While it may only be a matter of time until communications giant Comcast (CMCSA) branches off its linear television arm into Versant, for now, it still has control, and is bulking up MSNBC ahead of the upcoming split. Jacob Soboroff is set to join MSNBC, and investors were actually, if only slightly, displeased about this. Comcast shares notched down fractionally in Tuesday afternoon’s trading.
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Soboroff is set to join in as “senior national and political correspondent,” reports note, which is not too far off from the role he served at NBC News: political and national correspondent. Soboroff has had a hand in the coverage of presidential campaigns, elections, Los Angeles wildfires, and more. He was even a fill-in anchor with the Today show.
Soboroff originally joined MSNBC back in 2015, and will be part of the upcoming live event MSNBC is hosting, MSNBCLIVE ’25, when it airs October 11. All of this is ahead of MSNBC’s upcoming split from Comcast and into its own operation, Versant, which contains most of the linear channels from Comcast.
Stanching the Flow
This news comes at an interesting time for Comcast, as it is starting to see a distressing number of customers depart the service. The second-quarter earnings report featured the alarming news that around 226,000 internet customers dropped the service, prompting Comcast to consider a new plan to try and keep the customer count it had in place.
It did not help matters much that the customer exodus fired up a few months after Comcast announced price hikes for its Xfinity services. So Comcast, in a bid to actually keep what it had not yet lost, set up four speed tiers, including unlimited data, new price lock guarantees, and even an Xfinity mobile line free for one year. So far, customers are responding to the new pricing plans, as around half of new customer connects are taking the five-year price guarantee.
Is Comcast Stock a Good Buy Right Now?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Moderate Buy consensus rating on CMCSA stock based on six Buys, eight Holds and one Sell assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 16.34% loss in its share price over the past year, the average CMCSA price target of $39.43 per share implies 21.14% upside potential.
