Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts focused his comments at the virtual Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference Wednesday on the future, adding that the company’s performance over the years is proof that “scale matters.”

“The last couple of years demonstrates we’re in good businesses, but also how scale matters,” Roberts said. “So if one business is going down with some temporary hit from COVID, we have others that are surging. We have a great team of people, a culture that has been decades in the making, and I think we execute at a high level.”  

That may or may not have been a reference to Comcast chief financial officer Mike Cavanagh’s warning at the Sept. 14 Bank of America Media, Communications & Entertainment conference that broadband growth appeared to slow “a little bit” faster than expected in August. That comment drove Comcast stock down 7.3% that day, costing the cable operator about $20 billion in market capitalization and driving down other stocks in the sector.

Roberts instead pointed to the success of the cable unit’s broadband business, which has grown to about 31 million subscribers, and its 60 million customer relationships. 

“We’re really a broadband company,” Roberts said, adding that the strategy is to deepen those broadband relationships with consumers through innovative products and new ways to distribute them. 

Roberts said the announcement Wednesday of its XiOne product  is the latest example of its “develop once, deploy everywhere” strategy, which includes whole-home WiFi via its Xfinity Pods, its Xfinity Flex broadband-only service, its Gigabit gateway and even a feature that tells Peloton owners via text message that their exercise bike needs to be closer to their WiFi pod for better reception.

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“We’re building a moat around the most important part of the company, and we’re innovating and we’ve shifted the whole technology focus to broadband in homes and I think it’s really paying off,” Roberts said. 

Comcast also is focusing on streaming, adding that its Peacock service has about 20 million monthly users and 54 million signups a little more than a year after launching the service nationally. Roberts noted that Comcast also has its eyes on international streaming, with Peacock coming to its Sky subscribers later this year, and its August partnership with ViacomCBS for streaming content in Europe.   

“We’re looking at other partnerships like that around the world,” Roberts said.

Regarding sports rights, Roberts said what NBC Sports does best are big events like NFL football and the Olympics. While Roberts conceded that the recent Tokyo Olympics was “tough,” he pointed to the 120 billion minutes of programming that were consumed by viewers and was optimistic about future games in Beijing (2022), Paris (2024) and Los Angeles (2028).

“It really makes our company super-relevant for those 17 days, and no one quite can compete with advertisers for attention in the way an Olympics can every two years,” Roberts said. “We’re not that far away from Beijing, and we’ll get right back at it, but we’ll get to a normal rhythm as we go out and we look forward to Paris and we look forward to LA. We love our association with the Olympics.” 

With other sports, Comcast and its Sky satellite unit have the ability to “pick and choose,” pointing to earlier decisions not to get into a bidding war with streaming sports service DAZN for rights to Italy’s Serie A league and last year’s deal for rights to Germany's Bundesliga that resulted in a reduced fee. Sky recently extended its rights deal with the Premier League to 2025.

“These are really hard calls,” Roberts said. “You don’t always want to prevail, and sometimes you’re right and sometimes you're wrong, but I think the sustainability of sports is a critical part of what our company does well.” 

 This weekend’s spotlight on live sports programming starts in the boxing ring with Saturday’s Fox Sports-distributed Manny Pacquiao-Yordenis Ugas pay-per-view fight card. Pacquiao will be fighting the current welterweight champion after his original opponent, Errol Spence had to pull out of the fight earlier this month due to an eye injury.

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ESPN on Saturday will offer mixed martial arts action with a UFC Fight Night card headlined by the Jared Cannonier-Kelvin Gastelum middleweight bout. 

In other sports, ESPN and ABC will offer coverage of the Little League Baseball World Series on Saturday and Sunday. On the pro side, ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball will feature the Los Angeles Angels-Cleveland Indians matchup.

On the auto race track, Fox will provide live coverage of the NHRA Lucas Oil Nationals, while on the greens CBS and Golf Channel will offer weekend coverage of the PGA Northern Trust tournament. 

On the soccer field, ABC Saturday will feature a Bundesliga League matchup between Bayer 04 Leverkusen vs. Borussia Mönchengladbach, USA Network and NBC will offer Premier League action, and Fox, ESPN, and FS1 will televise Major League Soccer games. On Sunday, NBCSN will televise a Premier League soccer doubleheader.

Discovery Communications’ European sports network Eurosport won its fight to stop the largest satellite TV service provider in Germany from marketing itself as the exclusive home of Bundlesliga soccer, after a German court issued an injunction against Sky Deutschland, adding that the satellite service mislead consumers.

The Regional Court of Cologne, 31st Civil Chamber issued the injunction late Monday. According to the ruling, the court found deceptive consumer practices in Sky Deutschland’s campaign “Every Game, Every Goal” regarding its coverage of Bundesliga soccer. Sky Deutschland had been the exclusive provider of Bundesliga soccer until last year, when the league opened up bidding for its games to other providers after the Federal Cartel Office, Germany’s anti-trust agency, initiated the “no-single buyer rule” for rights to the matches. Eurosport has the rights to 40 Bundesliga games, while Sky Deutschland airs 572 of the 612 games each season.

Sky Deutschland is a subsdiary of Sky plc, which is in turn controlled by 21st Century Fox. The German ruling comes as Fox awaits word from U.K. regulators on whether it will be allowed to buy the remaining interest in Sky plc it doesn't already own. That decision is expected to be announced on June 29.

“Discovery has an obligation to ensure fans understand which Bundesliga matches they can watch, when they can watch them, and where,” Discovery Networks Deutschland said in a statement. “With consumers at the core of our business, we therefore felt it necessary to take action against Sky Deutschland, who have blurred the lines between fact and fiction, stating that all matches in the upcoming season will only be available on Sky’s platforms. A claim that Sky has been making that is complete fiction and in our view detrimental and confusing, to millions of sports fans throughout Germany.”

Beginning in August, Discovery Networks Deutschland will air every Friday night primetime match, five Sunday afternoon and five Monday evening matches exclusively, as well as the Supercup and four relegation games. All of the matches will be available through Discovery’s direct-to-consumer offering, the Eurosport Player, on the TV screen, computer and mobile devices.

“We look forward to continuing our strong partnership with the DFL and showcasing football to the highest standards for football fans in Germany,” Discovery Networks Deutschland continued in its statement.

Fox will be taking multiscreen to the extreme on Friday (August 14) at 2:30 p.m. ET when it kicks off coverage of the Bundesliga season opener between defending champ Bayern Munich and Hamburg.

In addition to televising the match nationally on Fox Sports Regional Networks and Fox Sports 2, the programmer will also offer live streams on four platforms – YouTube, the Fox Sports GO app, Fox Soccer 2 GO app and at FoxSports.com.

Fox is set to offer all 306 Bundesliga matches this season on Fox Soccer 2 Go, a digital subscription service that runs $99 per year. All matches from Germany’s top pro league televised by Fox Sports 1, Fox Sports 2 and Fox Deportes will also be available on Fox Sports Go, Fox’s authenticated TV Everywhere app.  Fox noted that this season is 21Century Fox’s first as the global media rights partner for the Bundesliga.

“We were looking for a creative way to kick off our new long-term partnership with the Bundesliga,” said Pete Vlastelica, executive vice president, digital, at Fox Sports, said in a statement. “One great way to do that is to tap into the power and accessibility of YouTube, and showcase Bayern Munich, one of the best soccer teams in the world.”

"We’re über-excited to bring Bundesliga matches to US soccer fans on YouTube for the first time ever,” added Tim Katz, head of sports partnerships, North America, at YouTube. “YouTube is already the premier home for sports highlights and with this partnership with FOX Sports we're delivering even more great sports programming to fans."

Discovery Communications could be eyeing the creation of European regional sports networks built on the Pan-European sports networks it already controls through its recently acquired Eurosport channels.

Silver Spring, Md.-based Discovery bought a controlling (51%) interest in Eurosport in May. The service has several pay TV brands — Eurosport, Eurosport HD, Eurosport 2, Eurosport 2 HD, Eurosport Asia-Pacific and Eurosportnews — that generally have focused on lower-cost rights like German Bundesliga soccer outside of Germany, skiing and cycling. The channels recently scored ratings gains with French Open tennis matches, averaging about 1.36 million viewers, and broke the 50-million viewer mark in France with cycling’s Tour de France.

“We think we can build Eurosport by being strategic and working with our partners,” Discovery CEO David Zaslav said at the Communacopia conference last week. Eurosport “has one feed that is sold on a Pan-European basis; we can put it into all 70 countries without adding one sales person. We also have a strong local presence. In some cases we think we can build a very strong local sports channel.”

Zaslav coyly replied “maybe” when asked whether those channels would be based on a U.S. regional sports network model.

The time might be ripe for European regional sports, Lee Berke, CEO of sports consultancy LHB Sports, Entertainment & Media, said.

While most prestige rights are locked into long-term contracts with big European distributors — such as BSkyB’s and BT’s $4.9-billion, three-year lock on England’s Barclays Premier League soccer — Berke sees room for channels built around a particular sport or team. “That’s where I think you can get some traction,” he said.

The biggest questions are which rights, which sports and how much money would Discovery be willing to spend. But the programmer has been willing to open its checkbook. This year, it teamed with Liberty Global to buy production company All3Media for about $1 billion and is expected to team up with Liberty Media to bid on a 49% stake in Formula One Racing, worth about $4 billion.

Berke also said Eurosport could build channels around supplemental and shoulder programming from teams, as well as regional skiing, Scandinavian hockey and European basketball.

Other U.S. networks’ efforts to secure major rights in Europe have not had much long-term success. ESPN, for example, had Barclays Premier League rights for a time, but then sold its U.K. and Ireland channels to BT last year. ESPN still has a strong digital European presence through its espn.co.uk website and others, but has shifted international focus mainly towards Latin America.

That could mean the market has room for a well-run competitor, and Eurosport has the experience to possibly pull it off, Berke said. “They have navigated their way through distribution country by country,” he said. “ My guess is they’re saying some of the same things we’re saying here in the U.S. — more interest in developing a range of programming on a range of screens and a range of distribution outlets.”