From Hollywood to Madison Avenue, all eyes will be glued to Comcast’s top-priority mission: scripting television’s greatest comeback narrative at also-ran NBC, which the cable giant formally took control of on Saturday .
But Comcast’s own reinvention is the true epic saga not to be overlooked in the $30 billion mega-deal.
The theme of this unfolding story is not NBC’s revival but Comcast’s challenge to sustain its dominance. And the irony in the tale is exquisite -- a mighty cable giant betting that its embrace of a faded Peacock will secure its future.
Read also: $30B Later, Comcast Is the Proud Owner of a Peacock
Emerging as the largest cable-TV operator during its almost 50 years, Comcast is the leader of an industry that not only has eclipsed the powerful broadcast medium but has transformed society. And now, as the Internet Age threatens the primacy of cable, Comcast aims to transform itself.
Can NBC Universal help homebound Comcast to deliver ubiquitous TV anywhere, anytime and on any screen and turn targeted ads into a new business model? Will together they reorder content windows and evolve programming economics? And, might they jointly conjure up a game changer, as did Google with search and Facebook with social media?
“Today marks the birth of the new NBC Universal,” CEO Brian Roberts of Comcast and Steve Burke, Comcast COO and CEO of NBC Universal wrote Thursday in a “Dear-Colleagues” message to its staffers.
Welcoming gifts distributed by Comcast to all employees were telling about the company’s futuristic intentions. Each got a copy of what Roberts and Burke dubbed “The Big Idea Book.” The bosses added: “We’re a company founded on and driven by big ideas, and this gives you a place to record your own.”
Comcast also handed out 25 Comcast shares to each employee. “Our hope is that you share ownership of this company and what we accomplish together,” the executives wrote.
Not that the imperative to reinvent itself is unfamiliar to Comcast -- or, for that matter, to most in the dizzyingly-shifting media business since the advent of digital technology. Among Old Media stalwarts --including record companies, magazines and newspapers and, now, television -- only the Comcast-led cable industry has shown any skills at morphing.
In the past 10 years, the nation’s largest cable-TV operator has converted to all-digital and emerged as the nation’s largest broadband provider, as well as a top supplier of home-phone service.
But its core business is facing a threat more complex than any other. Real threats are coming from a new ingenious entrepreneurial breed with a flair for harnessing the force of digital technology.
Just this week, for example, Netflix announced that it has topped 20 million subscribers, a surge fueled by consumer demand for its streaming video lineup of TV programming and movies. hat makes it one of the nation’s largest providers of “television,” rivaling Comcast.
