For decades, media executives loved one specific lie. They swore that owning the internet pipes and the shows running through them was pure genius. It wasn’t. It never was. Now, Comcast is finally throwing in the towel, carving off its NBCUniversal entertainment empire into a standalone entity. Tech giants like Apple, Amazon, and Netflix are probably already licking their chops.
Remember the pitch? It sounded so simple. You buy broadband from a company, so surely you want to buy their streaming service too. Except consumers don’t work that way. They never did. This divorce comes fifteen years after Comcast bought NBCUniversal from General Electric, a marriage built on corporate hubris. Just months ago, Comcast already swept its dying cable channels under a rug called Versant. Now, the rest of the crown jewels—Peacock, the historic movie studios, and the theme parks—are getting kicked out of the house.
History is littered with these corporate corpses. Time Warner tried it. They merged with AOL in a spectacular, dot-com era disaster. Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner’s former boss, saw the writing on the wall and split them up, calling the whole ‘pipes plus content’ logic completely nonsensical. But Wall Street never learns. Bewkes eventually sold his slimmed-down content engine to AT&T. The telecom giant promised investors that owning HBO would supercharge its wireless business. They lied. Or they were stupid. Either way, they bailed a few years later. Verizon did the exact same dance with AOL and Yahoo. Same result. Total failure.
Now Comcast is admitting what everyone else already knew: distribution and content are bad roommates. Sure, you could argue the Murdochs are attempting a digital spin on this old trick with their $22 billion play for Roku. But that is about gatekeeping the TV screen, not owning the actual asphalt of the digital highway. For Comcast, the dream is dead. The divorce is final. Who gets the house?
