To Stream or Not: How Comcast’s Wavering on Streaming Left an Opening for Netflix

Last January, at drinks before an offsite for NBCUniversal’s digital executives in New York City, someone asked NBCU CEO Steve Burke when the Comcast-owned entertainment company was going to launch a service to compete with Netflix, according to a person who was there.

Mr. Burke went through an analysis of how much it would cost to compete with the streaming giant. He told the group, “We literally look at it all of the time, but we just can’t make the economics work,” said the person, noting that Mr. Burke discussed the cost of programming and how hard it is to make such a service profitable.