"We don't look at it as a cost-cutting exercise," Comcast's chief financial officer Jason Armstrong told analysts about the company's overhaul on Thursday's earnings call. The layoffs that Comcast is preparing, according to Bloomberg, are set to hit cable TV, home broadband and mobile, the business the company will keep once it spins off NBCUniversal next year. In the third quarter of this year, that same business lost 144,000 home broadband customers, compared with 91,000 a year earlier. The scale of the layoffs is not yet clear.
The layoffs affect a company that had approximately 179,000 employees at the end of last year, including NBCUniversal and Sky. Comcast will book a charge of more than a billion dollars for the overhaul in the fourth quarter. On the call, the company's co-CEO Mike Cavanagh called the same programme "the most significant operating and cost transformation in our company's history".
Why Comcast is losing broadband customers
The details of the transformation came after a quarter in which broadband customer losses were, according to analyst Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson, the worst of any third quarter. The third quarter is usually seasonally stronger than the others. Home broadband revenue in the same quarter fell 4.7% year on year because of lower average prices and fewer customers. Pay TV lost 274,000 customers.
In Czechia, pay TV had 2.957 million subscribers at the end of 2025, according to the Czech Telecommunication Office (ČTÚ). The regulator says, however, that the 18.3% year-on-year increase cannot be read as a market trend, because ČTÚ counted viewing through internet apps for the first time. Satellite and cable subscribers, meanwhile, are declining. Most subscribers, 59.8% of the total, receive pay TV over the internet as IPTV.
In the third quarter, Comcast's broadband business faced aggressive moves by fibre networks in some markets. On the call, CFO Armstrong said that building those networks costs more than $1,500 per home, yet competitors were pricing them at $30 to $40 a month. He called such pricing irrational competition. Fixed wireless, meaning home internet delivered over a mobile network, continues to compete aggressively for customers and is gaining market share, according to co-CEO Cavanagh.
Comcast added 368,000 mobile lines in the third quarter. Roughly half of new postpaid lines are free. On the call, CFO Armstrong defended this by saying that Comcast runs mobile as a virtual operator without its own network (MVNO), so a free line costs it no capital. At the end of September, Comcast had more mobile lines than pay TV customers.
Nielsen measured Americans' TV time for August 2026 and published the figures on the same day Comcast reported its results. YouTube accounted for a record 15.8% of TV viewing time. Peacock, Comcast's streaming service, accounted for 1.6% after the end of the World Cup broadcasts on Telemundo and the Love Island USA series.
Peacock, meanwhile, is making money and is going after viewers on YouTube. In the third quarter, it was profitable for the second quarter in a row, with earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation reaching $261 million. From the start of next year, Peacock Premium in the US will be part of the YouTube Premium bundle. YouTube is attractive, according to Cavanagh, because a significant amount of NBC clips and content is already watched there, and the bundle is meant to bring Peacock younger viewers.
Who the Comcast layoffs will hit
Cuts in NBCUniversal's streaming technology, the part of the company that Comcast will spin off, have been under way since the start of October. Comcast's European arm, the media group Sky, will bear most of them, with some falling on NBCUniversal employees in the US. The cuts target engineers and quality assurance testing. The final number of jobs cut depends on employee consultations under UK law.
Cable employees could learn about the first cuts within weeks, according to Bloomberg. The money freed up is meant to go into growth investments. The overhaul, which Armstrong does not see as cost-cutting, is set to deliver billions of dollars over time, according to Cavanagh.
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