Everyone knew it was coming, and this week Charter officially inked a deal to acquire its largest shareholder Liberty Broadband in an all-stock agreement that buys Liberty’s 26% stake at a 5.2% discount to Class C shares’ last closing price. In addition, Charter will take on roughly $2.6 billion in debt. The deal should greatly …
When Charter and Disney struck a carriage deal in September after a 10-day blackout, many focused on Disney’s eight dropped channels (including Freeform and Disney Jr.) and the novelty of higher-tier Charter video subscribers getting free access to Disney+ and/or ESPN+. But eagle-eyed observers who read the press release recall a buried bullet that stated: …
The fact that the sudden deal this week between Charter and Disney came as a surprise even as “Monday Night Football” loomed tells us everything we need to know about the inhospitable state of the media industry right now. Like the 13 days that Kennedy and Khrushchev faced off over Cuba in 1962, the 10 …
An exposé from the Wall Street Journal reported recently that legacy telecom cables covered in lead and belonging to AT&T, Verizon, and others have degraded and contaminated locations across the country. Impact: The investigative report found at least 2,000 old cables, used in both overhead and buried lines and dating as far back as the …
Costly Environmental Issue Looms for AT&T and Verizon Read More »
Cable executives at the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo provided a glimpse into how the industry plans to compete with multi-gigabit speeds even as it works to counter fiber’s high speeds with speed increases of its own. Impact: At the conference, executives from Comcast, Charter, and Cox emphasized how much customer expectations for their broadband service have …
Cable Industry Hints at Competitive Strategy to Counter Fiber Read More »
Cable operators struggled through a tough quarter of broadband subscriber growth in Q2, with Comcast reporting flat growth (negative on the residential side), Charter sliding into the negative, and Altice reporting its fourth consecutive quarter of losses. All three cable operators attributed some of their struggles to the same issues: low move activity combined with …
The CEOs from Charter and Comcast had similar responses when asked during recent investor conference appearances about the potential threat to cable broadband from the explosion of fiber and 5G fixed wireless offerings in the Internet space. Impact: Not only did Comcast CEO Brian Roberts downplay any potential broadband threat his company might be facing …
Big Cable Continues to Downplay Potential Threat from FWA Read More »
T-Mobile executives reveled in the success of their fixed wireless access product on the carrier’s Q4 2021 earnings call on Feb. 2, with CEO Mike Sievert describing the service as “mainstream” due to the subscriber uptake. Impact: T-Mobile ended 2021 with 646,000 fixed wireless access subscribers, including 224,000 added in Q4 and 546,000 for the …
A strong contender for the quote-of-the-month award goes to Andrew McCollum, the CEO of streaming video service Philo. McCollum recently talked to Variety about the rising influence of connected TV platforms that bridge the Internet and living-room TV sets. “Direct-to-consumer,” said McCollum, “is a bit of a myth.” That’s a perceptive read of a phenomenon …
