Comcast is spinning off its cable networks into a new company called Versant.

They call it a “strategic realignment.” Anyone with a functioning frontal lobe hears: “we’re offloading the losers before they embarrass the winners again.”

This isn’t a media story. It’s a math story. It’s what happens when a 40-year-old model tries to compete with something built for scale and doesn’t recognize it lost until the scoreboard is taken down.

Versant launches with $6.6B in revenue, $2.2B in EBITDA, and $1.4B in free cash flow. All fine numbers. But it’s also writing Comcast a $2.25B separation cheque, taking on $3B in debt, and watching profits fall 24% before its ticker even goes live. This is what “healthy” looks like in cable now, which tells you everything.

And the macro backdrop is even uglier. Cable went from 96M US subscribers to roughly 69M in seven years. Pay-TV penetration fell from over 80% to the mid-30s. This is not a slow decline. This is the market moving on while the incumbents keep insisting “consumers still love the bundle.”

Streaming, meanwhile, is blowing past $400B globally with double-digit growth. Every dollar of upside is there. Pay-TV has the energy of a landline—still functioning, still charged, but mostly because nobody bothered to unplug it.

So Comcast did the rational thing. Broadband is ten times larger, ten times healthier, and not actively shrinking by the million every year. You keep the infrastructure business that compounds. You spin out the legacy division that doesn’t.

Versant isn’t built to win anything. It’s built to extract value on the way down. It’s the corporate equivalent of palliative care: cut costs, renegotiate old contracts, dump content into FAST channels, and stretch the cash flows as far as they go. Rotten Tomatoes and Fandango are nice digital assets, but they aren’t changing the trajectory.

Tech, meanwhile, quietly rebuilt the entire cable ecosystem in software and made the old moats irrelevant. Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, Samsung, LG—all of them turned the “bundle” into a UI decision. Virtual cable services grabbed 20M+ subs without touching a coaxial line. The old bundle didn’t disappear. It simply left the infrastructure behind.

Which leaves Versant in an awkward place. It’s no longer a platform. It’s inventory. Content to fill ad slots. A set of networks that still generate cash, but in a market that’s already moved on.

And here’s the broader lesson: every giant eventually produces its own Versant. Google Search is slowly heading there—still enormous, still dominant, but undeniably aging into legacy mode. Amazon Retail could be next, weighing down AWS’s valuation story even as it remains essential.

When a division stops compounding, the market notices. When it starts dragging on the multiple, the market demands separation.

Comcast just got there now. Versant is the result: the cable era, converted into cash flows and given its own ticker so the rest of the company can move on.