Charter residential video customers down 152,000 in 1Q 2019

STAMFORD, Conn. — Charter Communications, Inc. (along with its subsidiaries, the “Company” or “Charter”) today reported financial and operating results for the three months ended March 31, 2019.

Residential video customers decreased by 152,000 in the first quarter of 2019, while first quarter 2018 video customers decreased by 121,000. As of March 31, 2019, Charter had 16.0 million residential video customers.

Residential – Video – Primary Service Units

                                                           2018
                         --------------------------------------
                             1Q      2Q      3Q      4Q      FY
                         ------  ------  ------  ------  ------
Total                    16,279  16,206  16,140  16,104  16,104
Net Additions/(Losses)     (121)   (73)    (66)    (36)   (296)

                                                           2019
                         --------------------------------------
                             1Q      2Q      3Q      4Q      FY
                         ------  ------  ------  ------  ------
Total                    15,952
Net Additions/(Losses)    (152)

At the end of the company’s Q1 2019 results conference call, when asked about the possibility of licensing Comcast’s X1 platform, Charter Chairman and CEO Tom Rutledge said, “We’re down the road with our own user interface but we have a good relationship with Comcast and we’ve had discussions with them about licensing their X1 platform and their new IP video platform and if we can make that the best platform for us we’d certainly be willing to do that and we think they’d be a great provider. To date we haven’t, and we like our own UI and we like having the ability to change that UI at the pace we want to change it and to make it reflect our marketing strategy. Consistent with the extent to which we are different to Comcast or anyone else out there, we want to be able to continue to have that capability. So if we can check all the boxes in terms of having complete flexibility and low cost, we could become a vendor of Comcast in terms of their platform. To date we haven’t been able to do that.”