Altice USA is picking up on the growing demand for smaller, less expensive channel bundles and could be willing to team with a virtual MVPD to offer that type of product.
During his company’s recent second-quarter earnings call, Altice USA CEO Dexter Goei said many of Altice USA’s clients have said they want skinnier offerings.
“And so whether that's us providing a Altice-branded skinny bundle or us offering a third party's bundle on our Altice One platform, we are open to absolutely both,” said Goei according to a Seeking Alpha transcript. “And we have Netflix already on our Altice One platform. As you may imagine, we're in discussions with all the virtual MVPDs out there, the larger ones, about onboarding them onto our Altice One platform.”
Goei said that while Altice USA of course cares where the ultimate gross margin dollars go, it’s important to add features customers want in order to reduce churn.
RELATED: Altice USA cuts Q2 video subscriber losses down to 24,000
While it’s unclear which if any of the vMVPDs Altice USA might end up partnering with, it’s not unheard of for cable operators to integrate vMVPDs, even though they are competitive products. Dish Network’s Sling TV international subscription service is available on Comcast’s X1 platform.
Altice USA already appears to be having some success in mitigating churn across its cable operations. The company posted 24,000 net video subscriber losses, down from 37,000 in the year-ago quarter. The improvement was attributed to “significant improvement” in Suddenlink’s performance (11,000 losses this quarter versus 25,000 losses one year ago) ahead of the full expansion for the Altice One rollout.
“Our residential video business is trending better year over year and we continue to see significant increases in data usage on our broadband network, driven mostly by video streaming across multiple devices in the home,” said Goei in a statement.