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March 1, 2021 09:25 pm

Altice USA CEO Says Cable TV Will Die and Broadband and Wireless Companies Should Merge

An anonymous reader shares a report: When French telecommunications company Altice acquired U.S. cable companies Cablevision and Suddenlink, Chairman Patrick Drahi made a bold statement: Altice USA would rival Comcast and Charter in size, becoming one of the three dominant U.S. cable operators. Fast forward nearly six years, and Altice USA has about 5 million customer relationships, compared with about 31 million each for Comcast and Charter. (Altice USA did announce a $310 million acquisition of Morris Broadband on Monday, which will give it about 36,000 more customers.) CEO Dexter Goei explained to CNBC what prevented Altice USA's rapid expansion, why he thinks cable and wireless will eventually merge in the U.S., and why it's only a matter of time before cable TV becomes extinct. CNBC: So let me ask that question in a slightly different way. Do you envision a day where cable TV, as we know it, simply no longer exists?Goei: Yes. For sure. Everything is going to be IP-based, and then the question is because everything is IP based, and you have so many different choices...what the cable bundle is doing today is putting together everything that's available in the OTT world and providing it to you in a good format for you to be able to guide yourself through lots of different options in the way you watch television. As technology and integration technology continues to get better and better, you're going to be able to aggregate that on your OTT platforms, your smart TV. Your Samsung TV today already has, say, 20 apps, 30, 40 apps already there. The pain of it is you're always clicking between the apps, all the time. Once you can get the whole aggregation together and make it look very similar to what you do in a cable environment, then that interactivity becomes second nature and doesn't really matter who's doing the bundle. It could just be your set-box provider, your smart TV provider. CNBC:: So this idea that some media executives have that there's going to be a floor at 50 million subscribers, that's ultimately fantasy?Goei: I think so, because name me one person under 30 years old who has a cable video connection. I can't. So it's just a question of time. People grow up in a certain way. I tell my kids all day long, how could you spend 10 hours a day on your iPhone? And they're like, "Daddy, that's our life. We didn't go out in the woods and build bricks and castles and stuff like you. That stuff is boring. My whole life is on my phone." So, there's an evolution of technology and habits and the way people consume content thatâ(TM)s changed dramatically over the last ten years, and it's going to continue to change.

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