Altice USA has started offering new triple-play customers in its Optimum footprint free Netflix for one year.
An Altice rep confirmed that the promotion started in September. A commercial for the promotion can be found here. The cable operator said the promotion is a “$120” value, so it's ostensibly paying for the SVOD operator's $9.99 base streaming service.
The erstwhile Cablevision, which was purchased by Altice last year and rebranded as Optimum, was one of the first cable operators to embrace SVOD services, integrating Netflix and Hulu into its user interface several years ago.
For $69.99 a month for one year, Altice is now offering 100 Mbps internet service, a pay-TV package of more than 260 channels and a multi-room DVR, a landline, as well as free Netflix and Showtime. The deal doesn’t include a binding contract, but customers must maintain triple-play status for the full 12 months to keep the price point.
Altice USA lost 37,000 pay-TV customers in the second quarter, but only 12,000 of those losses came in its bigger Optimum system (the other 25,000 came from Suddenlink).
Altice has big advanced advertising plans for the 4.6 million video customers it still has in the Optimum system and is aggressively battling the corrosive forces of over-the-top distribution.
For its part, T-Mobile recently deployed a similar Netflix promotion, offering a free year of the SVOD service to those who signed up for family wireless plans.