Charter Communications lost another 66,000 video subscribers during the third quarter but that didn’t stop the company from growing its video revenue.
The video subscriber losses marked an improvement over the year-ago quarter when Charter lost 104,000 subscribers. Charter attributed the year-over-year improvement to fewer limited basic losses and sales of Charter's Stream and Choice video packages. As of Sept. 30, 2018, Charter had 16.1 million residential video customers.
Despite the subscriber losses, video revenues totaled $4.3 billion in the third quarter, a year-over-year increase of 2.9%. Charter said the increase was due to annual rate adjustments, promotional roll-off and higher bundled revenue allocation relating to the launch of Spectrum pricing and packaging in legacy Time Warner Cable and Bright House footprints.
"We are performing well through a very large integration, including completing all-digital and improving the quality and efficiency of our service operations. We have also significantly improved our products, including delivering faster Internet speeds with Gigabit speeds nationwide, and we have launched new products, like Spectrum Mobile," said Charter CEO Tom Rutledge in a statement. "At the end of 2018, our integration of legacy TWC and Bright House will be largely complete and we will operate as a single company, with a superior product and value proposition. With significantly less customer-facing change in 2019, we expect continued improving service metrics with higher demand and retention, faster growth and falling capital intensity, driving meaningful free cash flow growth."
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Charter launched Spectrum Mobile during the quarter on Sept. 4 and said it so far activated 21,000 lines with a mix of unlimited and by-the-gig service plans. The company said that its mobile service will eventually replace wireline voice service in its triple play bundles.
Overall, Charter’s consolidated revenues rose 4.2% to about $10.9 billion and adjusted EBITDA rose 3.5% to $3.95 billion.