Fifty-five percent of U.S. pay-TV households say availability of live sports is important in their decision to keep the service, said Parks Associates Tuesday. The churn rate for pay-TV services is trending “significantly lower than the rate for [over-the-top] OTT services,” said analyst Steve Nason. Over the past year, churn rates for OTT and virtual MVPD services declined as consumers turned to streaming video services for entertainment.
NCTA and its members urged adopting 3.45-3.55 GHz rules consistent with those in the citizens broadband radio service band, in a call with FCC Wireless Bureau and Office of Engineering and Technology staff. “NCTA noted the successful outcome of the 3.5 GHz CBRS auction, and the role that the service rules for that band played in attracting a diversity of auction participants … and encouraging the widespread deployment of the spectrum,” said Tuesday's posting in docket 19-348. Charter Communications, Comcast, Cox and CableLabs participated.
System operators that took part in one or more of the FCC's 2011-15 annual cable TV price surveys have 10 days to object to disclosure of the data in a Freedom of Information Act request, the Media Bureau said in a public notice Monday.
Starz added 800,000 streaming subscribers in fiscal Q3 ended Dec. 31, finishing the quarter with 28 million global customers, said Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer on a Thursday investor call. “We're well on our way to our goal of 50 million to 60 million global subscribers by 2025, the vast majority of which will be high-value streaming subs,” he said. “Amazingly, in spite of the challenges” from COVID-19, Lionsgate is shooting 19 scripted television series and another 20 unscripted shows globally, and five feature films “have returned to production,” he said. Lionsgate’s fiscal Q4 ending is perhaps the first time “where all the players are kind of on the field right now,” except for Paramount+, said Starz CEO Jeff Hirsch when asked about streaming competition. The “big broad-based streaming services,” including Netflix, Disney+ and Hulu, “are trying to service everybody in the home,” he said. “That's where the real competition is going to be, and you're going to see people competing on ad spend, people competing on price and people competing on bundling.”
Entertainment Studios Networks and the National Association of African American-Owned Media settled their 5-year-old complaint charging Charter Communications with racial animus in opting not to carry ESN content. The plaintiffs filed a notice of voluntary dismissal Wednesday (in Pacer, docket 16-cv-00609) in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. ESN settled similar litigation last year with Comcast (see 2006110011).
MVPDs in the COVID-19 pandemic era need to ramp up efforts to engage subscribers with new innovations and business models “or risk accelerating customer losses,” blogged Parks Associates analyst Kristen Hanich Wednesday. Three in five pay-TV households are interested in streaming movies and TV shows from an over-the-top video service as part of their subscription, Hanich said, and many providers are responding to demand: The number of customers receiving OTT services has jumped 50% in a year. Nearly 80% of pay-TV households have both pay-TV and OTT subscriptions, with the number of OTT services among households with any online video service averaging 3.8 subscriptions vs. 4.2 for pay-TV homes. Other findings: 43% of pay-TV households want video calls on their TV; 40% want to control smart home devices and security systems; and 34% are interested in playing video games on TV via a cloud gaming service. Pay-TV providers must keep offering their most valuable content, including live sports and cultural events, Hanich said. In addition to offering streaming channels, they need to target new services to customers and “be willing to take a hit on pricing until this chaotic market stabilizes.”
Comcast will increase its Internet Essentials program to 50/5 Mbps March 1, doubling the download speed, it said Tuesday. It also expects to launch 1,000 wireless "lift zones" by year-end to address the homework gap.
Charter Communications will spend $5 billion, including $1.2 billion from Rural Digital Opportunity Fund Phase 1 (see 2012070039), to bring up to 1 Gbps service to more than 1 million locations in mostly rural areas of 24 states, it said Monday: Timing for the "multiyear" buildout will depend partly on utility pole permitting and make-ready efforts. "The more cooperation we have with the pole owners and utility companies, the faster" the work, CEO Tom Rutledge said.
The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' rejection of a Massachusetts Department of Telecommunications and Cable (MDTC) appeal of an FCC decision (see 2012180023) distorted both court precedent and the congressional balance between consumer protection and using the LEC test to promote competition. That's according to MDTC Monday in a petition for rehearing en banc (in Pacer, docket 19-2282) of the decision upholding the agency's finding that vMVPD service AT&T TV Now is effective competition to cable TV, ending basic rate regulation in parts of the state. The FCC didn't comment.
Charter Communications ended 2020 with 19,000 more video customers than it had a year earlier, and it expects to do better in its video trends this year than the MVPD industry overall, CEO Tom Rutledge said during an analyst call Friday as the company announced Q4 results. Rutledge said the growth was driven in part by its broadband connectivity growth. He said industry growth will continue to decline "at a moderate pace," while Charter "won't have quite the internet growth … we had in 2020." Charter ended 2020 with 15.6 million residential video subscribers. It also ended the year with 27 million residential broadband subs, up 2.1 million year over year; 9.2 million residential voice subs, down 228,000; and 2.3 million residential mobile subscriptions, up 1.2 million. Rutledge said this year should have a return to pre-pandemic trends in internet subscriber additions, plus a full recovery of the advertising business as the economy also fully rebounds. He said that during Q4, Charter's minimum broadband speed offering of 200 Mbps went from being available in about 60% of its footprint to 75%. Rutledge said the 210 citizens broadband radio service priority access licenses that Charter bought for $465 million will be used on targeted 5G small cells. He said that over the next four to five years, up to a third of Charter's traffic might end up on the CBRS spectrum. The stock closed down 7.2% at $607.56.