Comcast is planning to spin off most of its cable television networks, including MSNBC and CNBC, into a separate publicly traded company, according to executives with knowledge of the plan.
The spinoff is expected to be formally announced on Wednesday. The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the impending announcement on Tuesday evening, said the involved channels also include USA, Oxygen, E!, Syfy and Golf Channel.
Comcast’s NBCUniversal division is keeping Bravo, the NBC broadcast network, the Peacock streaming service, and all of its other assets, like NBC Sports and the Universal theme parks.
The separate cable channel company will have the same sort of ownership structure as Comcast, but will have its own management team, led by NBCUniversal Media Group chairman Mark Lazarus, who will become CEO of the new venture.
While observers may view the spinoff as an attempt to shed cable channels that are losing value in the streaming age, the channels still contribute strong profits to Comcast’s bottom line. The company’s executives are expected to portray the spinoff as a growth opportunity for an industry in transition, with an eye toward acquiring other channels in the future.
Of course, the standalone cable network venture could also attract buyers as well as sellers. Wall Street analysts are predicting further consolidation of major media companies in the years ahead.
Comcast president Mike Cavanaugh foreshadowed the spinoff during a conference call with investors last month. He said the company was going to study whether it was a good idea to create “a new well-capitalized company that would go to our shareholders” comprised of “our cable portfolio networks.”
The study evidently did not take long.
Craig Moffett, an analyst with MoffettNathanson, told Variety that “investors have yearned for exactly this, or at least something close to it, for years.”
Notably, the spinoff will cleave MSNBC and CNBC, two profitable parts of the NBCUniversal News Group, away from the core news-gathering operation of NBC News. In recent years NBC has tried to bring its broadcast and cable news operations closer together. Now they may be peeled back apart.
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