clock menu more-arrow no yes mobile

Filed under:

Comcast’s internet revenue is catching up to TV

Internet beat out TV subscribers in 2015.

Rani Molla is a senior correspondent at Vox and has been focusing her reporting on the future of work. She has covered business and technology for more than a decade — often in charts — including at Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal.

Comcast first had more internet subscribers than TV subscribers back in 2015, but its internet revenue is still catching up.

Since then, Comcast’s internet business has grown to include more than 26 million subscribers, while its number of pay TV users has declined to 22 million — a difference of four million households. Last quarter, Comcast added 379,000 high-speed internet subscribers while losing 96,000 video customers.

Revenue has followed slowly.

Comcast’s high-speed internet revenue hit a high of $4.2 billion last quarter, nearly three quarters of its $5.7 billion in video revenue. That represents the smallest difference there’s ever been between those revenue streams — just $1.5 billion.

It’s important to note that internet revenue costs Comcast a lot less than video, because it doesn’t have to create content for the internet.

Last year, Comcast spent $12.9 billion on programming, or more than half of the $23 billion it generated from pay TV subscriptions. Then again, Comcast creates some of those license fees itself via its NBCUniversal* unit.

* NBCU is a minority investor in Recode owner Vox Media.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Sign up for the newsletter Sign up for Vox Recommends

Get curated picks of the best Vox journalism to read, watch, and listen to every week, from our editors.