Time Warner Cable chairman and CEO Glenn Britt said that cable operators should focus on winning back video subscribers at an industry conference Monday, but stopped short of saying when that reversal could happen.
Speaking at the Deutsche Bank Securities Media & Telecom conference in Palm Beach, Fla., Britt said the years of basic video subscriber losses are taking its toll.
While basic subscriber losses have been commonplace over the past few years - according to the NCTA, cable companies have lost a collective 4.8 million video customers from their peak in 2001 to 2009 - a handful of operators are showing some improvement. In the fourth quarter, Time Warner Cable and Comcast reported fewer than expected basic video losses, in part because of the strength of the bundle of video, voice and data, "We need to really to focus on that with a renewed intensity," Britt said of video customer losses. "It is not acceptable to me to continue to slowly lose video customers every year. That has been going on for too long. We're going to put renewed energy against that both in the product space and in marketing, to see if we can slow that down."
