Cable giant Charter communicationin which John Malone’s Liberty Broadband holds a large stake, it reported Friday its second quarter results, including the latest subscriber trends.
The company, led by chairman and CEO Tom Rutledge, lost 226,000 pay-TV subscribers in the last quarter, compared to a loss of 50,000 in the same period a year ago.
Requested earlier this year why Charter seems to outperform its peers in terms of video subscribers, Rutledge said: “We do our best, for example. And we try [add] value, where we can, for the consumer.” He added: “There is still a chance in video. And one of the things we’ve had success with is creating additional packaging and the mix of video products that we actually sell to consumers. The Charter’s CEO concluded, “It’s been difficult, because of the way historic video is packaged in this very thick, expensive bundle driven by the cost of sports rights.” But the company has “been able to take some of the content out of that ecosystem and layer them, and we’re selling them successfully.”
Charter broadband user growth turned into a decline in the second quarter as it lost 21,000 customers after a 400,000 gain in the same period a year ago.
But quarterly broadband customers in its residential and small and medium business segments increased by 38,000 on a combined basis, excluding 59,000 “disconnections related to the discontinuation of the Emergency Broadband Benefit program and additional requirements of the Affordable Connectivity Program.” The company had previously warned that those changes to government programs that help consumers get Internet services would hamper 60,000-70,000 users over the period.
On Thursday, Comcast had reported that its broadband user base was stalling in the second quarter.
Shares of cable operators have been hit hard in recent months by the challenges of broadband, which has long been a growth market, with some Wall Street analysts predicting that some cable companies could lose broadband users in the April-June period.
At the end of June, Charter had a total of nearly 30.25 million broadband customers and a total of nearly 15.50 million video subscribers.
Charter also added 344,000 cell phone lines in the second quarter, up from 265,000 in the same period a year ago. It ended June with a total of 4.3 million mobile lines.