television.
- [44:56]
Peter Kafka
Yes. And now, but then now you have Roku, which is.
- [44:59]
Neeli Patel
And I have Roku. But now you have YouTube TV which is a cable provider that is growing. And I think it's because it is everywhere. I think it's because it's on your phone and on your TV and all of the other places. Without that second push to subscribe to some physical connect connectivity.
- [45:15]
Peter Kafka
It works great on your phone. They are marketing the hell out of it. They are, they are putting money into it. I've always wondered, and I ask YouTube and Google people this all the time, why don't they don't push it even harder. You know, they are essentially selling you the same cable TV package at the same price as everyone else. Why not sell the same cable TV package at half the price? You're Google. Why don't you just eat the losses for X number of years and just own the entire connected TV market?
- [45:43]
Neeli Patel
I mean it's funny that you asked them that. I'm like, why don't you just make the sports in 4K? Why don't you just pay the money and put the 4K cameras in every NFL state? Your Google, you can figure it out. And then I'll have 4k NFL and I'll pay you as much money as you want. And they just kind of look at me and they say, you know, the local TV market is more complicated than that. And they Get a thousand yard stare. And it's the reality of no, we got to distribute to a bunch of local broadcasters and we got to share these feeds and regulators are involved and they can't just throw money at the problem. I think the way that they want to. That is a big mess. Right? That whole TV ecosystem is a relic of maybe three different eras. The broadcast era, when there are only three networks in the entire country. The cable era, the premium cable era when HBO was ascendant. Now whatever declining era we're in where there's like 45 sub channels on my main NBC broadcast that are all infomercials. I don't know what they're doing. There's something happening there that seems hard to reckon with and maybe everyone's just running away from. But it's still there. It's still like everyone starts to deal with it and it's still the main economics of everybody. Brendan Carr runs around being like I can regulate ABC content because of broadcast spectrum. That's a lot of machinery. That's a lot of complexity. Is one of the reasons you would take NBCU and the studios away and apart is to chase cleaner, pure direct to consumer Internet distribution instead of that whole mess. Or are they still gonna have to deal with that whole mess?
- [47:10]
Peter Kafka
It's just saying that those, those, those businesses are not connected. We're back to where we started. We, we thought we could connect them in some way. They remain unconnected. They're completely separate businesses. And again, the real answer is we think maybe our stock will go up if we get rid of this thing that is dragging our stock down. Or more optimistically, we got no value for this media company right now. If we split it, then we'll have a media company and a broadband company and maybe we'll have some lift by owning two companies instead of one.
- [47:45]
Neeli Patel
We have to take on a short break. We'll be back in just a minute.
- [47:57]
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Neeli Patel
Welcome back. I'm talking with channel's host Peter Kafka about the media half of Comcast business empire. Okay, we've talked about the broadband company quite a lot. Let's talk about the media company for one second. NBCU is a player. It has a sparkling brand name. It has the minions, it has the parks. As you've mentioned.
- [51:57]
Peter Kafka
Taylor Sheridan.
- [51:58]
Neeli Patel
Taylor Sheridan. Now he's going to get better or worse at writing Women with the power of AI. I feel we're going to find out
- [52:05]
Peter Kafka
we don't need women in our tv.
- [52:10]
Neeli Patel
Is that the winner of all this? Is that the company you want to be at?
- [52:13]
Peter Kafka
I mean, everyone I talked to at Versant has a good face, has a good game face that this is, you know, we can invest in our own future and we can, we don't have to worry about feeding the parent company. They all have the same hymn book. I don't know how much they believe it. I think you can make a pretty strong case that NBCU as a standalone company is interesting again, either as a standalone company or as an asset to be acquired by somebody else. You can't replicate that theme park business. Can't really understate how big a deal that is, especially in a world where AI is going to be their future. People are going to want tactile experiences like that is a great thing to own studio super valuable. Peacock has not really worked for them and they've been reluctant, sort of throw the same kind of money that their rivals have. So I don't know what becomes of that. And broadcast, man, broadcast is hot again. What you keep hearing from the Paramount folks is that yes, they bought all those cable TV assets. They know that's not their future either. They're going to try to milk money out of them just like Versant is. But they really think that broadcast TV is a special thing. I think that mostly comes down to broadcast TV as a thing you can show football on and that's super valuable. But they seem to think that is, that is a very valuable asset. And again, there are only a handful of broadcast TV networks. They own one of them. Another way of putting it is there are only a handful of places where you can distribute NFL programming to all of America and They own one of them. So yeah, it's a thing.
- [53:41]
Neeli Patel
It's the sports piece that makes broadcast valuable. NFL is the big one. It's the World cup right now. And the idea that you need big free distribution of sports that you control seems ascendant.
- [53:52]
Peter Kafka
And really the NFL, right, Like, I mean CBS and Fox in particular kind of only exist or their primary reason to exist is to distribute football. Like Fox basically doesn't have any other programming. They have some reality shows and then they have football. That's what they do now.
- [54:10]
Neeli Patel
It's funny, I was watching the World cup on Fox1 yesterday, which is their big streaming app. They're very proud of it. Streaming platform, you have to either pay for it or log into it with a cable provider. And I was watching it. I did what I think everyone does. I opened TikTok on my phone to be distracted from the thing I was ostensibly watching. And the first thing I got was an official Fox TikTok account that was streaming the same game for free. And I thought the economics of this make no sense to me, right? You need to reach the young consumer on this platform for free. And who knows how you're monetizing this or you're going to make the old people pay for to watch it on TVs in your app, which they don't know how to download and they have to go through some auth flow. That is horrible. How does any of that work? Does that ever get reconciled? The kids are all going to watch TikTok for free. A big thesis on the show is we all have to reckon with the fact that there's an army of teenagers making content for free on Instagram and TikTok every single day. And every media business has to just ignore it. Just ignore the elephant in the room that destroys their cost structure.
- [55:09]
Peter Kafka
That's well put. I don't know that they have an answer. Every time I hear them talk about it, it's the wrong answer. It is things like, well, if we make this in a format that works for phones, than people would pay for it, right? I mean quibi. But a million other things like that, right? And it's. No, it's not. It's not that no one can watch something on their phone. It's that no one wants to pay for the stuff that you have on their phone. They don't want to pay for most things. They can get most things for free. But that is why sports remain sports. Also, Fox paid almost nothing. They paid like $500 million for the world cup deal of the century for them, especially with the extra water breaks, that sports is the one thing that is immune to this. But even that's not really true because young people don't watch sports. They. If you find a zoomer and ask them to. Yeah, ask them to sit and watch a two hour game or a three hour football game. No fucking way. So this is one of those things where we keep saying the economics for all of this is not sustainable. It has to collapse. It has to have a reset. Year after year we say this, and year after year, the rights for sports go up and up.
- [56:15]
Neeli Patel
No, they're not. Because it's the only thing that can consistently draw audience. Right. There's no other.
- [56:20]
Peter Kafka
One day it has to snap. One day it will reach a point where an NBC or an ABC or a Paramount, one of them will cry uncle and say, we can't do this. I mean, you already saw Warner Brothers pass on basketball, which is a much, much smaller sport. And it'll be a big fucking deal when one of those companies bows out one way or the other. And that will be a giant, giant, giant shift. But we keep saying that, and it does not happen.
- [56:46]
Neeli Patel
My prediction, by the way, is that eventually YouTube just pays the money to have it. All, right? They already pay for Sunday Ticket. They're already the big NFL partner. At some point they're just gonna say, look, it's all on YouTube. The whole thing. We're just gonna take the whole thing. And then the NFL will have to reckon with the fact that there's Nothing next to YouTube that can compete the way that CBS can compete with Fox, can compete with abc.
- [57:06]
Peter Kafka
Yeah, I mean, the NFL is obviously religion and politics all wrapped up in one. And so I don't know how you ever get to a place where the United States government allows all of football to be only in one place. I think they want it distributed. So we'll see. There's already.
- [57:20]
Neeli Patel
There's already some noise about this. This is a different episode. But the Green Bay packers are at the center of this noise. The economics of the Green Bay packers are tied up in sports rights in the way that you're talking about. Could NBCU be a buyer? Could they buy a bunch of other stuff that's available?
- [57:34]
Peter Kafka
That's what they're saying.
- [57:34]
Neeli Patel
Could they get bigger?
- [57:35]
Peter Kafka
That is their argument is we are a buyer, not a seller. That is, they're on the record. This is what we want to do.
- [57:42]
Neeli Patel
And then. So you'd buy a bunch of studios and content and put it on.
- [57:45]
Peter Kafka
I don't Know what you'd buy? I don't really know what you'd buy. There's a bunch of cable networks available. No one wants to buy those. You know, is this. Do they go do transformational things? Do they do little tuck in businesses? Again, if you talk to Versant about how they're going to build their business, they talk about their online golf stuff where you can, you know, by tee times, which. But they've been talking about that for literally a decade. So I'm not sure what these, what these businesses you can tack on to the media business would be.
- [58:16]
Neeli Patel
The big argument for all the big studios has long been whether they will be a supplier to platforms like Netflix or build their own distribution. Thus far, all the big studios have taken a run at building their own distribution. Right. Paramount built Paramount plus Disney built it. Built Disney plus NBCU alone did not build an NBCU plus they built something called Peacock. Peacock is not as big as the others. As you've said. They haven't invested in it as much as the others. Is there a chance they just give up and they become a supplier to the Netflixes of the world?
- [58:46]
Peter Kafka
That is always a possibility. And that is again, a debate internally for them for a long time. And before the, all these companies went to become, went to do their, to buy, went to create their own distribution, to build their own Disney plus, they were very happy to be Netflix suppliers. They thought it was a great business because they were selling all their stuff at huge markups and Netflix were a bunch of dummies for buying it. Then they realized what they had created.
- [59:10]
Neeli Patel
Yeah, Then Netflix got to roll up and say, we're so big, it doesn't matter.
- [59:13]
Peter Kafka
Yeah, I could definitely see a world where some version of NBCU is the broadcast business, the studio, the theme park. And then if you want to buy our programming, Netflix or anybody else, go for it.
- [59:26]
Neeli Patel
Could they sell to one of the tech companies, an Amazon or an Apple?
- [59:29]
Peter Kafka
Yes, they could. The politics of that are very complicated because we don't know who's going to be in office and what regulatory stance we're going to have. And Right. There are deals that the Murdochs can do in 2026 that the Roberts family would have a harder time pulling off. I think fundamentally Trump is transactional, not ideological. So there's always a way to make the deal work. I mean, by the way, even as he's doling out favors of the Murdochs, he's suing them for $10 billion, which is just a. No cognitive dissonance there. So, yeah, I think a lot of folks assume there will be combinations of these assets, no matter what the Comcast executives were saying on their investor call last week.
- [60:11]
Neeli Patel
Well, just to make it plain, the Murdoch family owns Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, specifically the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which is religiously pro Trump. The New York Post, which is religiously pro Trump.
- [60:22]
Peter Kafka
I disagree on the Journal, but come on.
- [60:25]
Neeli Patel
Well, they're, they're, they don't like terrorists.
- [60:28]
Peter Kafka
They're, they're far to the right. They criticize Trump quite a bit, but not that it matters. Go on there.
- [60:35]
Neeli Patel
We could get into it. But they don't like tariffs, they don't like screwing with the Fed. Almost everything else, they're with them.
- [60:41]
Peter Kafka
They came out in favor of birthright citizenship the other day. They noted that, that several of the soccer players were not born in America. And it's good that they get to play for America.
- [60:50]
Neeli Patel
All right, we can agree to disagree on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, but it's the Murdoch family. Everyone knows where they're generally politically aligned. The Roberts family ran MSNBC. MSNBC. They're potentially politically aligned in a very different way. Is there a chance that all this split is so that they can do M and A without the stain of MSNBC or MSNow?
- [61:09]
Peter Kafka
It's definitely something I thought about. I think that is a lot of bending. I think there are easier ways to make Donald Trump happy other than splitting your company up. There's something you really want to get accomplished. I have thought about that. Whether or not this makes it cleaner and easier for the Roberts family to maneuver if they don't have to worry about what Donald Trump says because they no longer own MSNBC or they no longer own NBC. You know, what are the things he cares about? Msn. He thinks about things that are on broadcast television and cable television. So there's maybe a there there. But I wonder if we're just doing 5D shows.
- [61:44]
Neeli Patel
At the end of the day, Comcast was the company that best executed this strategy that you would have a big ISP and a big content arm and they would work together. And that has all come apart. I think it's come apart because of Internet platforms at large. Right? Meta exists, Instagram exists, YouTube exists. People are spending their time in different ways that have nothing to do with the economics of Hollywood. I was just at Cannes. Everyone is talking about creators at can is that they were just invented yesterday because they're the future of marketing in some huge way. They're the future of audiences in some way. I Spent more time listening to creators at CAN talk about how they're spending more money making video than ever before. And I thought, oh, we're just doing Hollywood again, right? But it's because the ad dollars are there to be directly integrated into the content they're putting on YouTube. Is this party just over for Hollywood? There's a part of me that says there's a whole generation of creators and creatives who came up in a different economic model. That model is ascendant and it is the only model that works. And Sony being a company that made huge IP and then monetized it by selling it to different TV providers around the world and had buildings full of accountants running audits on how many times the video was played on, you know, NBC 5 in Chicago. That's all over. Like those economics are over and maybe this just needs to be a clean break. Is there a way out? Is this split the way out? Or is this we're all just shuffling deck shares?
- [63:09]
Peter Kafka
I mean, it's funny. Sony was supposed to be a synergy company too, right? Because they had this electronics company. And of course there was never any synergy between Sony the company that brought you the Walkman, and Sony that brought you Adam Sandler movies. Just none. They just happened to be owned by the same conglomerate.
- [63:23]
Neeli Patel
Hey, they use the Spider man font on the PS3.
- [63:26]
Peter Kafka
I don't know about the end of Hollywood stuff. I know about. We like to write narratives. It's a very exciting narrative. People who have a reason to pitch that narrative have a reason to pitch that narrative. And you know, obsessions and back rooms and isn't this exciting? People are also going to see. They're also going to see the Odyssey from NBC Universal this summer. And that's a giant epic movie, right? There's going to be a new Spider man movie from Sony that's a giant epic movie. Could you in theory finance that thing yourself and do it without making a student? Sure, I guess. But the record labels still exist, right? So there is something that some combination of capital and talent still allows these companies to create that the individual creator cannot. It seems like consumers want both of those things, not either or so I would assume they exist in some form. But I do think they get gutted quite a bit.
- [64:24]
Neeli Patel
Right.
- [64:24]
Peter Kafka
It just makes it harder and harder if you are a giant Hollywood studio to justify the way you've been spending money knowing that your competitors are now people who are spending next. Enough.
- [64:34]
Neeli Patel
As you report on all this, is there self awareness from these media executives that these big bets didn't work, and they need to try something else in different cost structures.
- [64:42]
Peter Kafka
Usually you need an entirely new executive to come in and say, the old guys, I mean, that's what you're seeing at Xbox right now. Today, this morning is where they put out a memo saying, basically, our predecessors at Xbox got this all wrong. And that's the only way you can sort of acknowledge it. If you bring in a new team and say the people who were here before are the ones who screwed up, which is actually not a new dynamic. Right. They rarely say. I mean, the CEO of AT&T was the guy pushing for this for the AT&T Warner Brothers Discovery deal when he was not when he was coo. And then he became CEO and sold Warner Brothers and said, oh, that was never my deal to begin with. And everyone decided that was a polite fiction they would live with. It's a great world. If you and I spend $83 billion in the wrong way, we have real consequences and other people get raises.
- [65:30]
Neeli Patel
Well, Peter, I suspect over the next year or so, as all these splits happen across all these companies, you and I will be talking to each other many more times because none of this seems settled. And it also seems like there's a lot of money that's going to fly around without a thesis. And it's. It's our job to figure out what the story.
- [65:47]
Peter Kafka
Actually, it's great fun to write about, right? I mean, literally the last year or so I was saying, I'm kind of getting tired of this beat. I feel like I spent years talking about what would happen if the Internet finally showed up. And if the Internet finally became tv, what would happen? And I'm like, well, it did become tv, and it's really fucking boring. It's just Peacock and some streaming services. Not fun to write about. And it feels like it is now splitting again. And that is extra fun for us to cover.
- [66:13]
Neeli Patel
Yeah, the bundling part of the cycle is pretty boring. The unbundling cycle seems wild. There's a lot more characters. They're literally having to compete more. And somewhere in there, there's Elon Musk saying he will fund a rocket company with telecom margins, which.
- [66:28]
Peter Kafka
Who knows, man?
- [66:29]
Neeli Patel
Peter, this is wonderful. We'll have to have you back soon. Thanks for being on.
- [66:32]
Peter Kafka
Thanks, Neely.
- [66:35]
Neeli Patel
I'd like to thank Peter for taking the time out of his show to come on Decoder. And thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. To let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all, drop us a line you can email us atdecoder the verge.com we really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on Threads or Blue sky. We're on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at Decoder Pod. And we have a TikTok and on Instagram they're also at Decoder Pod. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share with your friends and subscribe over your podcast. Decoder is production the Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Stat. This episode was edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder Music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.