Jason S. Armstrong
Chief Financial Officer at Comcast
Thanks, Mike, and good morning, everyone. We had a really strong second quarter. And to take you through it, I'll start with our consolidated results on slide four. Revenue increased 2% to $30.5 billion, while adjusted EBITDA grew 4% to $10.2 billion, a record level, driven by continued operating leverage at our high-margin Connectivity & Platforms business as well as strong growth at studios and theme parks. We grew adjusted earnings per share by 12% to $1.13 and generated $3.4 billion of free cash flow, while returning $3.2 billion of capital to shareholders. Our healthy level of free cash flow in the quarter includes the significant investments we're making to support and grow our businesses in six key growth areas: our connectivity businesses, including residential broadband, wireless and business services connectivity, theme parks, streaming and premium content in our studios.
Taken together, these areas generated more than half of our total company revenue in the quarter and grew nearly 10% year-over-year, consistent with the first quarter. Now let's turn to our individual business results, starting on slide five, with Connectivity & Platforms. As I get into these results, I'll refer to year-over-year growth on a constant currency basis. Revenue for total Connectivity & Platforms was flat at $20.4 billion. Our core connectivity businesses: domestic broadband, domestic wireless, international connectivity and business services connectivity, increased 7% to over $10 billion in revenue, while video advertising and other revenue declined 7% to $9.8 billion.
Our strategy continues to incorporate a strong focus on investing in and driving growth in high-margin businesses, while protecting profitability in businesses with secular headwinds through disciplined cost management. This resulted in 170 basis points of margin expansion for Connectivity & Platforms in the second quarter, while margins for our domestic legacy cable business improved 240 basis points, reaching a record high of 47.3%. Diving deeper into the details. First, I'll unpack connectivity revenue growth. Residential connectivity revenue grew by 8%, reflecting 4% growth in domestic broadband, 20% growth in wireless and 26% growth in international, while revenue for business services connectivity grew 4%.
Domestic broadband continued to be led by very strong ARPU growth, which increased 4.5% for the second consecutive quarter. As we have said before, our goal is to protect ARPU by retaining the appropriate balance between rate and volume and to serve our customers' constant demand for more from our network. We continue to see the use cases for better and faster Internet increase. Demand for higher speeds is increasing, as is average network consumption and our customers are hanging more devices off our network in their homes.
The average monthly data usage for a broadband customer that doesn't take video from us is nearly 700 gigabytes and continues to grow. In fact, this is nearly 70% more than the average usage from the comparable quarter in 2019 pre-pandemic. Additionally, nearly 3/4 of our broadband customers are now on speed plans of 400 megs and above. That's up from less than 50% last year and less than 20% in 2020. We plan for our network and product capabilities to stay far ahead of demand, so that we maintain our position as a market leader, delivering the best broadband possible. To that end, our transition to DOCSIS 4.0 is progressing well. We're more than halfway through the year and have implemented our mid-split technology to 25% of our footprint and are on target to complete 1/3 of this build by year-end, with the first commercial launch of DOCSIS 4.0 in just a few short months.
We're also hard at work when it comes to expanding our footprint. We've grown our homes and businesses passed by 1.5% year-over-year to $61.8 million and we are on pace to meet or exceed our goal of one million new homes and businesses passed for 2023, with future footprint expansion remaining a high priority. Growth in domestic wireless revenue was due to higher service revenue, driven by continued strong momentum in customer lines, which were up $1.4 million or 30% year-over-year, to $6 million in total, including the 316,000 lines we just added in the quarter.
This marked the seventh consecutive quarter of more than 300,000 line additions. We continue testing some new converged offers in the quarter and we're encouraged by an increasing mix of new customers to Comcast, and we'll continue to experiment with different offers over time. With just 10% of our domestic residential broadband customers taking our mobile offering, we have a big opportunity and long runway ahead for growth in wireless. International connectivity revenue grew to $1 billion, a record high and demonstrates the strength of the Sky brand and the ability to leverage a leadership position in video and extend that to connectivity with significant success. Broadband, which accounts for 2/3 of international connectivity revenue, continued to grow at a mid-teens level, benefiting from both an increase in customers and ARPU compared to a year ago.
The remainder is wireless revenue, which tends to have more variable growth due to handsets, which contributed to the higher growth rate this quarter. Finally, on business services connectivity, revenue increased 4%, reflecting stronger growth in enterprise and mid-market and a slight deceleration in growth from small business, where we are seeing a bit of macroeconomic pressure. The strong revenue growth overall in our connectivity businesses was offset by declines in video due to customer losses since last year as well as declines in other revenue, reflecting similar dynamics in wireline voice. And finally, in advertising, which was impacted by lower political revenue in our domestic markets and the macro environment. Connectivity & Platforms total EBITDA increased 4% to $8.3 billion, and as I mentioned a moment ago, an adjusted margin that expanded 170 basis points.
This is driven by the mix shift to our high-margin connectivity businesses, coupled with very strong expense management. In fact, every line of expense was down year-over-year, except direct product costs, which are success-based and directly associated with the significant growth in our connectivity businesses. Further unpacking our Connectivity & Platforms EBITDA results between residential and business, residential EBITDA grew 4%, with margin improving 180 basis points to reach 38.9%, again, highlighting our favorable mix shift, while business EBITDA grew 5%, with margin improving 40 basis points to reach 57.7%. Now let's turn to Content & Experiences on slide six. Content & Experiences revenue increased 4% to $10.9 billion, and EBITDA increased 7.5% to $2.2 billion, driven by record results at Parks and strong growth at Studios, fueled by the success of Super Mario Bros.
Taking a closer look at the results, our Media segment combines our TV networks and Peacock, matching our holistic approach to managing these businesses. As viewership shifts to streaming, our dual revenue strategy at Peacock, where we're growing advertising and distribution revenue, is offsetting declines in linear revenue. At the same time, we are managing costs at our linear networks and reallocating some of these resources to Peacock, with the goal of maximizing profitability over the long term across our media portfolio. You see that in our media results this quarter with stable revenue as strong growth in Peacock offset the performance of our linear networks. Media EBITDA decreased 18%, which included a $651 million EBITDA loss at Peacock.
To get a little further into the details, domestic advertising declined 5%, with underlying trends consistent to prior quarters, reflecting continued softness in the overall market, partially offset by strong growth in advertising at Peacock, which increased over 75%, driven by strong demand. We expect these overall results in advertising to continue in the third quarter. Domestic distribution increased 2%, driven by Peacock distribution revenue growth of nearly 70%. Peacock paid subscribers landed at 24 million compared to 13 million a year ago, and 22 million at the end of the first quarter. As Mike mentioned, in June, we began an effort to transition Comcast bundled subscribers who receive Peacock for free to a paid relationship. We've made some nice progress to date as the conversion activity drove Peacock's second quarter subscriber growth, and we're bullish on further increasing our Peacock subscriber base through the balance of 2023, driven by both our continued conversion efforts as well as strong programming in the second half.
Some highlights include a strong lineup of movies exclusively on Peacock in our Pay-1 window, including Super Mario Bros., coming August 3, a day-and-date movie, Blumhouse Five Nights at Freddy's, coming at the end of October, and continued benefits from our next-day broadcast, Bravo content, along with a strong sports lineup, including Sunday Night Football and for the first time, Big Ten. Turning to Studios. We had a great quarter, driven by our film business, including the latest installment of the Fast franchise and the tremendous success of Super Mario Bros. While theatrical revenue growth was offset by lower content licensing at our television studios, due to the timing of when we deliver content, the momentum in our film business, led by the success of Mario, fueled nearly $260 million in year-over-year growth in Studio EBITDA. At Theme Parks, revenue increased 22% and EBITDA increased 32% to $833 million, a record level. Our park in Hollywood continued its momentum from opening Super Nintendo World last quarter.
The positive consumer reaction drove strong attendance and per cap growth, helping Hollywood to deliver its best quarterly EBITDA in its history. Our international parks are both experiencing nice rebounds post-COVID. Our park in Osaka delivered a record level of EBITDA for a second quarter as it continues to benefit from strong demand from Super Nintendo World. And our park in Beijing enjoyed its most profitable quarter to date, resulting in strong improvement compared to last year when the park was largely closed due to COVID. In Orlando, our comparisons were impacted by unprecedented levels of visitation last year, but underlying momentum remains healthy as attendance was relatively in line with 2019 pre-pandemic levels, while revenue was substantially ahead of 2019 levels. I'll now wrap up with free cash flow and capital allocation on slide seven.
As I mentioned previously, we generated $3.4 billion in free cash flow this quarter and achieved this while absorbing meaningful investments in our network and theme parks. These investments drove a 20% increase in total capital spending, primarily driven by higher capex, which was consistent with the outlook that we provided on our last quarter call. At Connectivity & Platforms, capex increased 11%, with capex intensity coming in at 10.4%, primarily driven by investments to accelerate our growth in homes passed as well as transition our U.S. network to DOCSIS 4.0. Content & Experiences capex increased by $344 million, driven by parks, with Epic accounting for the majority of this quarter's increase in spend. Turning to return of capital and our balance sheet. We repurchased $2 billion worth of shares in the quarter. In addition, dividend payments totaled $1.2 billion, for a total return of capital in the second quarter of $3.2 billion. We ended the quarter with net leverage at 2.4 times, in line with our target leverage.
With that, let me turn it over to Brian for a few words before we turn the call back to Marci.
