Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us for the eleventh annual MoffettNathanson Media and Communications Conference. I am really delighted to kick off this year's conference with an opening keynote with Brian. This is a fun fact: Brian was... You were the very first speaker at the very first MoffettNathanson conference, and going back even further, you were the very first speaker I hosted at my first Bernstein conference back in 2002. So-
Wow!
this is a really wonderful way of
What are you going to do next?
22 straight years of having Comcast at our conference. So thank you. Brian, I want to start with a really big-picture question. It's a sort of, it's a kind of "what is Comcast?" type of question. You've described Comcast as really special and unique. Talk about what that means to you and what that means for the roadmap as you think about it for Comcast over the next 5, 10 years.
Well, it's great to be here, and congratulations on 22 years of having, you know, your perspective on this changing and dynamic industry, which is never dull. So I guess I'd begin by saying that my dad started a company 60 years ago, and what the company looks like today is completely, obviously very different than 60 years ago. But there are certain themes of how we try to operate and how we built the company. And it starts with, you know, things that sound perhaps a tad corny but are everything, which is having great people, and I think we have a great team. Maybe never better than the team we have right this second.
But we've had wonderful people along those 60 years who have contributed, and there's hopefully a focus on leadership, innovation, taking risk, and we kind of coined that: act like an owner, not a renter. And we've seen other companies succeed. You know, sometimes you see short-term winners, but over the long term, it seems to be people that make investments and really try to have innovation at the heart. And as I think about the company right this second, one of the pivots we've made the last several years is really thinking more like a consumer, and every one of our products has to, you know, be the best in its space. So we're number one in broadband in residential in the U.S.; we're number two in the United Kingdom. We have a dynamic wireless offering to complement that broadband.
We have, which I think is the best wireless offering, the best Wi-Fi. We have a roadmap within our capital spending plans that takes us to 10G network. We have speeds bidirectional, beyond what anybody's using today, to imagine what's coming in the future. So it's not just here, it's where we're going. On the content side, I'm sure we'll talk about some of these things. You know, we had a very relevant company. We touch 200 million viewers every month, or thereabouts, and we do that from sports to news, to movies, to all sorts of television kinds of content. So it's a dynamic company in a lot of growing spaces.
One of the things you wrote about recently after our earnings is, if you take the long term, we have an ability with our balance sheet strength, with around 2.3 times leverage at the end of the last quarter. If we are able to utilize that strength to make these investments, to find a path while businesses evolve and change, that's how you build a winner, and that's what makes us unique in the space, and an exciting company, I hope, for people to want to work at.
And you made the case at your Convergence Day, a few months back, that Comcast is a tech company. Is that, is that the way you see it, that Comcast is a tech company?
Look, I think we're tech, and maybe add the word, another word, media, content. You know, it's a bit of both, but no question, we're not a cable company. I think we are more of a consumer innovation and technology-driven company, and you saw that at Converge. Thanks for bringing that up. I think that you look at how consumers in the last 20 years have adopted to the internet and then wireless, or maybe 30 years. We were at the heart of that. So I want to be relevant company, too, and we are relevant in television and news, and The Today Show, and The Tonight Show, and Saturday Night Live, but we want to be relevant in the technology roadmap in your home and in your business. So what will AI do?
Well, one thing it's going to do is create a lot more bits of things that we're going to consume, we're going to choose and search and navigate, assist, manage, and all of those things need connectivity, and they need the best connectivity. So our roadmap is pretty simple: be that best company with the best service, most reliable network, and an innovation, technology-driven path.
Well, that's a great transition as we dig into the individual businesses. To start with the elephant in the room, which is your broadband.
I think it's a great elephant. So it's-
Okay, well, let's talk about it. You've seen, like for all of your peers, the unit growth has largely stopped. Interestingly though, we saw fixed wireless broadband decelerate in the most recent quarter, and even FTTH gains decelerated in the current quarter, and yet cable didn't really respond yet. How do I make sense of all of that, and how confident should we be, and are you, that broadband unit growth is going to eventually improve or at least stabilize?
Well, it is, it is the right question to start with, and, you know, part of it is how we choosing to react to new competition. So let's start with the fixed wireless competition. Three companies are all simultaneously, within a short period of time, all offering a home connectivity product, by their own admission, and in, you know, a lower speed, lower, you know, more easily congested network. So how did we respond? And we chose to accentuate the difference. So you've seen a lot of our commercials talk about when you go to stream and when you go to have multiple devices, you're going to wish you had Xfinity. But in reality, there's a segment of the market that, that's a very adequate product. And so...
Also, in my experience, our experience over satellite, telephone, Google Fiber, we've had many, RCN, many different competitors over the years. How do you accept that new competitive reality, wait your time properly, and then start growing again? Hopefully, that's the kind of market we're in now. So we do see the market growing, albeit more slowly. And we have focused on ARPU and revenue growth. So the reason, when you focus on just units, which I understand investors' view on that, our judgment has been we can not grow units for a bit, and go backwards some small numbers while taking our ARPU up, last quarter, 4.2%. We've said we want to be in about the 3%-4% ARPU range. That's about inflation.
We've been able to do that continually through this period. Our revenue in residential broadband grew 4% last quarter, so that's a very healthy business, as we'll unpack what that means to free cash flow, free cash flow per share, earnings per share. We see a pretty steady ability to do that. However, we didn't think we were competing as effectively in that other segment, and we've introduced some new products called NOW Broadband, prepaid, really simple product to onboard, a better value than some of the fixed wireless, or we think all the fixed wireless offerings. A roadmap to hopefully one day upgrade you to the full Xfinity broadband experience. One last point that I just want to emphasize is what do we see happening, and you picked one statistic, subscribers.
I'll pick another statistic that I like to look at, in addition, and that is bits per home. And last quarter, bits per home were, again, north of 10% growth. We have over 20 devices. Our customers are using, you know, way more capacity, 700 megabits or, you know, a month, that is 20-30 times what they're using with a cell phone. So are bits per home growing? What is driving that? And is that sustainable, going to accelerate or decelerate in the years ahead? And the path we believe, and we hope will happen, is that all this innovation in that first answer, and also a very kind of knowable innovation called streaming, and particularly streaming of sports and streaming of high-def sports, and someday ultra-high-def sports, and someday 8K.
There's a race for who has the best pictures and the best number of cameras giving you choices. A Formula One race where you can see every car and have a camera in the car, and you get all that through your broadband. That's all bits, and that's all going to continue to want to have the best broadband. So we see a pretty good roadmap for our broadband business, and I think in the fiber world, which is ultimately the long-term competitor, we believe we continue to see a roadmap. We just had a review of that internally a few days ago. So much excitement on what we can do for a consumer with the network we've got, the expansion and innovation on that fiber network within the capital spending that we have today.
So, and that's for all our customers, not just pockets of customers. So I like our roadmap a lot, and I think you'll continue to find broadband is a great engine for this company.
You just referred to your network as a fiber network, and it was an interesting question that someone posed to me recently. Because you've probably heard, CableLabs has talked about a couple of court cases elsewhere in the world where cable companies called their networks fiber networks. They got sued for it and actually won because they said your network actually is more fiber rich than the FTTH network that sued you for it.
I'm not familiar with those lawsuits, but we have more fiber residential, I'm pretty sure, than anybody, and we have all sorts of ways for consumers to enjoy the best broadband, and if you start with what's job one, two, and three, it's making sure consumers have and understand they have the unlimited capacity that we think we can offer for years to come.
And so it sounds like you are convinced that fixed wireless is more of a temporary threat, and the real threat is still wired networks?
Well, I think it's a segmented market, and one of the things we it's not going to, I think we've learned, be a one-size-fits-all. If you're an apartment renter, you're a movie trailer set up temporary facility, you wanna have a quick installation, I'm using as your construction site, there's a big market out there, and there's gonna be plenty of moments where that is a perfectly more than good enough product. So we wanted to get into that business. We have the best Wi-Fi network, and our Xfinity, our NOW broadband product is basically a Wi-Fi product that you just plug and play. No fees, no equipment, no rental, and very simple, no contract. So we needed to be more aggressive in that end of the market than we've been.
We obviously understand and worry about the downdraft effect of confusing consumers with one price point, another price point, a different price point, and so I think we've been pretty disciplined in how we... And that's how we've been able to produce consistently good ARPU growth for the entire 31, +30 million base of customers that we've got, while being able to now compete more effectively in this other segment.
Just let's wrap up that ARPU question for a second. What gives you confidence that the price value equation for... Given that there's a low-end offering at often a $50 price point from Fixed Wireless, there's FTTH that's sort of trying to squeeze you from the top with making arguments their product is better, even if it, even if you would argue it may not be. How do you maintain that 3% growth? Are you confident that that's a sustainable growth rate?
I certainly believe so, and let's talk about all the reasons that that should be the case. But I think that is a great question and really should be very important. First of all, what's inflation? Inflation's running 3%-4%, so it doesn't seem like you have to reinvent things to justify that price in a consumer's mind. So it comes to how many robust competitors do you have for the products you're offering, and what are they what's their behavior? Well, first of all, for the really high-end products, I think our pricing is more than reasonable. Second, we're always looking to add value to the consumer. So the first...
Probably that's one place that maybe slightly differentiates Comcast and the way Dave Watson's been running our communications arm for a long time. We're very focused on adding value to broadband, and wireless is one way that we do that. Another way, and something that I'll just kind of mention today, but Dave's gonna talk about in the next few days, next week or so, in more detail, is what other ways can we help a consumer if you take our broadband products? And we're introducing something this month called StreamSaver, and StreamSaver is going to be available to all customers, not just one segment or another. So if you're an Xfinity broadband customer, Xfinity TV customer, StreamSaver works for you.
If you're a NOW customer, there'll be a NOW StreamSaver. StreamSaver is Peacock, Netflix, and Apple TV, and those three products will come at a vastly reduced price to anything in the market today, and be available to all our customers. And that's an everyday pricing, not an introductory pricing, and we'll reveal all that, and it'll be available this month. So as people look at bundling and segmenting and finding value for consumers so that your bundle can go up 3-4%, how can we add value to consumers at the same time, take some of the dollars out of other people's relationships and put them into our relationships? And so that's what mobile does for us.
We think in the StreamSaver category, we've been bundling video successfully and creatively for 60 years, and so this is the latest iteration of that, and I think this will be a pretty compelling package.
I wanna touch on wireless before we move to the other part of your business, because you mentioned that as part of the bundle that you're sharing with customers today. You've got about an 11% attach rate now of wireless to broadband. You've been in that kind of 300,000 net adds range for a while. And I asked this question on your last conference call: Do you think of wireless as a separate business, or is wireless there as a way to support the broadband business? And talk about what your vision is for convergence of this definition of convergence of fixed and wireless.
I think I said yes to you on the question, which means I didn't answer your question. I think we can make a profit and have a bundled offering, which is the only way we offer wireless. And so I'd start with that, the majority of the benefit is the bundled offering. So what does that mean? As everybody knows, we have a relationship with Verizon Wireless. It's a wonderful relationship, and I would like to believe Verizon is the very best wireless provider, and certainly, if not in a league by itself, right there at the very top of that category. So we're very lucky to have a wholesale relationship.
Xfinity Mobile, combined with our Wi-Fi, combined with our pricing, which is less than you can buy it at retail, combined with the fact that we have the very best devices that work, all devices work with that, with that network and that relationship, it's a seamless end-to-end experience that saves you money. Our most recent pricing with buy one, get one free is really beginning to more aggressively approach the kind of the family plan. We're $25 a line unlimited for the first four lines, and then $20 a line beyond that. That's pretty fantastic savings for consumers to have a product.
Another statistic that is often shocking to people to hear it for the first time is that 90%, up to 90% of the bits or the data that travels over that, that cell phone or that tablet, is coming over Wi-Fi. So it raises the question: How do we procure the last 10%? Because the first 90% is our own network, and so procuring that last 10%, can take the form of this relationship. We can build our own network, we can do a hybrid of both. Today, I have to say, we really like the relationship we've got, and it's worked well, and it allows us to have a profit, which is the second part of your question, and have that profit be a growing category.
So we could go a little faster and pull forward units and do things. We're always debating that question, what as we look at not wanting to completely have the category not be profitable, not have a long-term relationship with our consumers. We want them, when they're ready, to come do business with us, and they see the benefits of this broadband relationship, and now with StreamSaver, and we have a bundled, you know, deep relationship. That's sort of the best customers, and that's the track we're on, and I think we have now got to 11%, which means we've got a long growth runway ahead, and that should power our broadband business. Again, we're very broadband-centric, and if you go back and say, "What is the real metric you're trying to drive toward?" We probably would say EBITDA.
We, you know, and so in that broadband relationship, and then ultimately, you know, that turns into free cash flow. It turns into free cash flow per share. So I think we've got a plan, and we're going to stick to that plan, and we'll obviously make adjustments along the way, but mobile's a big part of it.
Well, one of the stats I remember you cited that, I think was really important was that you said 60% of all the traffic in your footprint comes from 3% of the square mileage, I think it was.
Some stat, I'm not an engineer, but it's a shockingly low density, you know, very dense reality of that. And so we've been testing technologies to and with our own spectrum.
The CBRS.
Right. And, you know, we've walked around Philadelphia with cell phones and had two phones, and this one's on that, and this one's on that. You can't tell the difference. And so, again, given that it's a small geography and a small amount of the volume that people actually use, there are opportunities to augment what we're now doing. I also just spent a minute on business services, which is kind of doing all of these same things in their own way, with a wonderful, growing suite of relationships, small, medium, and enterprise size. But we also are working on mobile and for all of your employees, and at the same time, connectivity for the physical sites and a suite of products, and with data security and network reliability and quick response on service.
We've built a $10 billion-a-year business from basically zero, just by taking this best network and bringing it to more than just homes and residences, but also the businesses and enterprises.
We could talk cable and connectivity all day, but you've got a lot of other interesting businesses. So I want to turn to a question that my colleagues, Michael and Robert, have been asking for a long time, which they sort of rhetorically ask: Is streaming a good business? Is it, and can streaming ever be as good a business as the linear business used to be?
Well, let's start with, is it a good business? You know, I think yes, and I think inside a media company like NBCUniversal, definitely yes. So we have, the way we're managing it under Mike Cavanagh and the team is, it's one media segment. And whether you consume Saturday Night Live this weekend, which was fantastic, I thought. For those that didn't see it, go to Peacock and stream it, and you'll see the content. But you could have been there on NBC Saturday night. And so we're getting two different revenue streams, two different businesses, and one business is cord-cutting to a place. The other business is the fastest growing streaming service out there, and that's a very holistic way to manage a company.
While one may not be as profitable as the other, the real question is: is it profitable, and is it good business? To the question you started with. It took us less than four years to get to 34 million customers for Peacock. It took Hulu over 10 years to do the same thing. That's the power of that first business, which is helping drive the second business. And we have one... You'll see it with the Olympics this summer. The best way to consume it will be on Peacock, but certainly NBC primetime is gonna be spectacular, and innovative coverage that we've I think will be the best we've ever done. And I think Paris will be a glorious setting. So we're running it as one business, not a complete standalone.
Yesterday, we had the NBCUniversal Upfront. We're very fortunate with Donna Langley picking all the content, Mark Lazarus selling all the advertising with the team and putting the business and the sports and combining it all together. Donna stood up and showed some of the relationships in the film division that she's run so successfully, and as they're coming over now to our television roadmap. So, you know, I would say very excited about Peacock, very excited about creatively where we're gonna go the next several years, and also very excited that many businesses, not just in our business, have made this transition from analog to digital, from one technology to the next technology. We, of course, were in Hulu. We were there for many years. It was there before we bought the company.
We owned a third of it, and as you know, we're involved in a sale process to unwind that, and so we had to start perhaps late. But that doesn't in any way suggest that in the fullness of time, the great content of NBCUniversal will not easily and hopefully successfully find a way into your consumer life through Peacock.
There's with all the disruption that's going on now with your purest competitors, I don't know what you would call them, but if I look at the chaos at Paramount, the diminution, I guess, of Warner Bros. Discovery. I mean, there used to be a sense that there was this kind of house on fire urgency to say, "We've got to get Peacock to scale," and that sort of thing. Do you sort of sit back now and just sort of take in this universe and say, there's opportunity here? Or do you say, this is actually a great time for us to wait and see how things shake out and sit back a bit? Or how do you think about the environment we're in?
It's ultimately playing our own hand, and we've been very consistent. I think one of the things, hopefully Comcast presents well to investors, is a certain consistency and kind of one foot in front of the other, and we've said that for Peacock for a long time. We started with a model that was advertising-centric. We've added subscription. We looked at it and said, "Well, that's exactly how we built Comcast Cable." We had advertising and subscription. We do those things really well. Now we've seen a lot of the other marketplace begin to adopt that dual revenue model, so I think we're right about how we approached it. And we've gotten life requires a little bit of luck, and we've gotten...
I love Warren Buffett once saying, "I work 20 hours a day to get lucky." So we have some people who had procured a lot of sports rights, and when COVID hit, we had something called NBC Sports Gold, which was leftover Premier League games, leftover Olympics, Tour de France-type content, Olympic sports, that we weren't able to show on our cable channels and on NBC. When we were launching Peacock, Rick Cordella, who's now head of NBC Sports, suggested that why don't we just put on one of the Premier League games? Because the season had been delayed in the U.K. and they were coming back on just as we happened to be launching.
We put that game on, and next thing you know, it's the most popular thing we had that day, and we said, "Well, let's put one more on, and one more," and next thing you know, we now have more live sports than any streaming service out there. People are surprised to learn that, or ESPN Plus and ourselves, but in terms of their premier events, I think we're actually leading the pack. So that allowed us to get going at that rapid rate that got the adoption to where it is now with Sunday Night Football and other things, and that's gonna create a platform for Donna to come along.... and great, create the great kind of shows, like the great kind of films.
And the TV team that we have has created great shows at NBC for years, and Bravo, and USA, and our wonderful networks. So I'm pretty excited that we have a unique spot. Those other companies, I'm not gonna comment about, but we're playing our hand, and I think we have a good roadmap, coupled with, again, what you said in your report about the ability for Comcast to be patient, given our balance sheet and overall scale. But we have a momentum and a sense of purpose of what we think we're all about, and we're gonna do it in a disciplined way.
I don't suppose I could go fishing and see if you have any comment about the NBA, since you mentioned sports?
No. Nothing to comment today.
We did a deep dive into a part of the business that I have become increasingly interested in, and that's the theme park business. Maybe before I ask my question, I think you have a video that you want-
Well, ask your question. Maybe I'll be able to tie it in with the video.
Well, this has been a real growth engine for your business overall for the last few years. But the opening of Epic is, I think, something that's really underappreciated by investors. So I want to sort of understand what's unique and coming about Epic, and how do you think that... What should investors expect from the Epic opening, and then as you think about kind of rest of world as well, after you finish up Orlando?
So theme parks, just real quickly, are, you know, have been an amazing business for us. They, they kind of feel a little bit like the old days, where you build a new cable system and a lot of people sign up, and then there's a recurring revenue. And while theme parks are somewhat different than that, they- it's not so much. And so we have an opportunity with Epic to do something that hasn't been done in 25, 30 years in this country. We're gonna build the, I believe, the absolute state-of-the-art, best-in-the-world park, 12 minutes away from Universal Orlando right now. And we have special buses and lanes and bridges and things that have been created, so you can zoom right there, ability to have one ticket.
Facial recognition when you enter the park, a technology inside the park that is the absolute cutting edge for the consumer experience writ large, not just the rides, but also the experience of navigating the lines, paying for food, communicating, the ability to in retail, and I think it's gonna redefine the park experience. And Mark Woodbury, who has been the chief creative officer and now the CEO for many years, built all these parks. We got a glimpse of this in Beijing with the park that we built there, and that team came to Epic. So what I brought today was a short one minute or less video, just for this room, sorry for the online folks, to just give you a sense.
On one side, you're gonna see sort of the rendering, and the other side, you're gonna see the state of construction of that rendering. There are five lands, and you'll go ahead and roll the tape, please. I'll touch on that for a second, which is that the breadth of that, we've taken seven years to build this. There's more dirt that's been moved, steel that's been brought in, hotels, restaurants, retail. It's... I don't think there's been anything quite like it in this country. COVID interrupted the construction, kind of set us back a couple of years. We'd be open by now if we hadn't. That's affected a little bit of our rhythm of when we have new attractions. But this is not just like, here's a new Harry Potter.
You saw it's Harry Potter, it's Nintendo, it's Dark Universe, it's How to Train Your Dragon with drones and fire, and it's pretty spectacular.
My sense is, historically, Universal aimed at a slightly older demographic than Disney did. But it seems like you're running a pretty wide age range of appeal at Epic.
We're gonna get better at that. It's sort of like the segmentation in the last conversation. But we're opening a park in Dallas that's gonna be geared to just younger kids. We will be parts of this park that with Illumination and DreamWorks Animation, that we've been able to assemble lots of content. But let me tell you, there's gonna be plenty of, for our core thrill-seeking adventure. It's beginning to make Universal a destination. We'll make it a destination. Come for a week, stay in our hotels. We have a Universal Grand Hotel that's the finest hotel we have.
And it's just right there in Orlando, where we know the weather's good, where we know the tourists wanna come, and it's a, we think, a very good investment for the company and for the stockholders, and at the same time, will just elevate Universal, as you say, and what other opportunities will that create for us elsewhere? One day at a time.
I was struck by, as we did that work, and I... Without heroic assumptions, it really looked to us like estimates for the next couple of years across the street are just too low for the theme parks business. I don't wanna skip the studio business, though, as well. You've obviously had a lot of success in film in the last couple of years. Talk about your vision for the studio and how they sort of fit into the value creation cycle. You know, 'cause you've monetized studio and intellectual property in a lot of different places in your company.
Well, we have... We were the number one box office worldwide last year, and I mentioned Donna Langley already. Really proud of a film like Oppenheimer. It's the kind of the triple whammy of win the Academy Award Best Picture, you know, super successful billion-dollar box office, and something that you can be so proud of every aspect of, of the team for, what its contribution to society, in helping us think and, and, and look back and look forward. But we have... And Christopher Nolan, we thank for, for creating that film.
But we've had this year, we have from Chris Meledandri, Despicable Me for coming, and then, yesterday, at the same upfront, Donna teased the audience and then said, "Nobody can use your cellphone, and it's not coming out for a week, but very soon we'll have the first trailer for Wicked out." And there was an audible gasp in the room of excitement for... And we have two Wickeds coming. So how do we take that great momentum in the film division? First of all, we're trying to infuse it together with the television division.
That's not always how Hollywood has operated, so with our team, as I mentioned, we'll be kind of trying to find a creative front door for the company that will allow people to bring their great skills to a hopefully creative, friendly company. Secondly, we can monetize it also over the ecosystem. We sell our content to Netflix and Apple and Amazon. We make content for all those companies. We make it for Peacock. We put it in theme parks. We have a pay one deal with ourselves with Peacock, but we have a very creative pay one deal. So when a film like Oppenheimer comes out, or a film like Despicable Me comes out, Kung Fu Panda, it'll go on Peacock for four months.
But after that, it will go on either Netflix or Amazon, then it will come back to Peacock. And so we very much believe in the windowing part of the industry, where you can create value at different destinations along that windowing journey. And then, of course, you see something like Epic Universe, and you'll see it infused with all of our own content all over the place. So, a very good holistic food chain, and if I'm missing any parts of that food chain, you get the picture. Obviously, the Xfinity team puts all of our content, and we have stunt, and we have events, and we think we're the best retailer, and it's, you know, we're always trying to...
When you see the Olympics this summer, you will absolutely have the best experience if you're an Xfinity customer with the NBC content. So we try to do all that, and we call that Symphony? It's a reason the company is together and is unique. Back to that, where we started.
Well, you mentioned the Olympics, so let's talk about the Olympics, 'cause that is in some ways one of the unique pieces of Comcast that ties everything together, and I think you have some video there as well.
Well, it wouldn't be good to come here and not talk about the world we live in, the society, the moment in time, and certainly the Olympics present an opportunity. While I'm sure there will be plenty of conversation about all the various problems in the world, the original charter of the Olympics was for 17 days for the world to put their arms down and get together and celebrate the incredible global community and excellence in sport. So when we go to Paris, when you turn on NBC, this is a sneak peek at how we're gonna present the Olympics when you come on air. So you'll be the first people to see this.
Sorry to the folks online, but I just, I'm really proud of how we're looking at the coverage, and why don't you roll tape?... Get ready. We're certainly-
I'll let that speak for itself. But I certainly I'll echo your sentiment that it would be nice to imagine that we get 16 days of world harmony would be a pretty good thing.
Don't know that that'll happen, but we're certainly... If you're not inspired by that, you know, I hope people will be, and I think Team USA is going to be spectacular. That's, that's the buzz, so should be fun watching.
So I want to close our discussion by returning to the sort of portfolio question, because valuations are low for cable. We've pointed out they're actually below replacement cost for cable, physical cable, but they're also low for media. Your combined valuation discount to the S&P is the widest ever. Part of that is, what are investors missing? But part of that is, what opportunities does that create? Because you've said before, your balance sheet is really strong. Is there an opportunity to go shopping for undervalued assets, including your own, buying back stock? But you've obviously had some success with acquisitions before. How do you think about the moment that we're in?
Well, start with why is it, why is it that way? And I think it's some of the uncertainty around the conversation we've had, and hopefully, I've helped in some way give you our roadmap as to how we're going to operate the company or try to operate the company. And I think as we perform, maybe people will rethink the multiple. You know, we've grew last year... I mentioned sort of the algorithm, and Jason Armstrong, our CFO, sitting here, and he's talked about this in other settings. If you can take a complicated story, so that's maybe part of it, which is that a big part of your business is cord-cutting video.
So your revenue growth is going backwards for 40-45% of the company, and going forward, quite strongly for the other 55%, so your revenue growth is retarded. We have six areas that are growing, you know, 7%-10% of revenue. So you put that together, you take a low revenue growth, converts into a single-digit EBITDA growth, low-middle single-digit. That's turned into last year, a 10% EPS and a 10% free cash flow growth, in the first quarter, higher than that. And so you have to unpack us a little bit, and someday, that'll self-correct, because enough years of cord-cutting, eventually, we have just the growing part of the company and less of the, of going backwards part. But can we maintain that, is, I think, the question.
With our 2.3x leverage, you know, let me throw out a stat. In the last 10 years, because we've been doing this a bit, we've returned $90 billion to shareholders, including, you know, $11 billion of that in stock buybacks just in the last 12 months. And so I think that algorithm, if it continues, we're going to buy a lot of our own company, the first thing. The second thing, and I said this on our earnings call, I think that therefore creates an even higher bar to wanting to change the mix of the company that we've got. Very pleased with the roadmap.
We're keeping our leverage around where we're at, and therefore, a lot of free cash comes out, and therefore, we're going to continue to return that cash to shareholders after investing in the roadmap of products and new innovations and content and investments like Peacock and Epic Universe, that I think are part of those six growth engines for the company. So, you know, we'll keep doing it, and we appreciate the fact that you keep studying it. But I think the main message is that diversification is really an asset because of the ability, as businesses change, to just be steady and return capital in this means that I'm talking about, and that's been the path we've been on for 10 years. I think we'll stay there.
Well, I can't thank you enough for being here today. I want to wish you great success with the Olympics and with Epic in the coming year. But I really appreciate you being here and having this conversation, and look forward to doing it again next year.
Thank you, Craig.