Altice USA faces a "more and more aggressive" competitive landscape, particularly from fiber overbuilders in its Western markets and fixed wireless in its Eastern ones, CEO Dennis Mathew said Wednesday at the New Street Research and BCG Future of Connectivity Leaders Conference. He said the fixed wireless competition is particularly centered on the poor, and Altice is changing its marketing approach for that segment in order to better compete. While Altice doesn't have sizable amounts of fiber in its own Western network, that's not a big impediment as the company has improved the quality of its hybrid fiber-coaxial network, he said. He added that Altice is about 70% overbuilt by fiber in its Eastern markets and expects fiber overbuilding in its Western ones -- now about 45% -- to reach a similar level.

As part of its goal to extend its network past 400,000 homes in new communities, WideOpenWest said Tuesday it had reached more than 100,000 additional households. That figure includes more than 80,000 fiber-to-the-home passings in its greenfield markets, as well as hybrid fiber-coaxial passings. The company announced market expansion plans in 2022.

A mobile offering at Cable One doesn't seem likely in the near term. CEO During a call with analysts Thursday, Julie Laulis said Cable One is "certainly open to partnering with a mobile provider," but small and midsize cable operators that have added mobile have seen "very mixed results." Announcing its most recent quarterly earnings, Laulis said, "The best use of our time is pursuing organic broadband revenue growth ... I don't think we need mobile to do it." The end of the Affordable Connectivity Program depressed Cable One Q4 results. It said revenue for the quarter was $387.2 million -- a drop from $411.8 million the same quarter a year earlier. CFO Todd Koetje said the loss of about 10,000 customers in 2024 due to ACP hurt residential data results. Excluding ACP losses and customer gains from a small acquisition, data customers grew by about 2,200 during the year, he noted. Cable One said it ended Q4 with 955,000 residential data customers, compared with 960,500 a year earlier; 107,500 residential video subscribers, down from 134,200; and 67,300 residential voice subscribers, down from 79,200.

Altice USA and MSG Networks reached a carriage agreement that ends an MSG blackout on Altice's Optimum channel lineups, the companies said Saturday. The blackout began in early January (see 2501130068).

With Comcast's planned spinoff of cable network assets, Peacock is its lead TV service, nScreenMedia's Colin Dixon wrote Wednesday. Accordingly, NBCUniversal must focus on retaining subscribers who might otherwise cancel and restart just for particular seasons of sports programming, he said, adding that Peacock will likely be a hub for NBA programming, all NBCU-licensed sports and reality programming. One challenge for Peacock is that its subscribers will bear the cost of Comcast's NBA and Premier League soccer licenses, he said.

Charter Communications' Spectrum Mobile has topped 10 million mobile lines, the company said Tuesday. Charter ended 2024 with 9.6 million mobile lines (see 2501310005). It launched the mobile offering in fall 2018.

While there's speculation that Comcast or T-Mobile might have an interest in acquiring Charter Communications, the rationale for either deal is questionable, consultant Terry Chevalier wrote Thursday. Comcast/Charter would have operational and mobile synergies, but the lack of competitive overlap means there wouldn't be big opportunities for revenue or cost synergies, he said. While T-Mobile/Charter offers strong synergy possibilities, a deal "feels like a stretch," given such issues as Deutsche Telekom's ownership stake in T-Mobile possibly running up against the White House's "America first" approach and T-Mobile's recent investments in new fiber technologies.

Faced with competition from fixed wireless access (FWA), fiber and increasingly low earth orbit satellite, cable internet service providers are responding by trying to starve FWA of spectrum it needs in the 3, 6, 7 and 8 GHz bands, consultant Richard Bennett wrote last week. Cable is also trying to siphon BEAD funding from fiber by directing it at less-powerful technologies like SpaceX's Starlink, he said. In addition, cable is improving its service by tackling "its painful asymmetry," he said. "Broadband doesn’t need to be equal speeds up and down, but 40 Mbps up and 1.2 Gbps down is ridiculous." DOCSIS 4.0 technology is developing slowly, Bennett said, and marketing it will necessitate a sales pitch very different from cable's traditional emphasis on download speeds, while ignoring everything else.

PBS unquestionably was supposed to see a hike in its royalty fees in 2015-17, and the Library of Congress' Copyright Royalty Board wrongly created a new method that disproportionately affected PBS, it told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. PBS and sports leagues are suing the CRB (docket 24-1260), challenging its 2024 cable royalty funds distribution decision. In its initial brief, PBS said the growth in public broadcasting content on distant cable TV systems should have driven higher royalties. Moreover, PBS said the CRB judges adopted a model that cut the value of signals transmitted by cable system operators that paid the minimum fee required, but they didn't apply that model evenly to everyone claiming copyright royalty fees. In their joint initial brief, the sports league appellants said the board purported to split the difference between two competing methodologies, when even the CRB recognized that neither measured the relative marketplace value of each claimant's programming. "The result was the definition of arbitrary, and it must be vacated," they said. Filing a separate joint appeal were the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball, NBA, NFL, NHL, WNBA and NCAA.

Mounting net subscriber losses made 2024 the worst year ever for cable's broadband business, but there are reasons for optimism in 2025, MoffettNathanson's Craig Moffett told investors last week. The rate of growth and share gain of fixed wireless access and fiber overbuilding are "unmistakably decelerating," he said. Moreover, subscriber losses should be much smaller this year, especially with the end of the Affordable Connectivity Program no longer hurting results. He said AT&T entering the fixed wireless market hasn't fully offset the deceleration of Verizon and T-Mobile in that space. It's doubtful whether the pace of fiber overbuilding continues, he said, adding SpaceX's Starlink satellite broadband will likely remain a player in rural markets only.