All right. Good morning. I'm Ben Swinburne, Morgan Stanley's telecom, cable, and media analyst. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. I'm really excited to welcome this morning here day two of TMT. Mike Cavanagh, Co-CEO of Comcast, previously served as Comcast CFO, shaping the company's strategy, capital allocation, and operating discipline across connectivity and NBCUniversal. Mike, thanks for being here. Great to be here. I guess it's our last hurrah together. That's right. In this format. Some other format, maybe. Absolutely. Congrats, by the way. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Why don't we start? You guys just wrapped up a very big month for the company in February. We were just chatting about the Olympics backstage. When you step back, what did the Olympics mean for the company, both strategically and kinda culturally? Sure. You know, I Well, the stats are fantastic, we issued enough press releases that I won't rattle any of that off to y'all. To answer the question, I mean, we feel it's so important to us as a company, given the incredible effort it takes across the whole company, which I don't think most people appreciate. Yeah. When you have an outcome like we had, and it's broader than the Olympics, it's the full month of February with Super Bowl, Olympics, and NBA All-Star Game, having the NBA back and a couple of NBA games sprinkled in at the beginning and the end. What do I mean by that? You know, I'd start with, you know, tech and distribution. You know, at our core or at our origin, we're a broadband and a video distribution company. The Olympics ended up streaming 17 billion minutes on Peacock. No known big... You know, no glitches. It worked, right? It worked multiple streams. It was an amazing feat over the course of the month, all done, like I said, back- to- back- to- back. The whole month was going from one huge event- Yeah ... Super Bowl onto Olympics with you know, 6,000 hours, I think it was, and then again, NBA All-Star. The fact that it worked, I think, speaks to we know how to do this stuff. We have both worked with Comcast and the outreach we have to the broader ecosystem of ISPs and other distributors to sorta make sure that we can make it all work, which I think is an advantage that our company has and brings to the party. What we also did is to take advantage of that for the benefit of the cable side. We did something, you know, real-time 4K, you know, which was sort of an end-to-end from NBC Sports production all the way through to Comcast Cable network, increasing compression, playing around to make sure that we could deliver 4K with at the least latency. Mm-hmm ... for the viewer because as, you know, Chris went through at Charter Communications with some of the things they're doing. I mean, as a broadband company, the more we can drive high data flow, higher resolution, reasons for low latency, I think that is gonna benefit the business over time. On the tech, you know, side, it's a very big deal. Of course, the X1, I was speaking to one of the technicians in the back who was miking me up and said he's been a Comcast customer for 30 years. I asked him about the X1 remote and the like. X1 households, 85% watched Olympics. Mm. There was a 76% lift per Nielsen in viewing of versus the nationwide average. It just goes to how we can present people's content in a way. I'd say the second thing is just the, you know, unbelievable level of sports production and storytelling. Mike Tirico. Yeah ... you know, Gold Zone, the team we have that does research on to create the story arcs for all the athletes, is all an amazing, you know, feat. You bring in to broaden it out for interest beyond just sports fans. You've got, Snoops and the Stanley Tucci doing food and culture. It all makes these events as big as it turned out to be. I think the final piece is just the marketing of it all. It is a, it is an unbelievable marketing job. We were just talking five weeks ago, say two weeks before the Olympics started, were you thinking? You know, did you have your mind on spending as much time as you did or that the country did consuming Olympics? The answer is sort of no. You could say, "Hey, that's a worry," but why did it work out that way? Well, our, you know, relay from Super Bowl to Olympics, you know, to, you know, create 9 billion, you know, promotional impressions. Wow. Using those for the benefit of promoting the next, you know, thing in the calendar sports-wise, but also promoting entertainment content on, on Peacock, for example, where we had over the two weeks of the Olympics, there was more, 52% of the video consumption on Peacock was entertainment, non-sports. It just goes to show when you're promoting what's there off the back of some of these big events, it does benefit there. Obviously, we leaned in, had a limited- time offer, you know, really, on the broadband side as we pivot in our go-to-market strategy and feathered Comcast in with our Jurassic spot in the Super Bowl and some of the company-wide Olympic stuff together with the go-to-market. All of that, I think, is what, why we're so proud of it. It's also very much the impact that it has when we sit down with major partners. Mm. Whether they be sports leagues or otherwise, they know what we do. We, you know, have Mike Tirico come to a meeting, have, you know, Molly Solomon, who does production, have Jenny Storms, who did that marketing promotion, have our technicians on the production side and network. You know what you're getting when you are partnered with Comcast because we can bring the whole company together. That was an important month. Thanks for asking about it. Absolutely. I think Brian was here last year. It's been a lot of change in the last year. You are now Co-CEO of the company. Congratulations. Thank you. You've also been repositioning, as you mentioned, the connectivity business. You spun out Versant to your shareholders. If you step back, how do you see the company's position, growth potential today, and what should investors expect to remain constant, you know, when we think about your strategy and capital allocation and what might change? Sure. I think the, you know, that it's the more things change, the more they stay the same, I guess, is one. Let's start with what's not gonna be different. I mean, I think, you know, Brian and I worked together for 10- plus years, and we believe strongly in the culture of the company, the bias to be entrepreneurial, going back to his dad, and innovate like we just discussed, the ambition of the company, the strategy writ large, but strategy is constantly evolving. Much is gonna be the same. I'd say what I'm gonna be spending my time on might be, you know, for the moment, is very much about driving a, you know, a pace of change and urgency, around all that we have, you know, really set up. I mean, I think we're we have great future prospects, but not if we don't really get after it in a very much blocking and tackling, you know, way. What does that look like? I'd say that to me, it's leadership, you know, getting the right people on the field in all the key positions and being willing to, you know, mix it up to make sure there's not, you know, plaque buildup, so to speak, in the way we operate, so we can move fast. Steve Croney is an example of that. I think there's a new leader of the cable business who's off to a big start. Heard him on the earnings call. You'll see more of him as time passes. Change agent, knows the business, detail-oriented, you know, leading a lot of the moves that we're making soup to nuts in that business. I think you go beyond that, the what we'll be driving is the new go-to-market strategy in the cable side. Mm-hmm. Big, important, set the business up for the long term with simplified, more transparent pricing. We'll get into it, you know, down the road, but that's underway, but we have to follow through on that. Third, I guess, would be the push into wireless. Yep. Very important, and again, underway and organized the right way. We'll talk more about that. I think the other things on my mind then on the media side of the company, it's really parks. Epic Universe, you know, was a huge success, as we, you know, first big, you know, park of its kind in 25 years. There's more to ramp there, and there's plenty more to go in the future of the parks business, but driving on that front. Media, I think Versant was a move most people didn't see us, you know, deciding to do, but I think the media question, segment is really about dealing with linear decline. I think deciding that those assets weren't core to our strategy and freeing them up to pursue their own path is something important that we'll continue down the path of managing media in a holistic way. Finally, Peacock. I think there's a lot of focus on taking Peacock. We made substantial P&L improvement again this past year, $700 million, and we've said that we'll see significant progress again this year despite having NBA. I think as your question teed up, I think we're marching on a path towards, you know, getting Peacock to profitability, you know, sooner than later. When you put all that together, I think that's the cadence that we're, you know, operating at together, Brian and I. Great. You touched on a lot of stuff there. We'll touch on the, all of those things in more detail. Let's start with broadband. That's probably investors' number one focus when it comes to Comcast. You're dealing with fiber overbuilds, fixed wireless, and a more promotional market. What are the changes you and Steve and the connectivity team are making to really improve the results of that business? Sure. Well, we've talked about it before. There's the network, there's the product, and experience. Network, we feel very confident in our network of today and the network we're gonna have tomorrow. It is, you know, already handles. Mm-hmm ... you know, volume. We talked about some of that. That is, we have. So there's. We give no, you know, give no quarter, so to speak, on the network side. It's getting more intelligent as we virtualize more in the network. It's allowing us to pinpoint, you know, customer needs and super- serve as time passes. That's one piece. Second piece is product. That's where I think we excel. We wake up as a broadband company every day. Some of our overbuild competitors wake up thinking about other things as a priority. Our push into lighting up the home, you know, connecting more devices seamlessly to our network, having the best Wi-Fi, which we've, you know, do, taking more offload onto our network through devices than the industry broadly. All those things are... it's our wheelhouse to make sure the product is excellent, not just in connectivity, but everything that surrounds connectivity. I think the real place where we had work to do, and I think our changes that Steve is leading, is really around the experience side. We, you know, had pricing, you know, that was less transparent and more, you know, harder to engage with for the consumer with, you know, difficult, more difficulty getting product onboarded than the new competition, particularly fixed wireless broadband. Revamping much simpler go-to-market, more all-inclusive, and is all part of addressing that. That's a big, you know, move on that score. General ease of doing business. We've got a lot of work going on to really do root cause work, you know, relying on, you know, agents, you know, AI agents to really work through internal systems to serve the customer better and avoid, you know, churn that comes from tougher experiences across legacy systems. That is also gonna come from the fact that we've simplified the business. There's a whole raft of effort going into positioning the business, you know, for the future. As you guys work through that transformation and repositioning, do you think about fixed wireless and fiber competition differently? Are you segmenting your approach, or how do you think of those two? Well, everything I just described I think is going to help across all segments. Yeah. The good news is that there's that's starting point. Yes, I'd say when you think about fixed wireless, it's well, all competition is intense, and we see it staying that a way for a while. Fixed wireless, net adds may be stabilizing, you know, a little bit, but we'll see. I think that is not a space that the telcos are gonna give up on, you know, so easily. We expect it to be ongoing pressure there. What we've now done is really study the playbook carefully. The playbook was super simple pricing. Yep. Easy, easy setup and install, and a very basic service that kind of worked, did what it was supposed to do. I think our new go-to-market at the lower-end tier with more inclusive and our go-to-market offer, I think has really gone at that segment of the market in a way that we weren't as aggressive dealing with, say, a year ago. What's more, I think on fixed wireless, you know, we know where they live, right? We, we know who is with us and when they left. We know in those neighborhoods how fixed wireless might be scaling, where there might be prone to opportunities to do win- backs and bring the offers to market. I think that for the portion of the market that's served by fixed wireless, hopefully, because of all the things we're doing to drive more need for higher capacity and speed and latency, you know, we have, you know, we are changing the games that more people want, you know, our higher product, but we are, you know, very squarely, you know, in the game of being more aggressive in competition against fixed wireless. On the fiber side, we always expected, you know, in the bulk of our markets to face fiber competition, and that's really why we're doing all we're doing in the earlier question to make the network. I don't think there'll be any concession on our part to say that, you know, we aren't going to compete very strongly against fiber. We've seen that when we've seen overbuild markets. You know, we have the early impact that ultimately settles into stable ARPU, stable, you know, a roughly equal split of market shares. With all we're doing that I just described, that's only gonna get, you know, better. Again, we wake up as a broadband company every day and, you know, making sure we're positioned well to fight that fight. That won't change the fact that they're still overbuilt to come. Yep. That has to be allowed, so to speak, to happen. In the long run, we expect it to be a two-wire market in most markets. Don't really see the big telcos overbuilding each other. There's markets where there's some other competition, but it doesn't really make sense, especially the way they're coming to market pricing and otherwise, that there's ever gonna be, you know, more than one big telco, which creates dynamics for how they're gonna compete against us, where we have ubiquity across our footprint with our MVNO and our ability to deliver, you know, upgraded speeds and plant as we roll out better networks. Mike, you touched on the network a couple of times, I wanted to spend a minute on the sort of network evolution that I think you're sort of in process of executing on. Mm-hmm. Getting to symmetric gigabit speeds, DOCSIS 4.0, where are you on that upgrade? Are you seeing, you know, any indication that where you have upgraded, the business is performing better competitively? To start with, as I was just saying, the network we have today is a high-powered network. Yeah. Delivering, you know, gig-plus speeds across the full footprint. Again, married with the MVNO, we are the converged player, you know, across the widest market anywhere. We handle, you know, massive 900 Gb a month on average, you know, 35+ devices. The one is growing around 10% a year roughly. The other is growing at 40% a year roughly. We're handling. The network of today is very robust. The path that we're on is again, a capital-efficient path to FDX, a full, you know, symmetrical, multi-gig up and down, which is, you know, the path to that is mid-splits. We're about 60% done with mid-splits, thereafter, we do a full upgrade to FDX. The markets, the subset of that where we are full FDX, yes, we have seen, you know, repair calls, repair minutes and customer problems, you know, dropping significant double digits. In the fullness of time, we'll be pushing that, you know, message across the base as we hit higher levels of penetration. You say 35 devices per home? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Amazing. Your refrigerator- Yeah. You know, go count them up. You'd be surprised. I'm sure you're right. Don't turn everything off because it's just FBI can find you if you walk into somebody's house, and there's a refrigerator picks you up. Yeah. As I've learned from some recent investigations. Good advice. Good advice to take. I wanna make sure we also touch on wireless. In particular, there's an expectation in the market that a lot of the free lines you've been adding as part of your new go-to-market are gonna roll to pay later this year, be revenue accretive. That's obviously important to your strategy. Can you talk about the opportunity in wireless and sort of how you think about that promo roll-off later this year? Sure. I think the, it is important. I think we've got a big opportunity. We have a right to win, you know, given the connectivity player we are on the broadband side. I think the MVNO is a strong, durable MVNO that allows us to have a right to win in the connectivity space, in the convert space. The challenge is how do you get. We've already ramped the business. Last year was our best year. We added 1.5 million lines. We're at 9 million lines, 15% penetration. A lot of room to grow. We're profitable in the business, but we don't have to, you know, let it all drop. You know, part of the reason we're doing this is to help drive the broadband business. Yeah. Therefore, what do you do? I think we watching... I think getting more customers exposed to the fact that the product is a high-quality product with best devices on a great, on a great leading network, so you're not giving up, you know. There's customer inertia. How do you deal with customer inertia, especially in homes with, you know, multiple devices? We're using free lines now that we're into this as a chance to get customers who haven't experienced exposed. What we see on the free lines that are out there, not yet at the roll date, is very good levels of engagement. Mm-hmm. We're very hopeful that as we hit the point where you're rolling into pay and knowing that pay means pay $25, you know, there'll be a steep discount, you know, for the customer versus what the alternative would be. Yeah. We're very hopeful of that. We'll keep working it as that, you know, passes. Once we get a active line, you know, we then do well in getting the next line in the home. 30% of our new lines last year are additional lines added to relationships where the first line was already there. That's important. On the other end, in addition to that, I guess, Premium Unlimited, which is a gives you opportunity for free devices, unlimited data and the like that is set up to really be a competitor at the higher end of the market. That is, you know, new in the market and attaching really nicely as we especially as we're doing our new go-to-market plans. I think we're set up to compete across the full spectrum, and it's an important growth driver, and we're just gonna keep at it as time passes. I know you're limited in what you can say about the new MVNO. We had Dan Schulman here yesterday. We've modernized our agreement. Modernized. Durable profitability and good profitable growth for the both of us. Okay. There you go. Okay. Maybe I'll skip the question. Why don't we talk about Comcast Business? Okay. This is an area where you've had, you know, really consistent growth, even as the residential broadband business has moderated. You know, there's fiber focused on that market, certainly fixed wireless as well. What do you see as the sort of pricing power in that business for you, the market share opportunity, you know, as you look out over the next few years and trying to avoid what we've seen in the residential business bleeding into business? I think the short answer is mix of business, meaning, you know, that at both the low end and the high end, adding more above and beyond great connectivity is been the recent past, and it's the path forward. Going back to the beginning, you know, It's a big market, $60 billion, where, you know, a $15 billion business ourself, you know, grown from nothing, sorry, $10 billion over 15 years with, you know, high margins. Small business is where we started. Mm-hmm. We built small business on the back of connectivity, very focused connectivity that served the purpose. As time has passed, we've added extended services to, you know, higher-end, service, managed Wi-Fi and the like. When we've gotten into the bigger end of the market, that really is what it's all about. We definitely have great connectivity, but we've, through some amount of M&A and some amount of investment in sales force that can really deliver these products. You know, it's managed networks, it's, you know, more mobile, and, we've got the T-Mobile MVNO on the business side, which is now gonna allow us to ramp above the, you know, 20- lines- per- account path. When you consider the things other than connectivity that we're focused on, I think that's the path to see the continued revenue growth as the mix changes, even as fixed wireless is definitely competing in the small business market. I think everyone's, you know, naturally, you know, we're seeing more focus from the telcos in the, in the mid and upper. Okay. Let's shift gears to the content and experiences segment, let's start with Parks. How's Epic performing relative to expectations here as you approach the one-year anniversary? I'd love to hear a little more about the ride flow piece that you've talked about a bunch, and also whether international tourism into the U.S. Parks business is seeing any softness. Yep. Yep. Those are fun ones to talk about. The business since 2011, I think when we fully integrated Parks, we've grown revenues and profits, you know, double digits in, you know, across the Park, you know, portfolio. We love the business. Epic was a big swing. You know, it's the most advanced, you know, park, you know, opened in the world, you know, in 25 years. Bring a lot of new to it. It's done everything we wanted. I would rate it as a great success in bringing, you know, more attendance into Orlando for us at large, driving higher per caps, you know, in the across the whole park system in Florida, in addition to Epic itself and hotel stays and length of stay. All those things, when you've already got the investment that we had in Orlando, having Epic succeed at that were, you know, check, check. We, you know, very happy. You know, where do we go from here? I think it's continue to see the park and the workforce in the park mature. Ride flow and capacity, you know, ultimately gets to its maximum potential, which, you know, is a, not a one as we come to the one-year anniversary, we've made great strides. We still have a little, you know, room to grow capacity, which will unleash, you know, more attendance possibility, giving us sort of path to continued growth in Epic before we get to extending this footprint around to do more and obviously, other things going on in the parks portfolio around the globe to follow this. On the international front, international, the same as 2025, there continues to be pressure on international visitation to Orlando that we're feeling. Domestic attendance continues to be strong. Great. Okay. you mentioned in your first answer, in the Q&A, talked about the NBA. Mm-hmm ...and the All-Star Game. This is the first year with the NBA back on NBC and of course, on Peacock. It's 11-year deal. Talk a little bit about the financial benefits since this is obviously a very substantial investment for the company into exclusive rights. You're gonna have another piece of that on the other side. That's right. ...in your new job. In, you know, the NBA's, this year, the NBA's, you know, 15% up, you know, versus last year. The kind of sport and the league doing well. Our piece of it, with, I think it's the most- watched All-Star Game in 15 years. You know, our, you know, Tuesday night product is up 90% versus the like for like on TNT and very strong performance on our new Sunday night format. You know, we're pleased with how we're doing, and it's doing everything or it's set up to do everything we would want it to do. Mm-hmm ...in terms of giving us over these 11 years ahead, a smoothed out sports portfolio within, you know, our media business, bringing a younger, you know, audience into the mix. All that will capitalize, you know, over time. Performance is great. It fits in for all the reasons we described. P&L side is definitely dilutive in these early years. We're taking a full one-eleventh straight- line amort of the cost, even as the revenue over the full life will ramp. You know how it'll ramp, as affiliate deals renew, we will, you know, see increases in affiliate revenues related to having the sport. We'll see growth and engagement happen as on the back of what we just discussed and more viewers and subscribers ultimately on Peacock. This year is the peak of it. Actually, this first quarter is the peak of the peak because we take the cost, that annual cost. Yeah ...and spread it in season against gains. Roughly, the first quarter is 50% of our games, you know, 25% in the fourth quarter, another 25% in the second quarter. As we look forward to, you know, next season lapping this first season, goes back to my comments earlier about despite all that, seeing meaningful improvement this year in in Peacock. That's actually where I wanted to go next. You added, I think 3 million customers in Peacock in the fourth quarter... Mm-hmm ...while taking a pretty significant price increase, and you're seeing an improvement in the losses. Look, I mean, looks like the business could potentially reach profitability in 2027. We've been talking about this for a long time. What is next for Peacock as a business as you look out over the next several years? Do you have the scale you need to kinda reach its fullest potential? Would you ever consider about a global- Yep ...product? I think we're domestic. In our current formation, you know, what we are is maximizing the fact that we have, you know, a leading broadcast network and all that means in terms of reach and investment to begin with there, and leveraging that into the basis of a portfolio inclusive of sports that makes sense for that audience that has left the paid TV ecosystem. That's not all there is. Obviously, our sports portfolio is, you know, behind ESPN, the most significant sports portfolio there is. I think. In addition, pay- one movies from Universal, one of the, you know, the leading, you know, we have and all the discussions around what's going on with movie production and theatrical. We're acknowledged as one of the, you know, we put out a significant number of new movies every year. We're at the scale that, you know, the industry is pleased with, not that that's the objective, but it's the fact, you know, between Focus Features and Universal Pictures. That feeds into and is very important for Peacock viewing and for the, you know, studio to have the outlet. Next day, NBC and Bravo really gives you a portfolio that, you know, to the question of where do we go from here? You know, we started very much in a, you know, we're going direct- to- consumer. We've maintained high ARPU throughout. We've scaled the business to 44 million subs as we, you know, got to the end of this year with less, you know, less of an emphasis on partnerships and wholesale. I think one of the roads ahead is to really look at, you know, taking the benefit that Peacock, you know, creates in terms of a full portfolio of what I described and seeing places where through bundles and partnerships with others, we have, you know, path to ongoing growth. Manage the whole thing in concert with the P&L of the NBC side, so as one media business whose dynamics are now different, having shed the pressure that comes from Versant. you know, chart our way towards both a profitability in Peacock, you know, the sooner the better, and view that in the context of the total media segment P&L. Which is important because that sits alongside a phenomenal parks business and a phenomenal studio. There's no I don't see a reason in our, in our construct why we are disadvantaged by not pursuing global. I mean, others are doing it. Clearly, they have different strategies for different, you know, players. In our case, domestic, is our path. As you can imagine, Mike, there's a lot of focus on the value of your media portfolio in light of the Warner Bros. process that's been going on for the last six, nine months. You guys were involved in that. I know there's a view that, you know, Comcast shares don't reflect full value for the portfolio. How do you and Brian and the team think about surfacing that value? Sure. I would certainly agree that Comcast is not capturing full value, right? I think we have businesses and we're determined to deal with that. I think, you know, start with the fact that we're in businesses where across all businesses we're at, you know, historic lows and multiples for a variety of reasons. The lack of certainty about the, you know, growth trajectory on the broadband side that we described and the path to win in wireless and convergence, and likewise, you know, the meaning of, you know, path to profitability and streaming. Those dynamics are affecting all of our competitors. Looked at through the lens of, you know, what do we have to do? We individually, in the industries broadly, have to prove out the thesis behind how we get to, you know, get the drive value in the businesses. I think everything I described, you know, earlier across these businesses, I think we're laser-focused on exactly talking to, you know, all, you know, we talk to investors all the time. I think our view on what needs to happen in the businesses is very lined up with what I hear from many shareholders. I think getting after it and doing it in terms of what needs to happen in each of the businesses where, you know, my focus is going back to some of the earlier discussion. That, you know, hopefully then, you know, the stock price follows, to where we feel very good about the capture of value of what the embedded businesses have. We always have the path, you know, the options to consider other things, if and when we concluded that there, that there's a need to consider other paths. Driving results in the business is, you know, our priority for the near term. If, again, if we conclude it differently, hopefully people take the evidence of the Versant spin and our consideration of a thoughtful approach to the Warner situation that made sense for us, didn't get picked by them, are evidence that we're open for business when it comes to other, you know, broader possibilities. I think we like what we're doing. Okay. Maybe just in the last minute here, my last question, about allocating capital to sort of drive the business. You're buying back stock. Obviously, you talked about valuation levels. How do you think about allocating capital to share repurchases versus trying to execute some inorganic investments to grow through M&A? Nothing really different now than what I've been saying for the last five years. I think the last five years, we've returned $70 billion of capital in total, $50 billion of stock buybacks. Substantial commitment and performance on capital return. In the context of our, you know, philosophy of let's take the business strategies, particularly the six growth businesses, allocating capital where needed to drive those businesses, which we've been doing. At the same time, maintain a strong balance sheet, 'cause I think in the world we're in, that we value that, we value that highly. That has nonetheless positioned us to be a significant, you know, both through dividends, which have, you know, grown for, you know, many years in a row, and commitment to buybacks and total capital return. I think that's, that formula should be continued. Investors should continue to expect that that's the formula. The bar is high for inorganic deployments, you know, never say never, but we like the organic plan, certainly as we're trying to drive, you know, the value of the stock. Great. Anything you'd like to wrap up with as we close it out? Good luck. Good luck. Look forward to competing against you. All right. All right. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Mike. Take care. Thanks, everybody.