Comcast Goes Horizontal, Why People Care Whether YouTube Is TV
1. Comcast Goes Horizontal
Comcast’s vertical integration strategy—having a cable company own a major media company—made a lot of sense in its day, but the Fox-Roku strategy of owning a major streaming platform makes far more sense in 2026.
Which is why Brian Roberts is doing the opposite of what Lachlan Murdoch just did and is getting rid of NBCU. Or at least splitting it and Sky off from the Comcast parts of the empire.
This makes sense on many levels and positions the remaining NBCU/Sky as an acquisition target for everyone from Disney to Google.
At least as long as Trump is still president.
Why It Matters
For quite some time now I have been preaching about how the media companies, to paraphrase Ben Franklin, all need to hang together or surely they will hang separately.
Meaning they keep treating each other as the enemy when the real enemy is Google, Amazon, Apple and the other big tech companies.
So they need to band together or become Google Chow.
Banding together though is easier said than done. Having just spent billions to buy Warner, Paramount is not going to buy NBCU.
Disney may be an option but so might one of the big tech companies. NBCU is international(ish) due to Sky and comes with a lovely dowry: Universal Pictures, NBC and Telemundo, NBC News, Peacock, Bravo, theme parks, and Sky.
It’s all rather iffy though.
The issue is whether or not buying them right now makes sense for anyone and the answer seems to be no.
If I was advising them, my take would be to wait and see how a number of things play out.
What happens to linear TV over the next few years? Because there is a better than nil chance viewership goes sliding down the cliff.
What happens to Peacock over the next few years? Because it has really taken off and its future is still unclear.
What happens to Universal Studios and movies in general over the next few years? Because here again, there is a greater than nil chance they go into rapid decline.
Given all that, I’d also ask NBCU’s new owners whether it makes sense to sell off the various parts which don’t seem to support each other as neatly as, say, Disney’s various parts do.
Someone might want the theme parks. Someone else might want Universal. Peacock could prove attractive to an OEM.
At which point NBCU, or NBCU + Telemundo would make an attractive target for someone who wanted to fill out their content offering, library offerings in particular.
Yes, it would be an ignominious ending for a once-great media company, but empires rise and fall all the time.
And in this age of Feudal Media, individual bubbles are worth a lot.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are another media or tech company you need to look at NBCU in terms of both the whole and the parts. Which pieces could you use? Could you use the whole thing?
And then decide when to play your cards. Now? Next year? Only if things look rough for them and the price is right?
Do the math now.
If you are NBCU you will need to do the math in the opposite direction and decide whether you are more valuable whole or as the sum of all your parts.
And while the market will likely determine that decision, it’s good to be armed with the data, just in case.
2. Why People Care Whether YouTube Is TV
The question of whether YouTube is really TV has been rattling the TV industry for some years now, and as a recent study we did with TVision showed, it really is both: YouTube is big enough that it can be both TV and digital video.
Sort of how Australia is both a country and a continent.
But that is not the real reason so many people are bothered by the definition. Or lack thereof.
You see, the reason has to do with Nielsen’s The Gauge metric.
Remove YouTube from their streaming equation and all of a sudden streaming’s numbers don’t seem nearly as strong versus broadcast and cable.
And the rankings for the remaining streaming services go shooting up.
So where would YouTube go?
It’s not like Nielsen can just get rid of it.
So they’d shunt it over to the “Other” column, the one where video games live and be done with it.
And so many people across the industry would be happy.
Why It Matters
Say what you will about it, The Gauge is an excellent marketing and PR tool.
It’s what people who don’t work in the industry use to create headlines about how much streaming is winning and broadcast and cable are failing.
That has a waterfall effect, as the public takes this to heart, the part of the public that works on Wall Street in particular.
And as that narrative spreads, it also becomes self-fulfilling. If “no one” is watching cable, then advertisers start to relook at their budgets, production companies turn their efforts elsewhere and viewers follow suit.
It’s the power of the lemming, but that has always been how media works.
Which is why there has been so much noise about why YouTube should not be considered “TV.”
Even if it clearly is.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are the traditional TV industry, you need to accept that YouTube is TV. Or, more accurately, a part of it is TV. And that part is growing rapidly.
Viewing patterns are changing. Slowly, but they are changing. And that is something you will need to deal with as well. Young people don’t own TVs, let alone watch them.
They watch a lot of vertical video.
They watch sports highlights, not games.
And so the genie is not going back into the bottle. Regardless of where The Gauge puts YouTube.
SorryNotSorry.
That is just the way the world works.
