Jason S. Armstrong
Chief Financial Officer at Comcast
Thanks, Mike, and good morning, everyone. I'll take you through our strong third quarter, and we'll begin with our consolidated financials on slide four. Revenue increased one percent to $30.1 billion, while adjusted EBITDA grew 5% to $10 billion. Our results were driven by six key growth areas we have highlighted this year: our connectivity businesses, including residential broadband, wireless and business services connectivity; our theme parks; streaming and premium content in our studios. Together, these growth areas generated more than half of our total company revenue in the quarter and grew at a high single-digit rate over the past 12 months.
The growth in these areas, which on the whole are margin accretive, coupled with disciplined cost management drove our EBITDA growth and contributed to our adjusted earnings per share increasing 13% to $1.08. Last, we generated $4 billion of free cash flow while returning $4.7 billion of capital to shareholders in the quarter. Now let's turn to our individual business results, start on slide five with Connectivity & Platforms. As a reminder, our largest foreign exchange exposure is the British pound, which was up nearly 8% year-over-year. So in order to highlight the underlying performance of the business, I will refer to year-over-year growth on a constant currency basis.
Revenue for total Connectivity & Platforms was flat at $20.3 billion. Our core connectivity businesses, domestic broadband, domestic wireless, international connectivity and business services connectivity, increased 7% to $11 billion in revenue, while video, advertising and other revenue declined 6% to $10 billion of revenue. We're focused on investing in and driving growth in high-margin businesses while protecting profitability in businesses with secular headwinds through disciplined cost management.
And it's working, underscored by the 100 basis points of margin expansion for Connectivity & Platforms in the third quarter while margins for our domestic legacy cable business improved 160 basis points to 46.6%. Getting more into the details, residential connectivity revenue was up 7.5%, reflecting four percent growth in domestic broadband, 16% growth in domestic wireless and 25% growth in international connectivity. Business services connectivity revenue was up 5%. Domestic broadband revenue growth continued to be driven by very strong ARPU, which grew 3.9%.
Our commitment to network leadership and delivering it ubiquitously across our footprint enables customers to do more on our network. They're using more data and connecting more devices at faster speeds, which provides them with increasing value and underpins our ability to drive ARPU higher this year and beyond. At the same time, our residential broadband base remained stable, both on a year-over-year and sequential basis with voluntary churn at record low levels for the third quarter.
While back-to-school was a tailwind as expected, the broadband market remains highly competitive, particularly at the lower end. During the quarter, we recalibrated by pulling back on some of our promotional offers targeting this segment to remain consistent with our strategy of competing aggressively but in a financially disciplined way. This means striking what we believe to be the appropriate balance between broadband subscriber growth and ARPU growth.
And as we continue to manage this balance, we expect ARPU growth to remain strong and our primary driver of broadband revenue growth with somewhat higher subscriber losses expected in the fourth quarter compared to the 18,000 loss we just reported in the third quarter. We expect subscriber trends to improve over time as we remain focused on network and product leadership and also as we see the benefits of greater footprint expansion. We've grown our homes and businesses passed by 1.5% year-over-year to 62 million.
And we're on pace to meet or exceed our goal of one million new homes and businesses passed for 2023. This is a material step up from 2022, and we should accelerate this again in 2024. Domestic wireless revenue increased due to higher service revenue driven by strong momentum in customer lines, which were up 1.3 million or 27% year-over-year to over six million in total. This includes 294,000 lines we just added in the quarter. We continue to test some new converged offers, which, along with the new iPhone launch, should translate into accelerated line additions in the fourth quarter.
With still only about 10% penetration of our domestic residential broadband customer accounts, we have a big opportunity and long runway ahead for growth in wireless. International connectivity revenue increased 25% to another record high, driven by steady mid-teens growth in broadband with the remainder driven by wireless, reflecting healthy growth in services and a particularly strong quarter of device sales.
The five percent growth in business services connectivity revenue reflects stronger growth in enterprise and mid-market. The strong revenue growth in our connectivity businesses was offset by declines in video, advertising and other revenue. Video revenue decline was driven by continued customer losses. The lower other revenue reflects similar dynamics in wireline voice, and advertising was impacted by lower political revenue in our domestic markets, which in the fourth quarter will face an even more challenging comparison to last year.
Connectivity & Platform's total EBITDA increased three percent to $8.2 billion with adjusted margin up 100 basis points, again driven by the mix shift to our high-margin connectivity businesses, coupled with expense management. Continuing the trends seen in the first half of the year, every line item of expense improved year-over-year except for direct product costs. These are success-based and tied to the growth in our connectivity businesses.
In terms of the breakout in our Connectivity & Platforms EBITDA results, residential EBITDA grew 2.4% with margin improving 110 basis points to reach 38.4% driven by our favorable mix shift. While business EBITDA increased 3.6%, EBITDA margin declined 60 basis points to 57.5%, reflecting investments we're making in sales capacity to drive growth in the mid-market and enterprise segments. Now let's turn to Content & Experiences on slide six. Content & Experiences revenue increased one percen to $10.6 billion, and EBITDA increased 10% to $2 billion driven by record results at parks as well as an improvement in year-over-year Peacock EBITDA losses.
Looking at the results of each segment, I'll start with Media, which combines our TV networks and Peacock, given we manage this as one portfolio. Revenue was slightly higher as strong growth in Peacock offset the challenging performance at our linear networks. Unpacking that further, domestic advertising declined eight percent, reflecting softness in the linear market, partially offset by growth at Peacock, which increased nearly 40%. Domestic distribution increased 4% driven by Peacock subscription revenue growth of nearly 90% as we continue to grow our paid subscriber base.
We ended the quarter with 28 million Peacock paid subscribers compared to 16 million a year ago with four million net additions in the quarter. This result was driven by continued success in converting free Comcast bundled subscribers to a paid relationship as well as organic growth driven by programming, including the start of the NFL season and having the Big Ten for the first time, as well as Super Mario Bros. landing exclusively on Peacock in our Pay-One window. Media expenses were slightly lower, reflecting effective cost management in our linear networks and the timing of Premier League costs, partially offset by higher Peacock expenses.
This resulted in a 6.5% increase in Media EBITDA with consistent EBITDA at our TV networks and improved year-over-year Peacock losses for the first time. As Mike noted, we believe Peacock's financial performance will continue to improve and now expect full year 2023 losses will come in at around $2.8 billion, better than our previous outlook of $3 billion.
However, keep in mind that in the fourth quarter, we expect our overall Media EBITDA results to be impacted by 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 and higher Premier League costs compared to last year when games were paused for four weeks to accommodate the timing of the World Cup.
Turning to Studios. Oppenheimer had a strong theatrical performance, delivering over $900 million at the box office. This success, coupled with the positive benefits from carryover titles from our strong film slate this year, resulted in EBITDA of $429 million. While this is a tough comparison to last year's third quarter, which was driven by the strong performance of both Minions: The Rise of Gru and Jurassic World: Dominion, it still ranks as one of the highest EBITDA quarters in the history of Studios.
At Theme Parks, revenue increased 17%, and EBITDA increased 20% to $983 million, our highest level of EBITDA on record. Our international parks continue to experience nice rebounds post COVID. Leading this growth was Osaka, which benefited from strong demand from Super Nintendo World, and our park in Beijing achieved another EBITDA record, driven by increases in attendance and per capita spending.
In Hollywood, the positive consumer reaction to Super Nintendo World, which we opened earlier this year, drove strong attendance and per cap growth, helping Hollywood to deliver its best quarterly EBITDA in its history. In Orlando, our results were also strong with attendance relatively in line with 2019 pre-pandemic levels and revenue substantially ahead. I'll now wrap up with free cash flow and capital allocation on slide seven.
As I mentioned previously, we generated $4 billion in free cash flow this quarter and achieved this while absorbing meaningful investments concentrated in our domestic broadband network, footprint expansion, streaming and theme parks. Total capital spending increased 16% driven by higher capex, which remains within the envelope of the guidance we gave at the beginning of this year, including Connectivity & Platforms capex intensity to remain at around 10% and parks capex to increase by around $1.2 billion for the full year compared to 2022.
At Connectivity & Platforms, capex in the quarter decreased slightly to $2.1 billion with capex intensity coming in at 10.3%. The year-over-year decline was due to lower spending in customer premise equipment and support capital, which more than offset the investments we are making to accelerate our growth in homes passed as well as to transition our U.S. network to DOCSIS 4.0. Content & Experiences capex increased by $270 million driven by parks with Epic accounting for the majority of this quarter's increase in spend.
Working capital was fairly neutral in the quarter and improved by nearly $1 billion year-over-year with more than half of this improvement reflecting the pause in production during the work stoppages associated with the writers' and actors' strikes. We expect this benefit in working capital to reverse as we ramp up to our normal levels of production in the quarters.
Turning to return of capital and our balance sheet. We repurchased $3.5 billion worth of our shares in the quarter, a step-up in our quarterly run rate relative to the first half of the year. In addition, dividend payments totaled $1.2 billion in the quarter for a total return of capital in the third quarter of $4.7 billion. We ended the quarter with net leverage of 2.3 times, in line with our target leverage.
With that, let me turn it over to Marci for Q&A.
