Clients only, and disclosures are available at the back of the room next to the AV desk. Welcome back to Citi's 2024 Global TMT Conference. I'm Mike Rollins with Citi Research, and we're pleased to welcome Jason Armstrong, Chief Financial Officer of Comcast. Jason, thank you for joining us today. Thanks for having me, Mike. The management team has been discussing the focus and investment around six key growth drivers for the business, while managing others through secular headwinds. Can you summarize the key trends across these businesses and how they drive annual revenue and EBITDA growth for Comcast over the next few years? Yeah, well, it's a good way to start 'cause it's a super big-picture question, and that's, you're right, that's the way we've sort of been articulating the world in the last, you know, couple years and sort of framing the company, what we're about, where we're investing, what the growth drivers are. And so to your point, we really have sort of six key growth drivers that we're investing a lot of capital in. And if you look at these six... It's important to sort of look at it this way because the past few quarters, I think as you've seen, our revenue growth has been a bit below our historical standards. You know, on the one hand you'd say, "Okay, is that the new norm?" On the other hand, you'd say, "No, we, we don't actually believe that." We believe we can re-accelerate revenue growth, but that is rooted in a view of you have to go look under the hood and unpack it and say, "We've got 60% of our business that's in six growth drivers, where we've got definitive advantages, clear right to play, and they're all growing end markets, and done right, we continue to invest in these and invest for growth, and over the last several quarters, these growth engines, which are 60% of the total revenue base, have been growing mid- to high-single-digits revenue. So it's a $70 billion book of business growing at a pretty high rate, and our, you know, our... The concept and how we're motivated internally is to continue to invest in these to drive growth, such that 60/40, and if you look out a few years, it becomes 70/30. Look out a few years after that, and it's 80/20, and the mix shift just takes over. So the six drivers, and just to hit, you know, sort of high level on each one of them, broadband, business services, wireless, theme parks, streaming, and studios. So broadband, you know, competitive market right now, no doubt. I'm sure we'll get into that. But even in a super competitive timeframe, which is probably the, we've said this is probably the most competitive we've seen broadband. Not only is it fiber overbuilding, but it's, you know, three new fixed wireless competitors in a certain segment of the market. Despite that, last quarter, we grew revenue 3%. Mm. So, you know, not being able to grow volume, being able to grow ARPU 3%-4%, that actually, in my mind, gives you even more conviction in investing in this business. In the downside scenario, where you're seeing all this competition, you can still manufacture 3% revenue growth at very high and accretive margins. That's a good thing, and so this is a growing business. It's a business where I'm sure we'll talk about convergence, given the news of the day, but where we've got an incredible hand to play, and so we're confident in investing. We're actually accelerating our homes passed at this point to pass more and more homes, 'cause we're confident in the formula, and it's underpinned by broadband. Second is wireless, and wireless, we're 12% penetrated. We sort of define that as a% of our broadband base, so we've got 63 million households, we've got 32 million broadband subscribers. So we're 12% penetrated as a percent of our broadband subscriber base, which is really who we're selling into. It's sort of the original convergence. We've been doing convergence for a very long period of time. But we've got. You know, selling into existing customers is very different than going out and trying to acquire a brand-new subscriber you don't have a relationship with. So whether that means our equilibrium share in the market is 20%, 30%, 40%, don't know, don't have a crystal ball, but it's substantially higher than 12%. We've been growing at a pretty steady clip, you know, 300,000-plus customers a quarter. There's probably ways we can go accelerate that. I think we've got a lot of opportunity in wireless. Business services, we built that business from scratch in the last 15 years. You know, we had a lot of adjacency to our footprint, hadn't served the small business community. Very easy for us to just go in, extend plant, and go serve small businesses and do it really, really well. We've grown that book of business to $10 billion at very high margins, as we've disclosed in the last couple years. We've given everybody sort of a real view into the business services segment. The next frontier, if you will, there, no pun, but is enterprise and midsize. So we've been starting to crack the code there, but as we look at the totality of the addressable market, we think it's about $60 billion in our footprint. So continue to crack the code on sort of moving upmarket, whether that's sales force or capabilities. But the key question for, you know, folks like us is, as much as we want to pat ourselves on the back for the first 10 billion, question is: How do we go source the next 10 billion? And that's, you know, mission number one. So I think we've got a ton of room to run on business services. Theme parks, we've got, you know, probably the most, you know, the biggest scaled, technologically advanced park to hit the U.S. market in the last three decades or so is coming next year. So that's Epic Universe in Orlando, so really excited about theme parks. We've obviously been spending capital on theme parks to drive growth there. Studios, you know, incredible performance in 2023. We were number one in global box office. We're off to, you know, a really good start in 2024 with actually a broad variety of titles- Mm ... whether it's different, you know, different genres. We really have cracked the code through a lot of different genres, and then streaming, which I'm sure we'll spend some time on later, but coming off the Olympics, a great moment for the entire company, but, you know, in particular, streaming and the way Peacock showed up through that, so both as an acquisition driver and engagement driver, but we've been the fastest-growing streaming company in the last couple years, and a lot of room to continue to grow as you think about Peacock, and ultimately that business, being one of the streaming services that definitively is gonna make it to the other side and will be in the winner's circle, and we're confident of that. So you take the totality of these, and then you asked about revenue. I mean, that's more of a revenue answer. In EBITDA, the benefit of each of these is, on average, they are much higher margin businesses than the 40% of our business that's not growing. You know, we've got 40% of our business that it's important, it's strategic, it's cash generative, but it's not growing. But the mix shift, the 60% that's growing at a pretty rapid clip, is margin accretive, relative to the businesses that are not growing. And then when you take it all the way down to free cash flow, we obviously generate substantial free cash flow, and then we make decisions off of that, right? And so reinvesting in the business is always gonna be the number one priority. As you see, we're doing a lot now, across the six drivers. But we've returned substantial capital back to shareholders, and it's sort of rooted in consistency and balance sheet management, and that gives you the flexibility through business cycles, through pandemics, through credit cycles, to just be able to have a consistent return of capital back to shareholders. And we've, I think, returned something like... We started buying back our shares in 2021 after de-leveraging, post the Sky deal, and we've returned somewhere in the order of $50 billion in capital to shareholders in that timeframe, so just over three years. It's an enormous amount of capital back to shareholders as well. So I think we're threading the needle, but priority number one is how do we go, you know, re-accelerate revenue growth? And we think we've got a very good formula. Very helpful and gives us a lot to discuss today. So maybe starting with broadband, how would you frame the competitive environment, including the impacts from fiber and fixed wireless? And you made some references, you know, just a moment ago to that. Yeah, I think it's no different than what we said in the second quarter. It's competitive, but it's also not incrementally more competitive. So I would say no better, no worse. It's sort of stable in terms of the competitive environment, which is more competitive than we've historically seen it, but I think we're navigating through it pretty well and have found some stability. If you think about what informs a long-term view, 'cause we're long term on broadband, we are. I think, you know, we're very bullish on the outlook. We wouldn't be accelerating our homes passed unless that was the case. So what informs that view? If you think about the competitive aspects of what we're seeing today and how we're responding, there's sort of the more temporary competition. And that's not to say it's going away, but it just, it's sort of in a finite niche, and that's fixed wireless. Because it's an excess capacity model, there's a certain amount you can sell into, and then you have to make decisions, right? Investing, you know, investing in capacity has a marginal cost to it, and can fixed wireless really support that type of model? We don't think so. I think the wireless companies would probably say the same thing. But nonetheless, there's excess capacity to sell into right now, and so we're sort of in the middle of that. But what informs, you know, our view there is our marginal cost to go deploy for excess capacity is one of, if not the lowest in the industry, and especially relative to fixed wireless, where the economics break down pretty quickly around marginal costs. So then it's just a function of defining the addressable market for fixed wireless. It's really gonna be a function of customer usage patterns, right? And whether those decelerate or accelerate, do you think customers are gonna continue to consume more and more on broadband networks? And our perspective is, of course, they are. You know, we've actually seen an acceleration. We saw a big bump through COVID as everybody would work from home, school from home, meant broadband networks were taxed a lot more than they had been historically, and we saw a big bump up from that. Then things leveled out as you sort of normalized in the next couple of years. Now we've seen usage patterns reaccelerate, and so, we've, you know, said that in the last couple of quarters. The amount of tonnage we're seeing across our network on a per-subscriber basis is growing double digits. That's a very healthy trend in our business. That's actually what we want to have happen. If you're the kind of low-cost marginal operator to go deploy new capacity against that, and you've got to plan around DOCSIS 4.0 and mid-splits to get to plenty of capacity to be able to support this and stay years ahead of it, you want your customers doing more on your networks every year. So if you look at kind of what's out there and what would inform this trend of more and more bandwidth consumption, you don't have to look much farther than the next couple of days, right? Football season is back, starts tonight. Ravens-Chiefs, that'll be simulcast NBC and Peacock, and then tomorrow there's an exclusive game. It's Packers and Eagles from Brazil, that'll be exclusive on Peacock. So last time we did this, which was a playoff game in January, we had unbelievable results. We, you know, sort of like 30% of the total tonnage of the internet was, you know, consumed in this game, and so expect more of that, but it's not just us. You know, Netflix has two exclusive games, you know, around Christmas for football. The NBA package, if you look at it, you know, a third of the package just went to a streaming-only provider. Another package went to us, and we intend to put a lot on streaming as well, so if you're on the other side of this secular trajectory, I don't think that's a good thing, right? If you're banking on consumer usage patterns, you know, decelerating, I don't think there's any evidence that that would be the case, so that informs our view of why we're comfortable in competing against fixed wireless. We think it'll be... You know, it'll carve out a permanent niche in the market, but the size of that niche is gonna be governed by consumer usage patterns, and secular trends, we think, are on our side with respect to that. Which leaves us with what we've said is the long-term competitor in our business is fiber, fiber to the home, and that's. You know, we already see it in 50-plus% of our households, and, you know, we've said that it, it'll be in the majority of our households over time, and probably the significant majority of our households. That's nothing new. And so as you look at what we've seen over the past, you know, few weeks with wireless companies investing in fiber, today's news, obviously, there will be, in the vast majority of our footprint two multi-gig symmetrical wires going into the home. There just will be. One is ours, and one will be the fiber company that we're whichever fiber company we're competing against. So then it becomes, how do you go surround the product with, you know, the best features? So coverage in the home, control features, whether it's parental control, knowing what devices on your network, knowing where the consumption patterns are, then for providing a great aggregation experience on top of that. Video consumption patterns are changing pretty rapidly, as you know. One thing that's not changing is the customer just wants to be able to find what they have easily, and so we've invested a lot between X1, Flex, now Xumo with Charter, in providing the best possible aggregation out there. And if people wanna do more streaming, we're gonna make it easy for them to do streaming and find what they wanna see 'cause we see benefits on the broadband side of the business. Wireless, you know, that's a great product to sort of add on as well, and we've got, you know, a great placeholder in wireless with the Verizon deal that we have, which is a great partnership. It works for them 'cause we're sending accretive traffic their way, certainly accretive relative to fixed wireless. And the economics work for us. We've been profitable, you know, for the last three years, and we continue to grow in profitability. But it's almost. You know, I wouldn't say that's the sole goal. It's almost in service of broadband as well. So when you put it all together, and one of the questions I know is, you know, given the news from today and just all the talk around convergence, if you believe we're headed towards convergence, and that's a real thing, we're sort of the original innovators of convergence. So when you ask, "Okay, how do you react to, you know, what you're seeing this morning?" I would say, "Okay, that's validation of what we're doing." People are coming our way, though. We have, if you take the totality of our footprint, as I said, 63 million homes, and the network plans that we have, which are in motion right now, we're, you know, we're a good ways through them, but the end state in the next couple of years is every one of those homes will have a multi-gig symmetrical wire into it, right? And that's, that's our positioning. If you take the totality of the big three wireless operators and include the, you know, company that was acquired today, so take the four of them, add up the fiber footprint of all four of them, it's substantially smaller than our 63 million. If you take their plans for the next several years that they've articulated through JVs, through acquisitions, and organic plans to build, it adds up to roughly on par with where we are in the next several years. So I think we've got an incredible hand to play in convergence. We're doing it in a way that our starting point is ubiquity. We're not making, you know, trade-offs. Every customer can get access to the same thing, and then the wireless product that sits on top of it is ubiquitous as, as well, but also doesn't involve network trade-offs. We're happy to see you come in and be a wireless customer. That's an economically advantageous situation, financially accretive transaction for us to go add a wireless customer, and it protects broadband. It's got its own separate economics that stand on their own as well. But really, really, we think about the two together, and so if convergence is the topic, I would tell you, I think we've got a leadership position, and I think we'll sustain a leadership position. And just one other follow-up on this: so, you know, as you look at the wireless guys having more fiber, and you've had this converged offering for years, what do you see in terms of what drives the decision-making for customers to enter into the converged bundle? Is it just the discount and the value of the services put together, or is it some of the features that you were describing and trying to give the customer holistically a better experience that they could identify with? Customers are looking for. You know, they're all making price-value trade-offs, right? And people sit at different ends of the spectrum. But I think, you know, when you see wireless companies investing aggressively in fiber, they're telling you fiber is the broadband relationship may be center at the plate in the overall relationship, which is a great thing for us. We're the largest broadband company in the U.S. and the largest homes passed, as I mentioned, 63 million. So I think it's some combination. If you think about the real consumer pain points, it's "I want speed in my home. I want wall-to-wall coverage in my home. I don't want rooms that sort of don't have great speed. Then I wanna have a way to organize what I have from a video perspective that may cut between linear and streaming. And then if I can add, you know, value through a wireless relationship on top of that, you know, that, that's relevant as well." And I think, you know, there's been some stats thrown out in the last couple of days. We do see advantage. When we add a wireless customer to our broadband relationship, churn goes down. It's probably the product that has the most explanatory power on reducing broadband churn, so it's helpful to you know, you know, go bundle that, and we've got a great strategy to go follow. As you pull all this together, how should investors think about the way Comcast is balancing the ARPU growth versus the volume side of the equation going forward? Yeah, I think that's. It was one of the big questions in the last kind of year and a half, that not only you guys were appropriately asking it, we were asking it internally as well, because it's a real test. I mean, this is a room full of people that study competitive markets for a living, right? And that's a good thing. If you know, we're aligned with that, we think of it the same way. And not wrong to think that when the largest broadband company in the U.S. sees a lot more competition come its way, and we're a company that historically has added a million-plus broadband subscribers a year. That was 10 years plus where we were doing that. When all of a sudden that becomes more challenged, how do you react, right? And so, and I think it's sort of a, you know, it's a competitive test. The best reaction in my mind that we could see is you're competitive, you're competing for volumes, but you're not stretching too far to compete for volume, where it's really gonna disrupt the 32 million base that you have. Because you've got to understand where the pockets of competition really, really are. Fiber for all the talk, we've been competing against fiber for 20 years, and it's been slowly creeping into our footprint, and that's gonna continue. That's nothing new. So we know how to compete against fiber. We know how, you know, incrementally, when it, when it launches, how do we sort of respond to that? The new competitor has been fixed wireless. It's been three companies with excess spectrum positions dumping capacity on the market all at once. So understanding that that's where it is and being able to segment our base and say, "Okay, that customer," it's probably not necessarily you or I, but, "That customer is a price value customer that's, you know, looking for the best deal, that's willing to make some speed trade-offs and just wants a lower price." So by the way, we operate there, but it's a niche of what we do. And we wanna make sure we're competitive there, hence we've been in the market with Internet Essentials for quite a while, which has really directed that base. We've launched the NOW product positioning in the last several months that sort of directly goes after this as well. But importantly, we've really segmented the base to say, "Here's where we're gonna really compete for that, where we're gonna isolate it from the rest of the base." 'Cause the rest of the base is seeing consumption patterns grow, you know, using 700 gigs per month. That's, you know, moving towards a terabyte and two terabytes over time. Our power users are up at, you know, two terabytes. That's always where the world is going within five years or so. It's historically been the relationship, so that's a very good thing if that's happening. So I think segmentation on the competitive side, and the team's done a really nice job. I think we've answered the question this year. We've been growing ARPU 3%-4%, which is within the range of what we've done historically, despite a much greater test on the competitive side this year. So I think the team's executed on that really well. I think longer term, the ability to grow ARPU is really are customers doing more and more on your network? Are they getting more value out of your network? That's gonna be the key question, and so it's back to same answer we talked about in fixed wireless, where we see our customers increasing usage and engagement on our network double digits year over year. And so if you really think about it, the price per gig is going down pretty significantly. Mm-hmm ... for the customer. That's an okay thing. We're still raising prices, taking ARPU, but the customer ultimately is getting a lot more value every single year, which informs a view of the ability to continue to grow ARPU. And so, in terms of the growth of ARPU, so the conviction to grow ARPU on a go-forward basis that you've been targeting is 3%-4% range? Yep, that's been the historical range. You know, obviously, had a greater test of that this year, and we've, the team's really delivered on it, been sort of in the middle of that range. And so we've said that's a range we think we can sustain. And then one other on broadband, ACP discontinuation. So now we're, you know, in September. Is there an update on the possible impacts to subscribers and revenue that you see from the discontinuation of this program? Yeah, so, you know, I guess first position was wish ACP hadn't gone away. This is not great for the consumer, but it has gone away, and so we're left with how do you go manage it in our base. So as we've said, if you rewind a couple of quarters, we came into the end of the program with 1.4 million ACP customers. But we also said along the way, the vast majority of these customers were our customers before ACP, so they were paying us, then all of a sudden got a discount on their bills. Now the discount goes away. But importantly, they were customers before this, number one. Number two, our customers are all postpaid customers. I think some of the hiccups you saw in the second quarter were from companies that had, you know, prepaid bases and were solving, serving this via prepaid. Our customers were postpaid. Wouldn't necessarily show up in voluntary churn then. It will show up through non-paid churn and just customers being delinquent on their accounts. So that's really been the question through the third quarter. But I think we said at the time, you know, we think we can manage this very effectively. There will be some impact, yes, but we think we can manage it very effectively. And by the way, this is what we do for a living. We are constantly dealing with promotional roll-offs. This happens every single quarter, quarter in, quarter out. This is just another sort of version of promotional roll-offs, but we've got teams that are just wired to figure out, how do you land customers on the best products, packaging, to, to ensure sort of survivability of that customer? Mm-hmm. And so I think we were wired to do this pretty well. I think we sort of identified, we thought we could handle this pretty well. As we get through the third quarter, I think we're delivering on that even better than our expectations. So will there be an impact? Yes, but you know I think we're very comfortable with what the impact is, and you know we're gonna try to clean it all up in the third quarter and be done with it. I think if you do step back, third quarter in total, yes, it's still competitive. That hasn't changed at all. We're probably landing ACP maybe a bit better than we thought. And then back-to-school tailwinds have been in place, which is a question, 'cause that's very much a group that can do other things at this point. So how are you indexing versus prior years on back to school? I think we've indexed very well. And that's the seasonality component that you- That's right. Great. Well, maybe, pivoting over to wireless, you mentioned earlier that there may be an opportunity to push the quarterly mobile net adds, you know, from the recent range. So just curious if you can unpack that and the opportunities that you see there to continue to push wireless, maybe even at a faster pace. Yeah, I think it's, you know, it's an incredibly important product for us. It's one where we've got a great relationship with Verizon, and as I said, it's, you know, we're feeding them traffic that they would, I think, tell you is accretive to them, and it's good business for them. It also is good business for us. And one of the reasons for that is, you know, you were sort of taking a lot of the acquisition costs out of the industry. I mean, how can it work for both sides? Well, it's... We're selling into our existing customers, where it's just a different acquisition process, and so if Verizon doesn't have that, we don't have that. It's one of the ways where you can square the economics working for both companies, so very good relationship. But for us, you know, we've been trending plus or minus three hundred thousand subs. We've been dipping into the market with different promotional activity just to, you know, test what might work, with an eye towards let's make sure we're not, you know, diluting the opportunity in wireless- Mm-hmm ... because we see it as a long-term growth runner. So it's got survivability at three hundred thousand plus, and then can we accelerate it without damaging, you know, how we go to market, and impacting the existing base? But I think you've seen us try quite a few things. I think Charter's actually tried quite a few things, and they, they've seen some acceleration, so we've got the benefit of staring at what they do, and if it works for them, we can be fast followers. A lot of proof points out there in the industry, but that's, you know, that's one of them. We can dip into handset subsidies more than we have in the past. That technically has not really been an area where we play all that aggressively. I think we've had good handset trade-in programs, but, you know, I think many have pointed out, to the extent we see some sort of super cycle in handsets, driven by AI, which is not. I wouldn't say we're voting on it that way, but if consumers vote on that, and it does happen, we're probably positioned pretty well to go play a role there. You know, we're, as I mentioned, we've got 12% share of our broadband base in wireless right now. Our gross add share is significantly higher than that, and our equilibrium share over time's a lot higher than that, as well. So confident that we're still a challenger in this business, and handsets potentially could be a lever. And that's helpful, and you mentioned you're ready for a potential super cycle. So as you just look at coming into a new smartphone cycle that I think we'll probably get an update on next week, is there also a seasonality element now that you're looking at, where there's opportunities to, you know, step in more into this handset opportunity? Yeah, something we're studying. And just to be clear, I'm not sure I'm predicting a super cycle, but to the extent the consumer drives a super cycle- Mm-hmm ... out of this, because it really is that incremental of a product, then, you know, we'll be ready, and we'll be prepared for it. Maybe pivoting over to the business side, you know, you mentioned that it's been a very significant contributor to growth and, you know, really built from the ground up, and so it's been... Your performance has actually been outperforming for some time this broader business wireline category that we measure when we do the industry work. So, you know, curious to get an update on Comcast's strategy, the opportunity to go after that $60 billion TAM that you mentioned with current products or, you know, how you're looking at also maybe expanding the product portfolio. Yeah, I think so we've got a $10 billion book of business right now. Mm-hmm. And built our way into this. You and we, we did it as you would've imagined, right? Which is go find adjacencies to the existing residential footprint that you can go pretty easily serve. And so small business sort of fit right squarely in the middle of that. And for the first ten years of its existence, business services was largely going after that type of market, which is a big one, you know, in our territory. But at this point, you know, we're, we have penetration that almost looks like residential penetration, so all of a sudden, we're increasingly sort of the incumbent in small business. And so I. You know, you probably won't see the volume growth there that we've historically seen, just given the nature of where we are right now, but can you continue to do more with the customer? Almost like residential. Segment the base and add more value to the customer. I think we're absolutely confident in that so what we've seen is our, you know, similar ARPU growth in small business, and that will probably be the formula going forward. When you look at the next segments up, so midsize, enterprise, and government, we've been at this for a few years, but the cycle here is you gotta go build a sales force to penetrate this market. And there's a lot of, you know, bigger companies that. Put yourself in their position, are you really going with the new guy in town, or do you want the proof points for the new guy in town? So the credibility stamp's there, and it's less of a leap of faith for you, and I think we've been on that journey in the last several years but have made incredible progress. So started out largely some of the bigger wins initially were if you look at fast food, food service, we really cracked the code there. Think about sort of branch offices or locations spread out across, you know, a large footprint. We did that and cracked the code there with some of the big names. Actually, 11 out of the top 15, I think, food service companies are using us at this point. So then that helps you extend into, okay, what are the next verticals we're gonna go take on? Financial services, healthcare, retail, and so now we're really starting to push into those. As we get further into this, a lot of these customers come back and say, "Gosh, we love what you're doing on sort of the basic connectivity side, and you made your way up the stack a little bit, but can you do SD-WAN for us, or can you do the following things?" And so then it's a question of: Can we go develop that internally, or are there tuck-in, niche acquisitions, companies that do that particular thing really well? And we can go spread that across our base and make it immediately accretive. So, Masergy was a good example of that a couple of years ago, where it was, you know, phenomenal acquisition for us. It's really taken business services to the next level in terms of what they can sell in the product category, but there's more opportunities for us to probably build into that. So that's what informs the view of we'll continue to crack the code with larger and larger accounts, and this sort of becomes self-fulfilling, where the more name brands you have on sort of your resume, the more credible you are to the next counterparty- Mm ... that would say, "I wanna do business with you guys, or at least hand you a part of my business and see how it goes. Great. Shifting gears for a moment to the topic of AI. Curious how Gen AI capabilities can help your revenue as well as your costs, and which one of these is the greater value creation opportunity for Comcast? I think we've got opportunities in both. I would maybe broaden out the category to some extent. Sure, this gets lost in, you know, is it automation? Is it AI? You know, put it in the same category. As we think about revenue efficiency, you know, think about our cable business. You know, how do you manage for customer lifetime value, and how do you take the customer along the journey and sort of ensure they're staying with you as long as possible? That's gonna be a function of how happy they are with you, and are they in the right rate plans? Do they have the right products and packaging? So there's an acquisition machine which can be fed by that intelligence to say Mike should have. We know Mike's profile, he should have the following product. And by the way, along Mike's journey, he may have kids going off to college, his needs may change, right? Mm-hmm. He may be rolling off promotion, so let's go predict exactly what we should be putting him in, to make sure we've got Mike as a customer for twenty years and not ten years. I think there's a lot of opportunity there that we're already seeing. On the expense side, whether it's service delivery, network management, you know, the ability to have more tools in place to prioritize, route, you know, optimize for the customer. You know, I think we've had some of this in place already. We've given the stats that in the last six years, our truck rolls are down 50%, our call center interactions are down 40%, so a lot more automation sort of solving for that. But, you know, this could be the next frontier of, you know, how do you go accelerate this and put it on steroids from the opportunities and then what, what's available to your, to your, you know, to your agents in the field, to your techs out in the field, and their ability to serve customers. Very helpful. Maybe moving over to the parks side. You mentioned earlier, the upcoming Epic, opening. Can you provide an update on, you know, what's happening in the parks business, you know, with respect to the attendance trends, the customer spending levels, competitions, changes in customer behavior, what you're seeing right now from that and, you know, how to think about the upcoming Epic launch? Yeah, well, we're extremely bullish on the parks segment. And, you know, in some ways we've been a little bit of a victim of our own success this year. So no real change in trend from what we told you on the second quarter call. I would think about this is a year where literally there was some COVID pull forward. Clearly, there's other modes of, you know, where consumers are going to do tourist activities and, you know, international tourism, a lot of other things sort of competing for attention. You know, certainly this past summer is what we saw. Said that on the second quarter results, and it's before Epic Universe next year. As you think about it, our parks team, I would give them credit, they have the next ten years mapped out. They, they're just so methodical about thinking about continuity of growth every single year. It took a pandemic to disrupt that strategy for them. So Epic was supposed to launch this year. This was supposed to be what filled the hole this year and, you know, wasn't available to us. We had to mothball the project for a few months as COVID hit and then restart it. So it'll be available in 2025. That's the next big thing coming. We're sort of in this window right now where we're dealing with the in-between. But as you think about Epic next year, you know, we've got visitation centers, we've got, you know, pre-marketing, and the response has been fantastic. So I think as you think about Epic, the two things that stand out to me, number one, are just the size and scale of the park, the sophistication of the park, and then the amount of IP that we have in the park. So it's a collection of a lot of the greatest things between Nintendo, Potter, How to Train Your Dragon, Dark Universe, sort of all-in-one. It'd be the biggest thing launched in the last three decades, we think, in the U.S. market. And then the second thing that probably stands out is just, you know, parks and our Universal properties, or Orlando properties as a true destination. Twenty years ago, that probably wasn't the case. It was, you're going somewhere else for the first four days, and maybe you're tacking on a day at Universal at the end of that. Mm. Now, with three land parks, one water park, CityWalk connecting a lot of it, thousands of hotel rooms, about to add, you know, even more hotel rooms, and a state-of-the-art thing that's brand new and opening up, this is a true destination. So whether you're coming for a few days or coming for a week, that's very different than what it used to be. Pivoting over to media and streaming, can you share with us the results of the Olympics for Comcast and how the entire company came together to create this successful event? Yeah, it was a big moment for the company. I think you'll hear, you know, more about this from us as we're still aggregating sort of how it went and, you know, all the proof points of this. But, it was a big moment for the company. Quite frankly, it was one that was not without risk. To be fair, we've had three Olympics in a row where between time zone and pandemic, had underperformed our expectations. No fault of our own, it was just, you know, things out of our... a couple things out of our control. And so that had the Olympics on shakier footing, if you will, co-headed into Paris, and so we had a whole company effort to lean into this and make it spectacular, to get it back on the right footing, and to set up Milan, LA, you know, and then whatever comes after that. The next couple are sort of locked in and should be great as well, but they will be more great if Paris was really, really good and sort of set the right tone for that. And so I credit the teams. I think we've delivered really well. We've delivered for our advertising clients. If you look at where ratings were relative to expectations, I think, you know, if you advertise with us, that was a very good thing. I think it delivered for streaming, 'cause as an acquisition tool, then the amount of engagement that we saw, and then sort of the quality of the platform, the platform delivery. The unique things like Gold Zone was a real big hit on Peacock, but that's always a test. When you throw that sort of volume onto a streaming platform, can it handle the load? And can it do it effectively, and can you come up with innovative things? I think we clearly checked that box in Peacock. Then the broader company, Comcast, the cable business, Xfinity, you know, used this as a promotional marketing tool. They had some new products and packaging that were sort of launched around this, and really leaned into it as well. What we saw in our footprint, which is, you know, what we've seen historically, and it happened again, was the ratings in our footprint from us driving traffic there, from us making it easier to find the events that you wanted to see on X1, Xumo, et cetera, meant that we out-delivered in our footprint relative to non-Comcast footprint by a pretty wide margin. So I think you put it all together, it informs a view that when the whole company leans into something, we can go architect an outcome. And so, more broadly, you know, we've done this with NFL Sunday Night Football. It is the highest-rated show on TV. It has been that way for 13 years. That is a whole company effort. Important, we all lean into it. Olympics just delivered on that, and now we've got the NBA. And so when people ask, "Okay, how do you make the NBA work? you know, how can you do things a little bit differently to really advance this property and work with the leagues maybe in a different way and really deliver?" This is another proof point that we can go do that, and helped inform that view. Switching over to studios, the studio business, you know, as you mentioned, successful summer, had a really well-received movie slate. Can you discuss the outlook for studios and, you know, how you look at this more broadly and the way it contributes to the overall value for NBCU and for Comcast? That's a great way to say it, especially the last part in terms of overall value. 'Cause studios really... You know, studios have their ups and downs, depending on box office success. So that can swing revenue around a decent amount, and we've seen that. But it's a critical business because of the IP that exists in it, the success in studios, the different windows you can go deliver in. It's not just box office, it's a Pay 1 window, which advantages Peacock, and then it's sold into Netflix and Amazon, so we monetize it well there, and then it comes back to Peacock. A lot of the IP and franchises make their way into our parks, and so we've got our own sort of interesting flywheel there that starts with a lot of the studio content. Studios, we had a phenomenal year in 2023, number one in global box office. That's the first time that's happened in a while, and then 2024, between, you know, so far this year, Despicable Me 4, you know, phenomenal success, sort of earlier this quarter. Kung Fu Panda 4 before that. Twisters actually did, you know, really well. We have Wicked coming up in November, and I guess what stands out is just sort of the breadth and diversification in our studio portfolio, not overly reliant on sort of one thing or the other. It's just, you know, we've got a real broad portfolio that seems to be, you know, firing on all cylinders at this point. So incredibly important business, both as it relates to how successful it is on its own, but more importantly, how it broadly feeds the entire company. And in our last couple of minutes, if you can give us an update on capital allocation and just how you're looking at the target net debt leverage, how you're looking at dividends, repurchases. You mentioned earlier just how much capital Comcast has been returning to shareholders. And, you know, maybe also just within this context, just how M&A will play a role in capital allocation going forward. Yeah, well, I think, you know, to jump to the M&A is gonna be a function of what do you have internally to go invest in. And, you know, capital structure, how, you know, how do you think about your stock. And we're obviously buying back our stock at a pretty aggressive rate. We got a lot to go invest in internally, in businesses where we've got competitive advantages that have growing end markets, so that's gonna be the first priority for capital and where it flows. So as you mentioned, we have healthy margins in our business, strong free cash flow, and a range of different growth drivers that we'll go invest in. I think two of the ones that stand out to me in the next couple of years are, we really want to continue to accelerate our homes passed. Historically, we did eight hundred thousand new homes or so, a year. We're, you know, did closer to one last year, on pace for more like one point two this year. That's a very good thing in my mind. Second is Epic Universe coming, you know, next year. There's been obviously substantial investment in that, but it's gonna be an incredible park, you know, an incredible sort of revenue accelerator for the parks business, but also NBC and broader Comcast. So these are all things that, as you think about growth in the six initiatives that we have that are really sort of long-term growers, we've gotta make sure we're feeding them. That's always gonna be the first call on capital. We're doing it in the context of a balance sheet that, you know, we've been in and around 2.3-2.4 leverage very consistently, sort of plus or minus a tick. But that's been sort of the right zip code, and that helps, right? Because that helps invest through cycles. It helps invest, you know, in a pandemic when we've got one business doing really well and two businesses not doing really well. The portfolio and the type of free cash flow that's generated and the stability of the balance sheet means we can make decisions that other companies probably couldn't at that point in time, whether it was, you know, keeping studios going, commitment to, you know, box office, getting Epic back as quickly as we could and running when there were real questions around those businesses at that time. And now you look at the fruits of that, several years' labor. It's why we've done so well in the box office. It sets up next year, Epic Universe sort of launching and real competitive advantages there. And then, you know, return of capital to shareholders. We've been, I think, on an incredible trajectory there. We've raised the dividend very consistently. It's a 3% dividend yield at this point, which seems like a pretty healthy yield to me, and then layered on share repurchases on top of that. So if the formula is, we can reinvest in our businesses to, you know, accelerate revenue growth over time, we can manage it with a balance sheet that allows for consistency in managing through various cycles, and then we're returning capital to shareholders in the form of 3% dividend yield and what's worked out to be, on average, sort of shrinking our share count mid-single digits every year, seems like a very healthy formula to us. Jason, thanks for a great discussion today. Thanks, Mike. Thank you. Yeah.