Charter updates on rollout of Spectrum Guide

AMSTERDAM – Charter and ActiveVideo, the company’s joint venture with CommScope, provided an update on the rollout of the cable provider’s next-generation channel guide.

Spectrum Guide, which uses ActiveVideo’s CloudTV virtualization platform, is now available on millions of set-top boxes within Charter’s footprint. The guide features enhanced customizations and functionality, and video previews along with updated graphics and navigation.

ActiveVideo CEO Jeff Miller told FierceVideo at IBC that his company and Charter had been quiet about the Spectrum Guide deployment, so they decided to provide an update. He said that Charter has been at volume production with the Spectrum product for years now, but had yet to provide a subscriber count. He said ActiveVideo was getting questions about how the rollout was going.

“So, we thought here at the show we’d address that question, and say that it’s going quite well,” Miller said.

RELATED: Charter partners with Arris, buys cloud interface vendor ActiveVideo for $135M

He declined to provide specific subscriber totals, or say how many devices are running the new guide, but he did say that Spectrum Guide is available to nearly all new Spectrum TV subscribers at Charter.

“Obviously, it takes time for subscribers to come on board and use things,” he said. “The numbers are growing every month, significantly. Right now it’s millions and that’s really all we can say.”

Charter ended the second quarter of 2019 with 15.8 million residential video subscribers.

Charter developed the program guide to be delivered on ActiveVideo’s HTML5 cloud browser platform, which virtualizes set-top box functions and enables the guide to be delivered from the cloud to any set-top without leaning on its memory capacity or CPU speed.

ActiveVideo operates as an independent company. But in 2015, Charter partnered with Arris (which has since been acquired by CommScope) to buy the company for approximately $135 million.