Charter said about half of all its new internet service sales are still taking video packages too thanks to the company’s wide range of pricing on video packages.
“We’re able to add value to these households not just by having a national low retail pricing structure for broadband but the ability to use video and to use the savings from mobile to compete now and really for a long period of time,” said COO Chris Winfrey said during today’s earnings call.
However, with total broadband subscriber additions across residential and business dropping to less than half of where they were during the same quarter of 2020, video losses also picked back up. The company lost 121,000 video subscribers—133,000 residential losses were somewhat offset by 12,000 business customer additions—after adding 53,000 one year ago. The losses brought Charter’s total video subscriber base down to approximately 15.89 million.
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But, like Comcast, the video subscriber losses did not translate to lower video revenues. In fact, Charter raised its quarterly video revenue to approximately $4.5 billion, up 6.7% year over year. The company attributed the increase to $218 million of sports network credits recorded in the prior year period, promotional rate step-ups and video rate adjustments that were partly offset by a higher mix of lower priced video packages, a decline in video customers and lower bundled revenue allocation.
During the call, Charter CEO Tom Rutledge reiterated his comments about his company having the biggest livestreaming app in the U.S. and shared that Charter has more than 10 million customers who strictly stream video from the company.
When asked about Comcast’s recent launch of XClass smart TVs that run a version of its pay TV platform, Rutledge said Charter likes the strategy.
“We think there’s lots of opportunity for us to continue to change the video model and to take advantage of our relationship with customers and to make the video model more efficient for programmers and for operators and to bring value back into television,” he said.