As cable subscriptions continue to crater, Charter has a rescue plan on the way. The company’s big push into bundling is poised to occur in the first half of 2025, bringing a bevy of streaming subscriptions into select cable packages at no extra charge.
“By early 2025, we’ll be providing our TV Select customers up to $80 per month of retail streaming app value at no additional cost, including the ad-supported versions of Max, Disney+, Peacock Premium, Paramount+, ESPN+, AMC+ Discovery+, BET+ and VIX,” Chris Winfrey, president and CEO of Charter Communications, said during the company’s third quarter earnings call on Friday.
Winfrey laid out a four-part plan for how rollout is unfolding. First, the company made deals with programmers, ensuring that Charter customers would have access to these programmers’ streaming platforms. That was then followed by launching a direct-to-consumer app. In time, customers will be able to upgrade to the ad-free version of these apps if they so choose. Winfrey noted that “only a couple” of these launches have taken place thus far.
“Then the final piece is really to put it all inside of what I would call a video portal, which allows you to manage all of your video subscriptions with us,” Winfrey said. “We think we’ll have all that placed in the first half of 2025 and be able to present that to customers as part of our pricing and packaging.”
Though Winfrey admitted to analysts on the call that it’s “easy to get impatient” about Charter’s rollout of this bundling offering, he emphasized that it will take roughly 18 months from securing programming agreements to launch. “It’s a relatively short period of time where we’re going to be fully operationalized,” he said.
Looking at these offerings longer term, Winfrey hopes they will have “a pretty significant impact on acquisition and retention, certainly for video, but hopefully also with internet.” However, he pointedly did not make any predictions as to how this would impact Charter’s video growth.
“I want to be careful not forecasting video growth. We’re simply saying that it’s a way to add utility into our seamless connectivity relationships in a way that hasn’t existed,” Winfrey said.
The move comes as cable companies like Charter are increasingly embracing the concept of bundling streaming subscriptions with their cable packages in a bid to stem their losses.
The post Charter Plans to Launch Its Big Streaming Bundle by First Half of 2025 appeared first on TheWrap.
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