Charter-Comcast JV Has Chance to ‘Reach Scale’ Quickly: Charter CFO

The 50-50 Charter-Comcast joint venture to develop a national streaming platform on branded 4K streaming devices and smart TVs (see 2206170008) brings together two “legacy cable providers” that have “an aptitude for the aggregation side,” plus lots of “interactions with consumers who are at the point where they're considering video products,” Charter Chief Financial Officer Jessica Fischer told a Credit Suisse investors conference Wednesday. “When you click that together with what really Comcast has created, it's a world-class platform that we can deploy fully across a national footprint,” she said. “Our opportunity to sort of reach scale there and to do so pretty quickly is very good.” Charter’s cable subscriptions have “shrunk more slowly” than those of “some of our peers” because “we're always looking to provide the packages that consumers want,” said Fischer. The offering with Comcast “enables us to sort of do that even more broadly, whether consumers want linear, whether they want streaming, whether they want skinny, whether they want fully loaded,” she said. “We're going to be in a place to pull together what it is that consumers are looking for.”