Comcast is breaking up with NBCU. Why did it ever buy it in the first place?

Today on Decoder , I’m talking with Peter Kafka, who is chief correspondent at Business Insider and host of Channels , a podcast about the media industry. And it’s a big week for the media industry — Comcast just announced that it’s splitting itself up , into the Comcast broadband company and the NBCUniversal entertainment company. That’s after the media giant spun out its cable assets like CNBC and MS.NOW into a new company called Versant earlier this year. A quick note, by the way — longtime Verge fans know we’ve been disclosing that Comcast NBCUniversal was an investor in our parent company, Vox Media, for years now. That’s come to an end — not only did that investment spin out with Versant, but Vox Media itself is splitting in two, and that Versant stake now lives inside of a shell company that is part of a joint venture with the Penske Media Corporation called PMX, which technically does not exist yet. It is very complicated, and I promise I will sort out a simpler disclosure when all of these deals close. But for now the upshot is the same as ever: None of these companies have ever told us what to do or say in our reporting, and we wouldn’t let them if they tried. Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here . Not a subscriber? You can sign up here . That is good, because, boy, do Peter and I have a lot to say about Comcast. He and I have been covering media and telecom as friends, peers, and competitors for years now, and Comcast was the biggest bet on the idea that combining media assets like NBC with access and distribution like Comcast’s broadband network would somehow pay off. This idea, which you’ll hear us loosely call content plus pipes, is irresistible to media and telecom people. They cannot stay away from it. AT&T tried content plus pipes when it bought Time Warner. Verizon tried content plus pipes when it bought AOL and Yahoo, and, hell, AOL tried content plus pipes when it bo