Comcast’s global media empire has NBC, movie studios and theme parks. Here’s why Philadelphia still matters.

For a Philadelphian, the name Comcast means a lot of things — cable and internet provider, major employer, the two-building Center City campus that significantly altered the skyline.

It’s also the largest publicly owned business headquartered in the region and a bellwether for the local business community, employing roughly 8,000 people in Center City and about 15,000 in the region.

But to outsiders, what does Comcast mean?

To many, the name might ring a bell because it appears in small print under the Universal logo at the beginning of Oppenheimer and other blockbusters, or because it’s the company that owns Peacock, their main way to binge-watch The Office.

With its Converge event last month, Comcast invited out-of-town investors and reporters to get a peek at what happens in Philly.

Saturday Night Live star Kenan Thompson hosted a 90-minute presentation that felt a bit like the television industry’s upfronts — where networks showcase top content to woo advertisers — but for cable and internet technology.

It was sprinkled with reminders that the audience was not in New York or Los Angeles, but Philadelphia. Thompson did a bit as a former Eagle, rattling off local vernacular like wooder, hoagie, and jawn. Flyers mascot Gritty made a cameo and later greeted guests on their way to lunch.

Chief technology officer Rick Rioboli shared a harrowing tale of a South Philadelphia service outage last year just before Super Bowl LVII, which Comcast fixed before kickoff thanks to AI-powered network technology. “Before hearing from a single Eagles fan, that alert was already with our operations team,” he recounted.

And CEO Brian Roberts himself referred to the presentation venue — the Ralph J. Roberts Forum named for his father and Comcast’s founder — as the “heart and soul” of perhaps the whole company.

In the past decade, Comcast has cemented itself as the adoptive parent of established production brands, infectiously popular shows, award-winning movies and hot-ticket theme parks. But at the Converge event, the first of its kind for Comcast, executives in Philadelphia pitched a different star: the company’s legacy and future of cable and internet innovation.

“If you’re from LA or New York, you haven’t been able to experience all of this technology,” Comcast Cable CEO Dave Watson told the crowd. “But that is changing.”

Comcast was founded in 1963 and went public in 1972. Its first few decades were marked by a string of acquisitions — cable companies, Muzak franchises, and a founding investment in QVC, for example.

A few years after buying AT&T Broadband, it became the largest internet service provider in the U.S. in 2009.

In a pivotal moment that same year, Comcast announced an agreement with General Electric to form NBCUniversal, a plan that required some heavy lobbying and continued to face scrutiny for years. In 2013, several years ahead of schedule, Comcast took over GE’s stake and became the entertainment company’s sole parent.

Time Magazine said the NBCUniversal acquisition “solidifies the cable and broadband giant’s role as a media titan” while Reuters said it created a “media behemoth that controls not just how television shows and movies are made but how they are delivered to people’s homes.”

To Philadelphians, the deal suddenly linked their hometown cable and internet company to a vast and prominent family of media entities.

Comcast tech leaders demoed super-defined “high-fidelity” video at the February event. They highlighted an upgraded operating system that navigates more seamlessly between cable and streaming using Comcast’s highly obedient voice remote. They also showed off the new TV hardware and gaming features available to customers of Comcast-owned UK television company Sky, which run on technology partially developed in Philadelphia, even though they’re not yet available to U.S. customers.

“Compared to other cable companies, they are very forward-thinking, especially when it comes to technology and consumer pain points,” said Avi Greengart, a consumer-technology analyst who follows the telecommunications and internet industries.

In showcasing that Philly-made technology, it wasn’t hard to connect it with the New York TV stars and Hollywood blockbusters.

“If there’s only one statistic you should remember from today, let it be this: 70% of all internet consumption is entertainment,” Philly-based global chief product officer Fraser Stirling told the audience of about 300. The tech developed in Philadelphia, he said, is “rooted in a very, very simple principle: Never get between customers and the content they love.”

Comcast now owns a lot of that content. Being able to tap celebrities like Thompson for a weekday corporate presentation is just one small perk.

In a January earnings call, highlights included record-breaking profitability at Universal theme parks and Comcast’s status as the top studio in worldwide box office last year, thanks in no small part to seven-time Oscar winner Oppenheimer. Roberts said it was the company’s “best financial year in our 60-year history” as revenue inched up just slightly from the year before, to $121.57 billion.

“As good as Comcast’s financials have looked, the fundamentals of cable-cutting still apply to them as well,” Greengart said. He sees strength in the theme parks business and Xfinity Mobile, Comcast’s cell phone service that saw 24% subscriber growth last year.

No other companies are doing everything Comcast is doing, he noted, but he’s skeptical about marrying entertainment creation and delivery. Even though it “sounds amazing on paper,” others have tried and failed, Greengart said. Other reports concur.

“To Comcast’s loyal core investors, showbiz isn’t just a distraction; it’s a burden,” Bloomberg reported last year. “The company’s cable TV and broadband business brings in twice as much revenue as the media unit but isn’t growing.”

But Comcast leaders are predicting growth ahead as consumers get increasingly hooked on all the entertainment and other media the internet has to offer.

As the Comcast team showed off its latest offerings for internet subscribers, like a new internet gateway product and home security features built into WiFi, the New York and Los Angeles crowd again gained exposure to technology they may never experience at home.

There’s almost no possibility of Comcast providing cable and broadband in those markets in the foreseeable future, Greengart explained, due to regulatory limits and the prohibitively unwieldy infrastructure investment it would require.

That means Philadelphia is going to stay important to the connectivity business, Greengart said. “They’re sort of locked to the Philadelphia area by the fact that they really still are a network company and that network is local to that area, to that geography,” he said.

And that business appears to remain central to Comcast’s strategy.

“We’re betting on a future that demands way more connectivity because so many more bits travel across our network every year,” Roberts said.

That seems to be playing out already. While Comcast’s broadband subscriber base was flat last year, average revenue per broadband user increased, thanks to demand for higher internet speeds to serve more devices.

“That’s why the innovation you’ve just tasted this morning is so important,” Roberts said.

The tech enhancements don’t always bring in revenue directly. Xfinity — Comcast’s cable and internet business — just announced it’s boosting internet speeds for customers at no extra costs. Cable customers don’t have to pay extra for the voice remote or for a recently updated large-button remote developed by Comcast’s accessibility team.

But those features can make customers more likely to stick with Xfinity instead of shopping around, and they incentivize buying higher tiers of service, Greengart said. Faster, more reliable service also reduces outage-related costs, increasing profitability.

More simply, Greengart said, “Providing cool stuff that people want is a good thing.”