• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, September 20, 2021

Media companies may not continue their march to becoming ever bigger corporate entities in the near term. A senior Comcast Corp. executive just took industry prognosticators' anticipated projections down a notch.

Comcast CFO Mike Cavanagh said recently that the company will play the handit is dealt, perhaps making some smaller buys.

Some of this comes after press reports in recent months that Comcast was looking to do some sort of mammoth deal -- possibly with ViacomCBS.

That ended up being somewhat less that groundbreaking: A joint pan-European subscription video-on-demand service venture called SkyShowtime, combining the Comcast Sky brand with ViacomCBS longtime Showtime brand moniker.

Another rumor is that Comcast is looking around for a possible deal with the big streaming set-top-box/platform Roku.

Cavanagh put the kibosh on all these rumors.

Some of this points to Comcast’s recent premium streaming effort around Peacock -- which, unlike some of its competitors, has not yet set the world on fire, according to several industry-estimated measures.

The thinking here is that premium streaming platforms needs much faster and bigger impact growth.

Instead, Cavanagh pivoted and talked up NBCUniversal's existing strong content interests: “Sunday Night Football,” still the No. 1 prime-time TV series -- as well as the Winter and Summer Olympics.

Although the latter took a massive ding when the Tokyo Summer Olympics recorded a dramatic 42% drop in Nielsen-measured viewership, NBC claims massive ROI results for advertising.

But back to the future. Does Peacock need a boost?

Perhaps Comcast's reticence is to see when and whether the fast-moving marketplace takes a breather before figuring out its next move.

In the past, we have seen media companies that are somewhat smaller in size making bolder -- and perhaps more risky -- moves to rocket ahead. Discovery’s deal to buy WarnerMedia from AT&T is an obvious example.

It sounds like even large media companies are doing a bit of Monday morning quarterbacking. "The bar is really high for us to pursue outright acquisitions of any material size,” says Cavanagh.

So maybe not that last-second throw-into-the-end-zone play just yet.