Jason S. Armstrong
Chief Financial Officer at Comcast
Thanks, Mike, and good morning, everyone. I'll begin on slides four and five with our consolidated results.
Total revenue increased 2% to $31.3 billion for the fourth quarter, and was consistent at $121.6 billion for the full year. On a reported basis, EBITDA was consistent at $8 billion for the fourth quarter, and up 3% to $37.6 billion for the full year. Our EBITDA results include severance and other in this quarter, as well as in last year's fourth quarter. Excluding these items, totaling $527 million this quarter and $638 million in last year's quarter, adjusted EBITDA decreased 1% in the fourth quarter and remained at 3% growth for the full year.
Adjusted EPS was up 2% to $0.84 a share for the fourth quarter and increased 9% to $3.98 for the full year. We generated $1.7 billion of free cash flow for the quarter and $13 billion for the full year, which translates into $3.13 in free cash flow per share, which was up 10% year-over-year. And we returned over 100% of this to shareholders, with $4.7 billion of capital returned to shareholders in the quarter and $15.8 billion for the full year.
Our strong level of free cash flow includes the significant investments we're making to support and grow our business in six broad and diversified growth categories, including residential broadband, wireless, and business services connectivity, along with theme parks, streaming, and premium content at our Studios. Taken together, these growth areas generated more than half of our total Company revenue and grew at a high-single-digit rate during the quarter and for the full year.
Now let's turn to our business results, starting on slide 6 with Connectivity & Platforms. As a reminder, our largest foreign exchange exposure is to the British pound, which was up nearly 6% year-over-year. As usual, in order to highlight the underlying performance of the Connectivity & Platforms business, I will refer to year-over-year growth on a constant currency basis. Revenue for total Connectivity & Platforms was flat at $20.4 billion. Unpacking that, revenue in our core Connectivity business, domestic broadband, domestic wireless, international connectivity, and Business Services Connectivity, increased 7% to $11 billion, while video, advertising, and other revenue declined 8% to $9 billion.
Our strategy is to invest to drive growth in our core Connectivity businesses, while at the same time, carefully managing businesses that are important but face secular headwinds. On balance, this is a favorable mix shift for the profitability of our overall Connectivity & Platforms segment as reflected in our results. EBITDA for total Connectivity & Platforms increased 3% with EBITDA margins improving 130 basis points year-over-year. This includes severance and other of $422 million in the quarter and $456 million of charges in last year's fourth quarter.
Excluding these items in both periods, EBITDA increased 2% to $8 billion, and EBITDA margins improved by 110 basis points. Margins for our domestic legacy cable business improved 70 basis points to 46.2%. In terms of how our underlying performance in Connectivity & Platforms breaks out between residential and business, on the same basis, excluding severance and other from both periods, residential EBITDA grew 2% with margins improving 120 basis points, and Business Services EBITDA increased 5% with margins nearly unchanged at an impressive 57%.
Now let's get further into the details, starting with our Connectivity growth drivers. Residential Connectivity revenue grew 7%, driven by 4% growth in domestic broadband, 15% growth in domestic wireless, and 19% growth in international connectivity, while Business Services Connectivity revenue grew 6%. Domestic broadband was once again driven by very strong ARPU growth of 3.9% for the quarter and for the year, landing at the high-end of our historical 3% to 4% range, while our base of 32 million broadband subscribers remained stable over the past year, including the 34,000-subscriber loss this quarter.
We remain focused on competing aggressively but in a financially balanced way, as evidenced by this quarter and past year's results. With the broadband marketplace remaining extremely competitive, we will continue to manage this balance and expect ARPU growth will remain strong within our historical range and continue to be the driver of our residential broadband revenue growth in 2024. While we do not expect subscriber trends to improve in the coming quarters, we do expect them to improve over time.
At the macro level, customers are consuming more, connecting more devices in their homes, and are using them for applications that collectively require even faster speeds, lower latency, and higher reliability over time. These secular trends are all moving in our favor, and we believe our marginal cost to add capacity to our network is unrivaled. This is why we are investing in our fiber-fed network, to further increase capacity and offer multi-gig symmetrical speeds ubiquitously across our footprint, and ensure that we stay way ahead of consumer demand with the best broadband offering and experience.
We have deployed mid-splits to about 35% of our footprint and expect that to reach around 50% by the end of 2024. On the back of this, we launched our first DOCSIS 4.0 market during the fourth quarter, and we'll continue to launch additional markets this year. We are focused on what we can control. That means segmenting our customer base by offering our customers the right price, including value options at different speed tiers, and driving ARPU ahead in an environment where broadband subscriber growth remains challenged.
And we're doing this in the context of aggressive network upgrades and expansion, putting us in a great position to eventually return to subscriber growth. Speaking of network expansion, we exceeded our goal of passing 1 million new homes and businesses in 2023, landing at nearly 1.1 million. And we plan to replicate this in 2024 with this level or potentially even greater footprint expansion.
Switching to wireless, we hit a great milestone, eclipsing $1 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time this quarter, with the year-over-year increase due to higher service revenue driven by continued strong momentum in customer lines, which were up 1.3 million, or 24% year-over-year, to 6.5 million in total. This includes 310,000 lines we just added in the quarter. We've had a healthy run rate generating around 300,000 net additional lines per quarter for the last two years, and we're consistently in the market testing new offers, and we'll continue to do that throughout the coming year with the goal that some of these offers will translate into accelerated line additions as the year progresses.
With only 11% penetration of our domestic residential broadband customer accounts, we still have a big opportunity and a long runway ahead for growth in wireless. International connectivity revenue increased 19%, driven by steady mid-teens growth in broadband along with strong growth in wireless, which had healthy growth in both device sales and service revenue. Finally, Business Services Connectivity revenue increased 6%, driven by consistent growth in our small business category as we grew ARPU through rate and higher penetration of additional products like SecurityEdge and from strong growth in mid-market and enterprise.
The revenue growth in our Connectivity businesses was offset by declines in video, advertising, and other revenue. The video revenue decline was driven by continued customer losses. The lower other revenue reflects similar dynamics in wireline voice, and advertising was impacted by a tough comparison to last year, which benefited from higher political revenue in our domestic markets. As I mentioned earlier, excluding severance and other, Connectivity & Platforms total EBITDA increased 2% with adjusted margin of 110 basis points. To unpack this improvement, the main driver is the mix shift to our high margin Connectivity businesses, a transition you've seen for the last few years and that we expect to continue.
In addition to the mix shift, we are benefiting from ongoing cost discipline. For every quarter of this year, including the fourth quarter, five out of six categories of expenses we report have decreased. The only category that grew is direct product costs, which are success-based and directly associated with the significant growth in our Connectivity businesses. In addition, we continue to get more efficient with better tools and technology. Compared to 2017, we reduced our domestic truck rolls by nearly 50% and customer interactions are down nearly 40%, even while we increased our domestic relationships by nearly five million over this same time period.
The investment we are making in our network, including virtualization and using technology to enhance the customer experience, not only makes us more competitive, it makes us more cost efficient. Together, the mix shift, the cost discipline, and the technology advances we've made in customer service are all structural and we expect them to continue, positioning us to drive higher profitability and further margin expansion in 2024 and for the foreseeable future.
Now let's turn to Content & Experiences on slide seven. Revenue increased 6% to $11.5 billion, and EBITDA increased 2% to $932 million. Excluding severance at $101 million this quarter and $186 million in last year's fourth quarter, adjusted EBITDA decreased 6%, reflecting a decrease in Media, partially offset by strong growth at Studios and record results at Parks.
Now let's take a closer look at Content & Experiences starting with Media. Media revenue increased 3% driven by strong growth at Peacock, which was up 57%, and similar to wireless crossed the $1 billion in quarterly revenue mark for the first time. Domestic distribution increased 9% driven by Peacock subscription revenue growth of 88%, fueled by the continuation of solid growth in our paid subscriber base.
We ended the quarter with 31 million Peacock paid subscribers, up 10 million over the past year, including three million net additions in the quarter, driven by sports, including the NFL and the Big Ten, and movies, notably the day-and-date movie Five Nights at Freddy's, and a variety of originals and other entertainment programming. International networks revenue, which is mainly distribution revenue for Sky Sports, increased 17%, primarily due to the increase in sports content this year as well as the positive impact of foreign currency translation.
And finally, domestic advertising declined 7% due to tough comparison to last year, which included a significant incremental contribution in advertising from Telemundo's broadcast of the FIFA World Cup. Excluding the World Cup, advertising increased nearly 3%, driven by strong Peacock advertising, and from our strong sports lineup. Peacock advertising increased 50%, again excluding the World Cup, and hit an all-time high.
Media EBITDA decreased 50%, mainly due to higher sports costs, reflecting a full quarter of the contractual rate increase in our NFL programming, the addition of Big Ten to our sports programming lineup this year, and higher Premier League costs compared to last year when games were paused for four weeks to accommodate the timing of the World Cup.
At Peacock, EBITDA losses continue to moderate in the fourth quarter, with nice year-over-year improvement, resulting in full year losses for Peacock of $2.7 billion, which was slightly better than the expectation we had previously communicated. 2023 marked the peak in annual losses at Peacock. And for 2024, we expect to show meaningful improvement in losses versus 2023.
Turning to Studios, revenue increased 4% driven by theatrical revenue growth of 59% due to our performance at the box office this quarter with Five Nights at Freddy's, Trolls Band Together, The Exorcist, and Migration. In fact, Five Nights at Freddy's was the highest-grossing horror film of 2023, and also set a record on Peacock as the most-watched title of all-time in the first five days of its release. In addition to the films this quarter, we benefited from prior period titles moving through profitable licensing windows, driving EBITDA growth of 83% to $308 million.
At Theme Parks, revenue increased 12% and EBITDA also increased 12% to $872 million for the quarter. These strong results were again driven by growth at our international parks, especially as Osaka continues to benefit from strong demand from Super Nintendo World, driving higher attendance and per cap spending relative to both last year and pre-pandemic levels. In Hollywood, we also continue to benefit from the positive consumer reaction to Super Nintendo World, which opened earlier in 2023, driving strong attendance and growth in per caps and resulting in Hollywood's best fourth quarter EBITDA in its history. In Orlando, our results were also strong with attendance in line with 2019 pre-pandemic levels and revenue substantially ahead.
Now I'll wrap up with free cash flow and capital allocation on slide eight. As I mentioned previously, we generated $1.7 billion in free cash flow this quarter and $13 billion for the year. And we achieve this while absorbing meaningful capital investments to expand our footprint and further strengthen our domestic broadband network, scale our streaming business, and support the continued build of our Epic Universe park ahead of its 2025 opening. As a result, total capital spending increased 13% for the year driven by higher capex.
At Connectivity & Platforms, capex increased 1.5% for the full year with capex intensity coming in at 10.1%, primarily driven by investments to further strengthen and extend our network. In 2024, we expect capex intensity to be in the same range as we continue to transition our U.S. network to DOCSIS 4.0 and accelerate our growth in homes passed. I'll just note that while our capex intensity at Connectivity & Platforms has been at around 10% for the past few years, this is not a specific internal target for us. Rather, it's an output. Our teams are going as fast as possible. However, if, for example, we have an opportunity to accelerate further our growth in homes passed at accretive economics, then we'd welcome that opportunity. But right now, the envelope has been right around 10%, and we're very happy with the pace that we were on and the progress we're making.
Content & Experiences capex increased by 1.2 billion for the full year driven by Parks, with Epic accounting for the majority of the increase in spend. In 2024, we expect Parks capex to remain elevated and then decrease in 2025 when we open Epic. Working capital was $2 billion for the year, which was better than we expected, improving $1 billion over last year's level. Our 2023 results included benefits from the pause in production during the work stoppages associated with the writers and actors strikes during the year.
Turning to return of capital and our balance sheet. For the full year, we returned a total of $15.8 billion to shareholders. This includes share repurchases of $11 billion, including $3.5 billion in the fourth quarter. In addition, dividend payments totaled $4.8 billion. As we announced this morning, we are raising our dividend by $0.08 a share to $1.24 per share, that's our 16th consecutive annual increase. We ended the year with net leverage of 2.3 times, in line with our target leverage of around 2.4 times, and we expect to remain at this target level in 2024.
Wrapping up, we had a very solid quarter and a great year, and we're focused on continuing to execute our long-term growth strategy, supported by our balanced and disciplined approach to capital allocation. I'm proud of the steady and consistent framework which guides our decision-making. We're going to invest aggressively for organic growth across our six key areas. We'll protect our balance sheet and cash flow position and return capital to shareholders.
Now I'll turn it over to Brian for a few remarks before we turn to Q&A.
