Comcast, the nation's largest cable provider, told a familiar story through its third-quarter earnings on Wednesday: overall growth despite continued slippage in television subscribers, and unflattering comparisons to last year.

The biggest part of the sprawling company, Comcast Cable, reported a 5.2 percent uptick in revenue by signing up more broadband Internet users and by squeezing about $10 more a month from its average television subscriber. Thus, Comcast came out ahead, even though it lost 129,000 of its 21.6 million TV subscribers in the quarter, slightly more than it lost in the period last year.

These trends — increases on the broadband side and decreases on the television side — have been evident in Comcast's earnings for years amid stiff competition from Verizon and AT&T's TV services and changes in consumer behavior. Many of Comcast's customers pay the company for an all-inclusive package of TV, broadband and phone. But the company is rapidly approaching the point where it will have more broadband subscribers than TV subscribers.

Three years ago, Comcast had about 23 million TV subscribers and almost 17 million broadband subscribers; now, it has 21.6 million on the TV side and 20.3 million on the broadband side.

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That's partly why the company's newest promotion, which it calls Internet Plus, is aimed at persuading people to sign up for broadband plus entry-level TV service. The package, $50 a month for the first 12 months, emphasizes on-demand TV by including HBO and its HBO GO streaming service as well as Comcast's own Streampix, but it also includes broadcast television channels and a set-top box. The package gained press attention last week because it eschews the typical channel bundle and comes close to selling HBO via the Internet without any other TV service. But Comcast executives played down the significance of the move, saying that it was intended to hook new subscribers.