Altice USA CEO Dennis Mathew used the opportunity of his company's Q3 conference call with equity analysts Wednesday to throw his support behind the groundbreaking carriage renewal deal carved out in September by Charter Communications and Disney.
“The model is broken,” Mathew said. “I just have to say, for the last 10 years, the consumers have made it clear that there is a significant shift from linear to streaming, and yet the costs for linear have continued to rise. And we as distributors need to find a way to work with our programming partners to put the customer at the center. We need to give them great value.”
Mathew made his comments as Altice USA was reporting the loss of another 77,600 linear video customers in Q3, vs. 84,000 in the third quarter of 2022. Altice USA has just over 2.3 million remaining pay TV subscribers.
“We need to give (subscribers) the right content,” Mathew added. “As we look at these programming deals, we’re bundling in content that basically nobody wants to watch, along with the content that consumers actually want to watch.”
Moving beyond video, Altice USA continued to see its core business, wireline broadband, retrench, but at a lower rate, losing 31,000 customers in Q3 vs. a year-ago comparable performance of 43,000 lost high-speed internet souls.
The company did report 45,000 net fiber additions in the third quarter, as well as 24,000 new Optimum Mobile lines.
Total revenue for the quarter was $2.32 billion, down 3.2% year over year.
