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.
Download speeds of Comcast's and Charter's mobile services have increased more than 100 Mbps in the past two years, driven by the cable operators offloading some traffic onto their Wi-Fi networks, Ookla said Tuesday. Ookla examined 2023 and 2024 internet speed test data for the two cable operators. Charter Spectrum Mobile customers have seen median download speeds go from 84.35 Mbps to 188.63 Mbps, it said. Comcast Xfinity Mobile users saw download speeds increase from 66.60 Mbps in Q3 2023 to 170.39 Mbps a year later. Hardware improvements, such as Comcast upgrading its network from DOCSIS 3.1 to DOCSIS 4.0, and the ongoing replacement of older handsets with newer ones, will continue to result in better customer experience, it said.
Fiber has been part of cable networks for years, and is taking on increasing importance as cable operators use its capabilities in new ways, CableLabs Principal Architect Matt Schmitt wrote Tuesday. Cable operators are moving fiber portions of their networks from analog to digital, as well as pushing fiber deeper into the networks and closer to the customer, he wrote.
New York state's Mid-Hudson Fiber has set 1 Gbps symmetrical as its minimum plan speed, it said Friday. Existing customers will be upgraded automatically at no additional cost.