Charter grew its video subscriber base in 2020, a remarkable feat considering the macro cord-cutting trends impacting the industry.
It will be difficult to repeat in 2021 and Charter seemed to acknowledge that during its most recent earnings call. CEO Tom Rutledge was asked about his company’s video strategy moving forward and he seemingly left nothing off the table in terms of evolving Charter’s video product lineup to meet changing consumer behavior and demands.
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Here’s a quick rundown of every potential facet of Charter’s video strategy for 2021 and beyond, according to Rutledge:
- “Our video strategy is to continue, obviously, to sell the products that we’ve historically sold and to sell them with a reasonable margin attached to them…in a way that allows us to satisfy the needs of as many customers as possible.”
- “That includes the addition of new video tiers or products that may be skinnier or differentiated or targeted in a way that they could create customer satisfaction at reasonable prices.”
- “We also think that we want to have a transactional marketplace on a consumer-friendly interface so that a customer of ours has access to all the products they may want to buy that are direct-to-consumer.”
- Worldbox is deployed to multiple millions of households and Charter is planning to launch several third-party streaming apps on those set-top boxes.
- “We have the opportunity to offer an app-based platform to our data-only customers. We haven’t offered that IP-only product although we’ve opened up some of our video products through apps to our internet-only customer base, like our news channels for instance.”
Charter CFO Chris Winfrey spoke last year at a Morgan Stanley investor conference and said his company has considered developing a new IP video platform complete with hardware, which sounds similar to Comcast’s Flex platform for broadband-only customers. He promised more details to come about the product but did not provide a specific timeline. The subject of new hardware didn’t come up during the most recent earnings call.
RELATED: Charter building a Comcast Flex-like streaming device
Charter lost 66,000 in the fourth quarter but after adding 102,000 and 53,000 net residential video subscribers in the second the third quarters, respectively, the company ended up adding 19,000 video subscribers in 2020. The company attributed the growth largely to much higher-than-usual broadband customer growth. But the numbers also suggest that Charter is doing something right with its video business.
Charter’s future video strategy is still somewhat vague but Rutledge did say that “ultimately, I expect all of our customers will have opportunities to transact with us in a video marketplace.”