In the first public comments by a Charter executive since a carriage renewal with Disney, CFO Jessica Fischer said the deal “met all of our objectives” and a preceding blackout resulted in only moderate TV subscriber losses.The closely watched Disney-Spectrum carriage dispute was resolved Monday as the companies reached a precedent-setting multi-year pact. Eight of the 19 cable networks that had gone dark (along with eight ABC stations), among them FXX and Freeform, remained off Spectrum TV under the new agreement. Charter secured the long-sought ability to integrate Disney streaming services in its TV packages.Speaking at the BofA Securities Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference, Fischer said TV subscriber losses due to the outage, which came at the start of football season, were “much less than what we anticipated.” The hit to the company’s broadband subscriber base, meanwhile, “has been very, very small,” she added. “We’ve come out the other side of this doing well from a consumer perspective.”With 14.7 million TV subscribers, Charter is the No. 2 cable operator in the U.S.“We’re really happy with the deal,” Fischer said. “We met all of our objectives.” Among those, she said, was “taking valuable content that had been leaking out of the system and putting it back on our packages.”Moderator and BofA analyst Jessica Reif Ehrlich asked Fischer why Charter had chosen Disney — which she characterized as the least prone among major media companies to “leak” programming from the pay-TV bundle to streaming — to battle over carriage terms. Fischer explained that the rift essentially centered on a single property. “They have the linchpin asset in ESPN,” she said. “You could not move to a new model without it.”The carriage agreement provides “a glide path that gets us to the new direct-to-consumer environment,” Fischer said. Pay-TV operators have been shedding millions of linear subscribers each year as the secular shift toward streaming continues. Charter had balked at what it said was Disney’s attempt to “charge consumers twice” for the same content (an assertion refuted by Disney) airing on linear TV and also streaming. The company issued threats that it could completely abandon the video business altogether, continuing that brinkmanship publicly throughout the impasse."I see a lot of ‘who won?’” Fischer said of the analysis of the carriage fight’s outcome. “I really think everybody wins in this deal …. It’s a win for Disney and a win for us and I think it’s really a win for consumers.”Asked by Ehrlich about the impact of the deal on future negotiations with other programmers, Fischer expressed confidence that it would enable Charter to “moderate growth” of carriage fees.Without offering specifics, Fischer confirmed Disney’s own account of the deal terms as far as carriage fees. “We were willing to accept their market increases” in exchange for other concessions, she said.
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