Cable One is furthering its prioritization of high-speed broadband services by electing to unwind its bulk cable video offerings for MDUs, hotels and more.
During Thursday’s fourth-quarter earnings call, CFO Steven Cochran said the decision helps ready Cable One’s network for continued high-speed data enhancements and also eliminates the “time and energy spent focusing on an unprofitable product offering.”
Cable One expects the decision to accelerate its video subscriber and overall customer losses in the first quarter of 2022 but said it should positively impact margins and adjusted EBITDA. The company lost approximately 21,000 video subscribers during the fourth quarter, bringing its total down to 247,000.
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Cochran was asked about Cable One’s decision to back even further away from video and if it meant the company might be considering third-party streaming partnerships as a means to offer live TV streaming products to its broadband-only subscribers.
“We don’t have a competitive product and it’s not a financially viable business for us. Exiting out of that isn’t really changing our video strategy around residential,” said Cochran, noting that the decision only relates to bulk video deals for condos and hotels, and that Cable One will continue to sell its residential video services.
“We have the IP platform that we’re migrating people to, to recover the broadband. That being said, we certainly don’t encourage people or try to market to people to move into those packages. If that’s what the customer chooses, then that’s the offering we have,” he said.
Cable One last year announced Sparklight TV, its new IP-based video product. It planned to launch in select markets in early 2021 before making it available across its footprint by the end of 2021. It said the move from linear video to IPTV will allow for continued spectrum reclamation for more network capacity for current Gigabit offerings and 10G service.
Cable One said that some of its smaller investments are trying strategies including revenue sharing with over-the-top providers but Cochran said that Cable One currently doesn’t have any plans on going down that path.