Comcast, the US' No 1 cable TV operator, today announced that quarterly profit fell 69% on a drop in investment gains and a higher tax rate. They also offered a disappointing outlook for 2006 growth, saying that they expect revenue and cashflow to grow around 10% as they invest heavily in a digital phone services.
Comcast seems to be suffering from not having jumped earlier onto a digital phone network so that they could offer customers a triple play of TV, broadband Internet access and telephony. Time Warner and Cablevision, that jumped into the triple play much ealier, are seeing better growth rates.
Comcast now has 21.4M cable customers, 8.5M high-speed Internet customers and 1.3M phone customers. And there lies the problem and opportunity. For they need to get digital telephony avaiable to all their cable customers, or they risk losing them to competitors. And the competitive landscape only gets tougher this year as Verizon and AT&T pile into the triple play and Internet TV as well.
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