Charter Boosts Subscriber Base with All-Digital Overhaul

The content distribution landscape in America is slowly changing. The emergence of over-the-top (OTT) content delivery alternatives has started to pose a challenge to traditional pay-TV providers. Despite these challenges, cable provider Charter still managed to grow its video subscriber base during the fourth quarter of 2014. The approximately 3,000 new TV customers added pushed the company’s total number of video subscribers to almost 4.2 million. This uptick was attributable to a number of important factors. Chief among these was the completion of Charter’s conversion from a partially analog distribution network to an all-digital one. This resulted in the delivery of an improved range of services to even more customers.

The Benefits of Going All-digital

Charter’s all-digital overhaul was complemented by the unveiling of the forward-looking and digital-minded Charter Spectrumbrand towards the end of 2013. Officially launched in early 2014, the brand’s adoption heralded the intensification of the company’s equipment and infrastructural upgrading efforts. Charter’s all-digital conversion initiative was subsequently rolled out to residential customers in markets across the U.S. on a phased basis. It saw subscribers who hadn’t previously used a digital set-top cable box being required to do so. With the addition of this piece of equipment, these TV service subscribers were able to enjoy the following benefits from the company’s upgraded distribution system:

Better picture and audio quality

Large numbers of new and existing Charter TV subscribers across the country were able to enjoy improved image and sound quality due to the fact that digital signals are inherently more resistant to degradation than analog ones.  

A Charter Communications technician works on a cable line.
(Courtesy of stltoday.com)

More channels

Charter TV customers in many areas throughout the U.S. were also able to access more channels than in the past. This bump in channel options was made possible by the greater capacity of digital signals, relative to analog ones, to carry video and audio data. This allowed the company to utilize the bandwidth and transmission capacity of its distribution network even more efficiently than it had previously done.    

Broadband business also gets a boost

The video side of Charter’s business wasn’t the only beneficiary of these upgrades. The data side experienced even more robust growth during the fourth quarter, adding over 100,000 new residential Internet subscribers. This influx of customers swelled the company’s broadband subscriber base to just shy of 4.8 million. Again, the infrastructural upgrading work undertaken by the company was primarily responsible for these gains. The conversion to an all-digital network enabled the company to offer faster download and upload speeds to Internet service subscribers across the country as the final quarter of the year progressed.    

Charter has its head in the “cloud”

The recently completed all-digital system overhaul was one of the main planks in Charter’s larger modernization master plan. Its accomplishment has cleared the way for the company to proceed with the deployment of additional services that will use this all-digital platform as a foundational building block. The cloud-based TV offering, dubbed “Worldbox”, which was unveiled by Charter at the 2015 edition of CES is one such development that’s in the pipeline.