Charter Communications

John Malone has stepped down from his role as director emeritus on the Charter Communications board, citing concerns that his simultaneous presence on Warner Bros. Discovery’s board of directors violates the Clayton Act.

Preparing to complete what had seemed just last fall to be a highly unlikely successful bankruptcy restructuring, Diamond Sports Group on Wednesday announced a multiyear carriage renewal deal with what is now the largest pay TV operator in the U.S., Charter Communications.

Charter’s Spectrum cable and streaming platforms will continue carriage of The Weather Channel, TheGrio, JusticeCentral.TV, Pets.TV, Recipe.TV and Cars.TV in addition to retrans renewal for Allen Media’s TV stations. Also, The Weather Channel TV app is now included for authenticated Spectrum Video customers.

Dennis Mathew’s investor conference appearance coincides with M&A chatter that Charter Communications is eyeing an acquisition of the cable TV rival.

Charter tops Comcast as No. 1 pay-TV provider by subscribers, months after hinting it may exit the business.

Shares in Charter Communications dropped 13% Friday morning after the company reported disappointing fourth-quarter earnings and a surprising loss of broadband subscribers. Charter said it lost 61,000 internet customers in the quarter ending December 31, compared with Wall Street analysts’ expectation for a slight gain.

Charter CEO Chris Winfrey said the company’s recent Disney carriage fight cost the company 320,000 video customers in the third quarter, but the resulting deal represents “a significant step forward for the video ecosystem.” Speaking during the company’s third-quarter earnings call, Winfrey said the agreement showcased “a new hybrid distribution model is good for consumers.” The companies agreed to terms after a 10-day blackout that kept ESPN, ABC stations and other networks off Spectrum systems just as college football season was starting. The new pact “better aligns video content and DTC apps, which will be included for free in our video packages. … We created a glide path to bridge from linear video to new growth.”

Net-net, Charter will be paying more to Disney, with the increase in wholesale fees for streaming exceeding cuts in payments for cable networks that are being dropped, most analysts have concluded. MoffettNathanson analyst Robert Fishman looked at the Charter deal and has tried to game out how a similar deal would work out for other media companies.

Jessica Fischer also told an investor conference that she was bullish on having a model to “moderate” content cost increases in future carriage deals.

ESPN’s first NFL game of the season is caught in the carriage dispute. Charter is now pushing customers toward Fubo.

Charter CEO Chris Winfrey indicated that little progress has been made in the week-long carriage fight with Disney and said a leaner, ESPN-free TV bundle “could stick” with price-sensitive Spectrum customers. The exec updated investors on the epic distribution battle during a keynote session at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Tech Conference in San Francisco. “If I had anything material to highlight, I would,” he said of the negotiations. “So that should tell you something.”

Disney has seen a 60% jump in Hulu + Live TV subscriptions relative to internal expectations since a carriage impasse with Charter began, according to figures provided to Deadline by a Disney spokesperson. Last Thursday, 18 of Disney’s cable networks and eight ABC stations went dark on Charter’s Spectrum service in one of the most contentious and consequential TV carriage disputes in memory.

Paramount Global CEO Bob Bakish said the Disney-Charter carriage dispute took a “notable” financial toll on many pay-TV stakeholders, but he touted his efforts to “modernize” the company’s distribution relationships for the streaming era. Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Tech Conference, Bakish said last Friday was “obviously a notable day for the industry.” That was the first trading day after 18 Disney cable networks and eight ABC stations went dark on Charter’s Spectrum TV service. It brought a collective $15 billion hit to the market value of a number of programmers and operators, Bakish estimated, as the carriage impasse “was interpreted as a negative” by investors. Nevertheless, he continued, “all companies are not of the same point of view” when it comes to co-ordinating their efforts across linear TV, streaming and other lines of business.

The Disney-Charter carriage battle is foregrounding the fragility of the pay-TV bundle. Charter’s Spectrum TV service is in its fifth day of darkness as the companies fight over carriage terms, leaving nearly 15 million customers without access to 18 Disney networks, including ESPN, as well as eight ABC stations.

Whoopi Goldberg was absent from the Season 27 premiere episode of The View today due to yet another case of Covid, though many usual viewers throughout the country will miss the show too: The View did not air today in markets impacted by the ongoing clash between Disney and Spectrum. In New York City, for example, where the daytime series originates, viewers attempting to tune into the show were greeted with the same Spectrum message that’s been on the ABC affiliate channel all weekend: “The Walt Disney Company, owner of this channel, has removed their programming from Spectrum,” the message begins. “We offered Disney a fair deal, and yet they continue to demand an excessive increase.”

The battle between Charter Communications and Walt Disney, spurred due to cord-cutting, is now getting very tangled. Charter suggested last week that it might be ready to cut Disney networks from its programming lineup after the two companies reached an impasse in talks to extend their carriage contract. Now Disney is hinting to Charter subscribers that they might want to cut their connection with the large cable distributor.

Shares of several big media and entertainment companies tumbled Friday as investors considered the potential fallout from an impasse between cable giant Charter Communications and media titan Walt Disney Co. On Thursday, Disney said it had pulled major networks such as ESPN and ABC from Charter systems after the two companies could not come to terms on a renewal of their carriage license. Charter’s systems reach a little under 15 million subscribers in markets that include New York City and Los Angeles.

Addressing Thursday night’s carriage impasse with Disney, Charter Communications executives told Wall Street investors on a conference call today that their linear video business is “at the edge of a precipice.” Charter CEO Chris Winfrey said any resolution to the outage, which left almost 15 million customers in the dark at the start of football season, would need to happen quickly. Otherwise, he said, Charter will take pains to preserve broadband relationships with customers who drop video service.

If Sinclair’s Diamond Sports Group doesn’t pay Cincinnati’s MLB team by Friday, the club is set to broadcast its own games starting Saturday vs. the White Sox on a new channel. The Reds have handshake agreements with Charter Communications, the dominant cable TV supplier in the Cincinnati DMA, as well as DirecTV.

The six-year-old suit accused the defendants of unfairly benefitting from Charter’s $78.7 billion purchase of Time Warner Cable in 2015.

The suit accused Malone of unfairly benefiting from Charter’s $78.7 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable in 2015. The defendants didn’t admit wrongdoing.

The cable giant, armed with $6.1 billion of free cash flow to help it appeal forever, reduces the latest settlement offer to fit within its insurance coverage.

The recent news that Comcast and Charter are branding their joint venture into connected TVs, devices and free streaming Xumo — with the existing FAST and AVOD service now known as Xumo Play — shows the two pay TV giants are getting serious about safeguarding future revenue streams.

Comscore and Charter Communications have extended their data and measurement deal, with Charter giving Comscore credits of $4 million in 2002 and $3 million in 2003. According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the credits are being applied to the payments money-losing Comscore would have had to make to license Charter’s viewer data.

Customers of Charter’s Spectrum TV are about to see their bills go up yet again. Late last month, Charter began issuing notices to customers of its Spectrum-branded video services warning that the price of their programming packages will go up by at least $4 a month. The price increase is tied to a broadcast television fee that Charter imposes on customers who receive local channels as part of their video services. Affected video plans include Spectrum Stream TV and Spectrum TV Choice.

Charter is phasing out Spectrum Originals as the cable provider moves out of the original scripted series space. The move comes after it was reported that Spectrum Originals head Katherine Pope would be leaving the company to take over Sony Pictures Television from Jeff Frost. Pope is due to begin her new role in the coming weeks, at which time Charter will begin to phase out the Originals division.

A Dallas jury found Charter Communications grossly negligent in the December 2019 murder of an 83-year-old customer by one of it service technicians, hitting the cable operator with a $337.5 million compensatory damages verdict. Following an 11-day trial, the jury determined that Charter was 90% responsible for the stabbing death of Betty Thomas, an Irving, Texas, grandmother, at the hands of Roy Holden, who is currently serving a life sentence after pleading guilty to her murder.

As Comcast prepares to leverage its Flex system in a streaming platform joint venture with Charter, the cable giant is “extremely focused” on growing the base of U.S. operators who it licenses to, Comcast Cable CEO Dave Watson said Wednesday.

Charter Communications and Comcast Corp. said they named Marcien Jenckes president of their joint venture to build a new streaming platform. Jenckes, who has been president of Comcast Advertising since 2017, will focus on developing the business and monetization models for the new platform, which will be built on Comcast’s Flex and include Comcast XClass TV business and the Xumo streaming service.

Charter Communications and Comcast on Wednesday announced a 50/50 joint venture to develop a streaming platform on branded 4K streaming devices and smart TVs. Comcast will license Flex, the company’s aggregated streaming platform and hardware to the new joint venture, contribute the retail business for XClass TVs as well as Xumo, a streaming service acquired in 2020. Charter will make an initial contribution of $900 million, funded over multiple years.

Sinclair Broadcast Group and Charter Communications on Thursday reached a “comprehensive distribution agreement” for continued carriage of Sinclair’s TV stations, Tennis Channel, 19 Bally Sports RSN brands, Marquee Sports Network and the YES Network, in which Sinclair is a joint venture partner. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

The two sides appear to be earnestly hammering out a longterm deal and will abide by temporary agreements until that’s done.

Charter Communications and Sinclair Broadcast Group have agreed to a one-month extension on an expired deal to carry the broadcaster’s regional sports networks and local broadcast channels on Charter’s Spectrum TV system. The extension will keep Sinclair’s 294 broadcast stations in 89 markets — at least those of which that are in the Charter footprint — on the program guides of Charter’s more than 15.8 million remaining pay TV subscribers. More notably, it might — or might not — keep Sinclair’s Bally Sports-branded regional sports networks on Spectrum TV, as well.