Michael J. Cavanagh
President & Chief Financial Officer at Comcast
Thanks, Brian. I look forward to the new role. It's quite an honor and I appreciate the trust that you and the Board continue to have in me. I'm excited to work with the leaders on this call, Dana, Dave and Jeff, and all of our colleagues to take advantage of the great opportunities for Comcast's future.
So now, I'll begin on slide four with our third quarter consolidated 2022 financial results. Revenue decreased 1.5% to $29.8 billion, reflecting the comparison to last year's quarter, which included the Tokyo Summer Olympics as well as a headwind from currency translation at Sky and our international theme parks due to the strengthening dollar. After adjusting for both of these items, our revenue was up about 7% year-over-year.
Adjusted EBITDA increased 5.9% to $9.5 billion, and on a constant-currency basis increased about 8%. We generated $3.4 billion of free cash flow and we reported an EPS loss of $1.5 per share, which was mainly impacted by an impairment charge at Sky.
We test goodwill annually across the Company in the third quarter. Challenging economic conditions in the UK and other European markets have resulted in, a significant increase in discount rates used in the annual impairment analysis and reduced estimated future cash flows at Sky. As a result, we have taken an impairment charge related to Sky goodwill and intangible assets totaling $8.6 billion. On an adjusted basis, EPS increased 10% to $0.96 per share and on a constant-currency basis, adjusted EPS increased about 12%.
Now, let's turn to our business segment results, starting with Cable Communications on slide five. Cable revenue increased 2.6% to $16.5 billion, driven by higher rate and volume in residential broadband as well as growth in business services, wireless and advertising. The strong growth in these businesses was partially offset by lower revenue in video and voice. Total customer relationships were up 315,000 compared to last year and down 21,000 sequentially in the third quarter.
Diving further into the details, first, our revenue growth drivers. Broadband revenue increased 5.7%, driven by growth in ARPU and in our customer base compared to last year. Broadband ARPU increased 3.7% year-over-year, consistent with the growth rate in the second quarter. We expect ARPU growth will continue to be the primary driver of our residential broadband revenue growth in the near-term.
Wireless revenue increased 31%, mainly driven by service revenue which was fueled by growth in customer lines. We added 1.3 million lines over the last year, including 333,000 lines in the quarter, which is our highest number of net additions for any quarter on record and marks the fourth consecutive quarter of adding more than 300,000 lines.
Business services revenue increased 9.4% or approximately 5% excluding the acquisition of Masergy, which closed at the beginning of last year's fourth quarter. This healthy organic growth was driven by increases in both ARPU and our customer-base. We continue to see healthy performance across our diverse customer segments, including SMB, mid-market and enterprise, with this quarter's organic growth driven by a mix-shift to higher data speeds and increased sales of our Advanced Services, as well as rate increases and growth in our customer base.
Advertising revenue increased 7.2%, primarily driven by political and our advanced advertising business, FreeWheel, partially offset by a decline in our local core advertising business and the absence of our streaming business, Zuma. As we previously announced, Zuma is now part of our joint venture with Charter, with those results reported in Corporate and Other. If we exclude the impact of Zuma, Cable advertising revenue would have increased to 12%.
Partially offsetting the growth from these revenue drivers was video revenue, which declined 4.4%, driven by year-over-year customer net losses, partially offset by 6% ARPU growth due to a residential rate increase at the beginning of this year. And last, voice revenue declined 12.5%, primarily reflecting year-over-year customer losses.
Turning to expenses, Cable Communications' third-quarter expenses increased 0.5%, reflecting higher non-programming expenses, mostly offset by lower programming expenses. Programming expenses decreased 2.8%, reflecting the year-over-year decline in video customers, partially offset by higher contractual rates. Non-programming expenses increased 2.5%, driven by growth in other expenses due to an increase in bad debt compared to last year, reflecting a return to more normalized levels and increased technical and product support expenses driven by growth in our wireless business as well as the addition of Masergy.
These higher costs were partially offset by a decline in advertising, marketing and promotion expenses, partly due to the comparison to last year, which included some Olympic sponsorship spending as well as lower activity levels. The lower activity levels coupled with the improvements we continue to make in our customer experience also contributed to the decrease in customer service expenses.
Cable EBITDA increased 5.4% to $7.5 billion in the quarter with Cable EBITDA margins improving 120 basis-points year-over-year, reaching a record-high of 45.1%. And on a per customer relationship basis, we grew EBITDA 4%, as we focus on monetizing these relationships over their lifetime.
Before moving to NBCUniversal, Hurricane Ian has impacted our footprint in Southwest Florida causing outages and damage to our Cable Network that our Cable team is still repairing. Many of our customers' homes and commercial locations were severely damaged or destroyed. While our third quarter results were not impacted by the storm, we expect to report an impact in the fourth quarter, including net losses of broadband customers.
Now, let's turn to slide six for NBCUniversal. Starting with total NBCUniversal results, revenue decreased 4.3% to $9.6 billion, reflecting the difficult comparison to last year, which included $1.8 billion from the Tokyo Olympics, included in our immediate segment. EBITDA increased 24.6% to $1.7 billion. Media revenue decreased 23% to $5.2 billion, again reflecting the comparison to the revenue associated with the Tokyo Olympics last year. Excluding the Olympics, Media revenue increased 4.4%, driven by Peacock, with revenue of $506 million, which more than doubled compared to last year.
Distribution revenue increased 4.6%, reflecting growth at Peacock, driven by increases in paid subscribers compared to last year as well as higher contractual rates at our networks, partially offset by linear subscriber declines that accelerated sequentially. Advertising revenue increased 4.7%, reflecting strong increases from Peacock, partially offset by a decline in linear advertising.
Media EBITDA decreased 41.5% to $583 million in the third quarter, including a $614 million EBITDA loss at Peacock. We continue to expect Peacock EBITDA loss will be roughly $2.5 billion for the year, with the fourth quarter's loss reflecting the cost of new content. Excluding Peacock, Media EBITDA in the third quarter decreased 21%, reflecting the difficult comparison to last year's Tokyo Olympics as well as revenue pressure at our linear networks.
Looking to the fourth quarter, we expect Media growth ex-Peacock to be impacted by a gradual acceleration in pay-TV cord-cutting as well as some deterioration in the ad market, reflecting broader economic uncertainty as well as higher costs associated with the broadcast of the World Cup on Telemundo.
Moving to Studios, revenue increased 31% to $3.2 billion, driven by strong theatrical and content licensing revenue. Theatrical revenue more than doubled compared to last year, driven by the success of our summer of film slate, including Jurassic World: Dominion, Minions: The Rise of Gru, Black phone and Nope. In addition, content licensing was up 17%, driven by the benefit of our carryover titles and the acceleration in film windows as well as healthy growth and television licensing.
EBITDA increased $358 million to $537 million for the quarter, primarily reflecting the higher theatrical and content licensing revenue, partially offset by the corresponding higher programming and production costs and also the benefit of the timing of marketing costs that we incurred in the second quarter for films in the third quarter.
Last, at Theme Parks revenue increased 42% to $2.1 billion and EBITDA increased 89% to $819 million, our highest level of EBITDA on record. These results were driven by growth at each of our parks. At Universal Beijing, we had our first profitable quarter since opening compared to the third quarter last year when it incurred $130 million of pre-opening costs.
At our US Parks, we continue to see strong demand with attendance and guest spending increasing year-over-year. In fact, Orlando broke a new record delivering its highest level of EBITDA for the third quarter, despite the parks being closed for two days due to Hurricane Ian. Universal Japan continues to rebound since capacity restrictions were lifted at the end of March and compared to last year when the park operated under more strict COVID-related controls.
Now, let's turn to slide seven for Sky. As I said earlier, our reported results were meaningfully impacted from the currency translation due to the strengthening dollar, but I will speak to Sky results on a constant-currency basis. For the third quarter, Sky revenue was consistent compared to last year at $4.3 billion, as low-single digit growth in the UK was mostly offset by lower revenue in Italy and Germany. Direct-to-consumer revenue was also consistent compared to last year, reflecting low-single digit growth in the UK, driven by broadband and wireless revenue, offset by declines in Italy and Germany.
On a customer basis, we added 320,000 customer relationships in the quarter, with positive additions across all three territories, the UK, Italy and Germany. These net additions were driven by streaming customers due to the timing of unique content and the early start of football seasons, including the EPL, to accommodate the timing of the World Cup in the fourth quarter. We do not expect a similar level of additions in the fourth quarter. Rounding out the rest of revenue at Sky, content revenue increased 6.4%, driven by licensing our entertainment content. And advertising revenue decreased 1.6%, with lower revenue in Italy and relatively flat revenue in the UK and Germany, reflecting the difficult macro-environment.
Turning to EBITDA, Sky's EBITDA decreased 15.5% to $701 million, primarily reflecting the timing of sports costs, again due to the early start of the football seasons and the shift of matches into the third quarter towards -- accommodate the timing of the World Cup in the fourth quarter. While this shift will benefit sports costs in the fourth quarter as four weeks of games are paused, results will also be impacted by the challenging economic environment in Europe. And we will incur higher sports costs in the first half of 2023, reflecting the higher number of games as the season is extended and the remainder of the paused games are played.
Now, I'll wrap-up with free cash flow and capital allocation on slide eight. We generated $3.4 billion of free cash flow this quarter. Consolidated total capital increased 24% due to increased spending at NBCUniversal and Cable, partially offset by a decrease at Sky. The increase at NBCUniversal was driven by higher CapEx at Parks, as we continue to invest in new attractions and make significant progress in-building Epic Universe in Orlando.
Cable capital spending increased 17%, with CapEx intensity coming in at 12.2% due to timing. On a year-to-date basis, Cable CapEx intensity was 10.4% and we continue to expect Cable CapEx intensity to be around 11% for the year. Working capital was $1 billion for the third quarter, reflecting the continued ramp in content creation and the timing of annual sports rights payments.
As we enter the fourth quarter and look to our year ahead, we remain focused on driving long-term growth during an increasingly challenged economic environment. As a result, we expect we'll be taking severance and other cost reduction related charges in the fourth quarter in anticipation of expense reduction actions that will provide benefits in 2023 and beyond.
Wrapping up with capital allocation, last month we increased our buyback authorization to $20 billion, up from $10 billion. And during the quarter, we repurchased $3.5 billion worth of our shares. In addition, dividend payments totaled $1.2 billion for a total return of capital in the third quarter of $0.7 billion. We ended the quarter with net leverage at 2.3x, in line with our expectations for leverage to remain around 2.4x.
Thanks for joining us on the call this morning. I'll turn it back to Marci who will lead the question-and-answer portion of the call.