Wall Street might start looking at cable growth in 2024 as "a game of inches with growth and investment narratives dependent on short-term promotions and competitor offers rather than structural drivers," Barclays said in a note Thursday. Price hikes will likely be a focus again for the telecom industry in 2024 as they were during the past few years. Barclays also said a slowdown in cable subscriber growth due to issues such as competition from new entrants in a low-growth environment is likely to be exacerbated by Verizon and T-Mobile having greater access to spectrum for fixed wireless. An additional worry for cable is that AT&T is moving further into fixed wireless. Traditionally, cable grew through speed upgrades and price hikes. With Comcast and Charter offering minimum speeds "way higher than needed for most households," pricing becomes more important, Barclays said. However, price hikes come with trade-offs, it added, pointing to increased fixed wireless competition and wireless-only growth.

Ad-supported Disney+ is now a part of all Charter Communications' Spectrum TV Select packages at no extra cost, Charter and Disney said Thursday. The streaming service's availability is the result of a distribution agreement the two reached in September (see 2309110034). Tom Montemagno, Charter executive vice president-programming acquisition, said that as the video industry evolves, the cabler is "committed to including direct-to-consumer apps like Disney+" with its Spectrum service.

The Q3 2023 inflation adjustment figure for cable operators using Form 1240 is 3.33%, said the FCC Media Bureau and Office of Economics and Analytics Thursday. In the year-ago quarter, it was 4.37%.

Wideopenwest is piloting a test in the Panama City, Florida, market using distributed access architecture modes to increase capacity on its hybrid coaxial fiber network and offer multi-gig speeds, it said Tuesday. The cabler said the tested technology lays the framework for offering symmetrical multi-gig speeds via DOCSIS 4.0. It said under the test, customers in a specifically designated area will enjoy speeds of 2 Gbps/200 Mbps. Test phases will make those speeds available to current and new subscribers in additional markets later.

Comcast customer data including usernames, hashed passwords, contact information, last four digits of Social Security numbers, dates of birth, and secret questions and answers was accessed in a hack exploiting a Citrix software vulnerability, the cabler said Tuesday. The hack occurred Oct. 16-19, it said in a notice alerting customers of the incident.

Kentucky cable operator Duo Broadband is dropping its traditional cable TV service at year's end and is notifying customers on its website. It cited "extreme costs associated with Cable TV systems, maintenance, and facilities." In addition, it said large programming fee increases "would have required significant, continued price increases that would be a burden for our customers." Duo said pricing also is moving it to drop its streaming TV service, and it's directing subscribers to the Mybundle service to find alternative over the top services.

Charter Communications is confident about competing for residential broadband customers in the long term, but there are short-term "challenges," Chief Financial Officer Jessica Fischer said Tuesday during UBS' Global Media and Communications Conference. She said a soft November points to Charter losing broadband subs in Q4. Fischer said the first phase of Charter's network update to multigig speeds, happening in about 15% of its footprint, should improve trends in those markets, Fischer noted, adding the second phase would start in a few months. Fixed wireless is a bigger competitive challenge in parts of Charter's footprint where there's not a fiber overbuilder, she said. FW is attracting "more price-conscious" subscribers, but Charter expects many will come back as it becomes more capacity constrained, she said. The pace of fiber overbuilding should start to slow as the costs of capital and construction have increased and as fiber overbuilders already have their networks in the areas with the highest densities and most desirable customers, she said. "Over time, their passes are getting more expensive and getting more challenging from a demographic perspective as they continue to build," she said. Charter is on track to do 400,000 rural passings this year, up from the 300,000 it projected, she said. The cabler "absolutely" will pursue the same approach with other programmers it did with Disney (see 2309110034) of including a video-on-demand service as part of its bundle and dropping networks that are available via that VOD service, she said. Xumo -- its streaming platform joint venture with Comcast -- is now the primary product being deployed to new video customers, though Charter is not going to proactively swap out traditional cable boxes for Xumo boxes, she said. Charter will operate with quadrature amplitude modulation video "for a long time," but eventually will see efficiencies from that shrinking QAM video footprint. Charter stock closed Tuesday at $364.40, down 8.7%.

About 50% of Comcast's footprint faces fiber competition, with that figure expected to reach 60% in the next few years and continue growing, its Chief Financial Officer Jason Armstrong said Thursday during a Morgan Stanley investor conference. Comcast adds roughly 300,000 wireless subscribers per quarter and will likely accelerate that pace with subscription deals, he added. It completed 850,000 line extensions in 2022 and is on track to do more than a million this year. It will likely exceed that figure in 2024, he said.

High interest rates and inflation helped hammer WideOpenWest's subscriber numbers, with the company losing 4,400 high-speed data subscribers in Q3 and expecting to lose "significantly more" in Q4, CEO Teresa Elder said last week as WOW announced Q3 financial results. She said WOW is also facing increased competition, with fixed wireless more aggressively competing at lower-speed tiers in several of its markets. WOW stock closed Thursday at $3.19, down 57%. Noting construction has begun on plans to pass 80,000 new homes in Michigan, with construction to start next year on similar network expansions in Minnesota and Florida, she said WOW is on target to bring its network to 400,000 additional homes by the end of 2027. Since the company's August launch of YouTube TV as its primary video offering (see 2308020007), more than 13% of new subscribers have signed up for the subscription VOD service, said Elder. While WOW hasn't forced customers off its legacy video service so far, she said that in the next 12 to 18 months it wants "to completely get off of our QAM network" and will start forcing them off. WOW finished Q3 with 503,400 high-speed data subscribers, down from 518,600 the same quarter a year earlier; 100,800 video subs, down from 129,900; and 82,700 telephony subs, down from 92,900.

The cable industry's distributed access architecture deployment cycle -- with DAA deployments enabling DOCSIS 3.1 upgrades and eventually a DOCSIS 4.0 rollout -- is still in its early days, with most of the upgrade work likely to happen between 2024 and 2027, Dell'Oro Group's Jeff Heynen blogged Friday. Comcast and Cox today account for 38% of the DAA node or module market, but purchases by Charter and other cable operators will also drive significant equipment purchases, he said.