Communications titan Comcast (CMCSA) is experiencing a lot of change right now, but not much of it looks all that positive. How it will work out remains to be seen, but right now, it lost a company president and moved some channels to higher paying tiers all in one swoop. Investors were clearly concerned, and shares slipped fractionally in the closing minutes of Tuesday’s trading.
Stay Ahead of the Market:
- Discover outperforming stocks and invest smarter with Top Smart Score Stocks
- Filter, analyze, and streamline your search for investment opportunities using Tipranks' Stock Screener
Word from the Wall Street Journal noted that Rashida Jones, president of MSNBC, is on her way out. One of Jones’ greatest wins was pushing MSNBC ahead of CNN in ratings during the 2024 election, but viewership has declined at both ever since. Jones was with MSNBC for four years, the report noted, and she departs the company before the network can be rolled off into its own company.
Comcast will be cutting off a skein of its cable networks, including SyFy, the Golf Channel, Oxygen and several others. It will, however, keep both NBC and the Bravo network. The spinoff is likely to take most of 2025 to actually be accomplished, and represents a fundamental shakeup in Comcast’s operations. It is not immediately clear just how much help MSNBC will be able to expect from NBC itself, where it got quite a bit of its news-gathering apparatus.
Sports? That’ll Cost You.
Then a report from the Mercury News demonstrated just how rough things are getting in the San Francisco Bay Area as far as television goes. Comcast plans to move the NBC Sports channels that were part of Comcast’s cable operations up to the “Ultimate TV” tier.
The value of sports in streaming has proven itself to be substantial of late, which makes it particularly odd that Comcast would put sports behind a higher paywall. Especially given how many streaming sports alternatives there currently are, and how many more there could be. But the issue is somewhat academic anyway; the report noted that most subscribers who watch regional sports networks are already at Ultimate TV tier subscriptions anyway.
Is Comcast Stock a Good Buy Right Now?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Moderate Buy consensus rating on CMCSA stock based on 14 Buys and eight Holds assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 13.1% loss in its share price over the past year, the average CMCSA price target of $49 per share implies 35.1% upside potential.
