Jason S. Armstrong
Chief Financial Officer at Comcast
Thanks, Mike, and good morning, everyone. I'll start with our consolidated results on Slide 4. Total revenue increased 1% to $30.1 billion. And within this, our six major growth drivers generated nearly $17 billion in revenue, well over half of total company revenue, and once again have shown steady and consistent growth at a high single-digit rate over the past 12 months. While EBITDA was in line with prior year's level at $9.4 billion, we generated a high level of free cash flow this quarter at $4.5 billion. And we returned $3.6 billion of capital to shareholders, including $2.4 billion in share repurchases. And over the last 12 months we have reduced our share count by nearly 6%, contributing to our adjusted EPS growth in the quarter of 14%.
Now, let's go through our business results. Starting on Slide 5, with Connectivity & Platforms. Note that our largest foreign exchange exposure is to the British pound, which was up 4% year-over-year. So 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 $20.3 billion, reflecting strong growth in connectivity revenues offset mainly by declines in video revenue.
Residential Connectivity revenue grew 7%, driven by 4% growth in domestic broadband, 13% growth in domestic wireless, and 19% growth in international connectivity, while business services connectivity revenue grew 5%. In domestic broadband, our revenue growth was driven by very strong ARPU, which increased 4.2% and came in a bit above our historical range. Our team is doing an excellent job of customer segmentation, while balancing rate and volume, and we are encouraged by the positive consumer behavior trends, we see in our base of 32 million customers.
Bandwidth requirements and engagement are increasing at a rapid clip. While the vast majority of our customers are now on speeds of 500 megabits or higher, and adopting advanced tiers of service like xFi Complete at a higher rate. But as Mike mentioned, it continues to be a very competitive environment, and we lost 65,000 subscribers in the first quarter, following the loss of 34,000 subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2023. As we sit here right now, we do not see this trend improving in the near term. We expect churn could be elevated given the end of ACP, which is only fully funded through April and partially funded through May.
We remain in constant communication with our ACP customers and will continue to be diligent in helping this customer segment stay connected through various options, whether that's our successful Internet Essentials program or our new prepaid NOW [Phonetic] offerings, as Mike described. In addition, I want to remind you that the second quarter also tends to experience seasonal headwinds. While it's a competitive market, especially for the price-driven segment, we will continue to compete aggressively yet in a financially balanced way and expect to drive healthy broadband revenue growth through growth in ARPU, which we expect to remain well within our historical range of 3% to 4% growth even as we managed through the ACP transition.
Turning to domestic wireless. Revenue growth of 13% was due to higher service revenue driven by a 21% year-over-year increase in our customer lines, ending the quarter at 6.9 million in total, including the 289,000 lines we just added in the quarter. We are consistently in the marketplace testing new offers, including some recent new pricing plans targeted to multi-line customers, the new NOW Mobile product, as well as our Buy One, Get One line offer. We continue to see significant opportunity in wireless to increase the penetration of our domestic residential broadband customer base, which currently sits at 11% and to sell additional lines per account.
International Connectivity revenue reflects strong growth in broadband revenue driven by solid ARPU growth, as well as growth in wireless due to additional customer lines and also higher ARPU. For Business Services Connectivity, we generated 5% revenue growth, driven by higher ARPU in small business and broader growth in both customers and additional solutions for mid-market and enterprise. The SMB market has gotten more competitive, but will aggressively defend our position. And similar to this quarter, will grow revenue by increasing ARPU, driven by higher adoption of additional products like mobile, SecurityEdge, Connection Pro and WiFi Pro and through targeted rate opportunities.
Meanwhile, our momentum continues to build in mid-market and enterprise as our expanding capabilities and managed services, wide area networking and cybersecurity have led to increasing customer wins and the expansion of existing relationships. The strong growth in our Connectivity businesses was offset by a decline in video and other revenue. The decline in our video revenue was driven by continued customer losses and slower domestic ARPU growth versus last year. And the lower other revenue reflects continued customer losses in wireline voice.
As I mentioned earlier, Connectivity & Platforms total EBITDA increased 1.3% with margin of 50 basis points, reflecting a decline in overall expenses driven by the mix shift to our high margin connectivity businesses combined with a continued focus on expense management. While margins for our domestic legacy cable business improved even more, our international business was impacted by a reclassification of some expense from capitalized software to operating expenses, creating a tough comparison to last year. We will see a similar trend until we start to lap this change at the end of this year.
I'll note that absent this change, EBITDA growth in the first quarter would have been about 1 point higher, and our margin improvement would have been about 50 basis points higher. While this change increased our operating expenses this quarter, there was an offsetting decline in Connectivity & Platforms capital, resulting in a neutral impact on net cash flow, which was up 5% this quarter.
Breaking out our Connectivity & Platforms EBITDA results further, residential EBITDA grew 1.1% with margins improving 60 basis points to 38.3%. And business services EBITDA growth was lower than our typical mid-single-digit level at 2.6% with margins declining 160 basis points to 56.7%. These results include significant investments in the enterprise space, including in sales and fulfillment that we are making to drive future revenue growth. Business Services generates well over $5 billion in annual EBITDA, which is margin accretive, and we expect it to continue to be a material contributor to overall connectivity and platforms growth this year and over the longer term.
Now let's turn to Content & Experiences, on Slide 6. Overall, revenue increased 1% to $10.4 billion and EBITDA decreased 7% to $1.5 billion. Let's take a closer look at the details. Starting with theme parks, revenue increased 2%, while EBITDA decreased 4% for the quarter. These results reflect the negative impact of currency as the Japanese yen is at a 34-year low against the dollar. Adjusting the results to exclude the impact of foreign currency, Park's revenue would have increased 5% and EBITDA would have been flat compared to last year's first quarter. We had strong underlying growth at our park in Osaka, which continues to benefit from demand for Super Nintendo World. We're also seeing growth in Hollywood, despite lapping the opening of Super Nintendo World in that park during the quarter.
Beijing results were relatively flat in what is typically a seasonally light quarter, and Orlando results were below last year, but still roughly in line with pre-pandemic levels. We are seeing some pullback from the unprecedented attendance we realized immediately after the pandemic, which we believe is driven by the timing of new attraction openings and some increased competition from other entertainment venues, notably cruises.
At Media, which includes our TV networks and Peaco*ck, revenue increased 4% as Peaco*ck's strong growth of 54% more than offset a low single-digit decline at our linear networks. Distribution revenue growth of 7% was driven by Peaco*ck with subscription revenue growth of 68%, powered by the 55% year-over-year increase in our paid subscriber base to 34 million, including 3 million net adds in the first quarter. We are really pleased with Peaco*ck's trajectory.
We started the year with an incredibly successful NFL Wildcard Game, which resulted in a nice lift to paid subs. But even more important was how our broad content offering enabled strong consumer acquisition, retention and engagement. We've had success across a broad range of content during the quarter, including films moving into our Pay-One window like Oppenheimer, the most watched Pay-One film in Peaco*ck's history; and The Holdovers, as well as successful originals, including Apples Never Fall, Ted and the second season of The Traders.
Looking ahead, we'll continue to be focused on retention, particularly in the second quarter as we look forward to the second half of the year, we will have a substantial amount of acquisition-oriented content lined up. This is consistent with Peaco*ck's historical trends, and this year is expected to be driven by the Olympics this summer and the NFL and Big 10 returning in the fall. In addition to the steady stream of films landing in our Pay-One window as well as upcoming originals.
Finally, domestic advertising revenue was flat in the quarter, reflecting a stable overall market with strong advertising growth at Peaco*ck, offset by lower advertising revenue at our linear networks. Media EBITDA decreased 6%, reflecting the revenue pressure on our linear networks, partially offset by continued year-over-year improvement in Peaco*ck EBITDA losses even with the addition of the wildcard rights costs. And we expect to see, on average, even better year-over-year improvement for Peaco*ck in the coming quarters.
At Studios, the revenue decline of 7% reflects lower content licensing, which was impacted by the timing of deliverables related to our film licensing business, which was partially offset by a modest increase in theatrical revenue, driven by the strong performance of Kung Fu Panda 4 at the box office this quarter. Studio's EBITDA declined 12%, reflecting the difficult comparison to last year's film slate, including the highly successful carryover title, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and the timing of licensing deals at film.
Now I'll wrap up with free cash flow and capital allocation on Slide 7. As I mentioned previously, we generated $4.5 billion in free cash flow this quarter, and we achieved this even with the significant investments we continue to make to support our growth drivers. Specifically, our $3.3 billion in total capital spending this quarter incorporates our efforts in expanding our footprint and further strengthening our domestic broadband network, scaling our streaming business and supporting the continued build of our Epic Universe theme park ahead of its 2025 opening. And working capital was a $940 million drag for the quarter, a significant improvement over last year, a lot of which is timing-related.
Turning to return on capital. For the quarter, we returned a total of $3.6 billion to shareholders, an increase of 13% year-over-year. This includes share repurchases of $2.4 billion and dividend payments of $1.2 billion. Putting it all together, in the last 12 months, we've returned over $16 billion in capital to shareholders between share repurchases and dividends, reducing our share count by nearly 6%. At the same time, we invested nearly $17 billion back into our businesses in the form of capital and working capital carefully and consistently balancing reinvesting in our businesses for growth, returning significant capital to shareholders and doing so with a very strong balance sheet, which facilitates this consistency through a variety of operating environments.
Now let me turn it over to Marci for Q&A.
