Charter Communications' said it will commit as much as $2,500 for customers to move up to five wireless lines from their existing carrier to Spectrum Mobile. 

The move comes after Charter CEO Christopher Winfrey said last week that the cable company will continue to eschew aggressive handset subsidies, but rather aggressively capitalize on "our opportunity from a subscriber acquisition standpoint to rip out multiple lines that are stuck in contracts" with large mobile network operators "that have locked up these devices and tied up these consumers."

Spectrum Mobile ended Q1 with 8,252 wireless subscribers, but quarterly net additions have been declining since a peak of 686,000 in the first quarter of 2023. From January - March, the cable wireless reported only 486,000 net additions. 

Winfrey said during a conference held last week by equity research firm MoffettNathanson that Charter will continue to refrain from handset promotions. (You can hear a replay of Winfrey's talk here.)

"We've never thought that being in the subsidies business for handsets was really a great business. I still think that's the case," he said.

To be fair, Christopher Winfrey isn’t coming off Tommy John surgery.

But factoring in stocks and incentives, the Charter Communications CEO made more than $89 million in compensation last year, according to documents filed by his cable company Monday with the Securities & Exchange Commission. 

Charter's stock price ended 2023 up following a late 2022 crash. The cable operator defied industry gravity by adding 155,000 high-speed internet users last year. And Winfrey led Charter through a tense negotiation with The Walt Disney Co., carving out an innovative deal that will make the cable company part of video’s streaming future. 

But considering that Comcast’s CEO, the venerable Brian Roberts, made just over $32 million in total compensation in 2022 (it's the last figure we have for him right now), Winfrey's haul seems like … a lot. 

And get this: In December, everyone kind of lost their minds when two-way baseball star Shohei Ohtani signed a new deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers paying him $700 million over 10 years. 

Most of Ohtani’s money is deferred, but even his total annual compensation doesn’t exceed Winfrey's 2023 number.

A Charter rep emailed us shortly after this story was originally filed an informed Next TV that the majority of Winfrey’s pay increase over 2022 was due to a five-year performance-based equity program that was awarded last year. The performance of Charter stock still has to hit certain lofty benchmarks over the next five years in order for Winfrey to actually recoup the money. 

The program impacted the bottom lines of other Charter executives, as well. 

Beyond just Winfrey, it’s good to work in the Stamford, Connecticut, C-suite of Charter, where Richard DiGeronimo, president of product and technology, took home over $53.3 million last year, and chief financial officer Jessica Fischer made more than $28 million. 

Tom Rutledge, who retired as CEO in December 2022 but served as executive chairman through 2023, made $19.465 million. 

DENVER — The cable and wireless industries continue to disrupt each other, with fast-growing but still nascent mobile services from cable providers stealing market share from wireless giants, while fixed wireless access keeps eating into cable wireline growth. 

Witness the back-and-forth Tuesday, as Charter Communications CEO Christopher Winfrey declared cable the network speed champion at his industry’s annual tech event, SCTE Cable-Tec Expo, which is being held this year in the Mile High City. 

Speaking during the event's opening session, Winfrey said that 87% of the bits generated by Spectrum Mobile are now being transacted “over our seamless, converged, gigabit wireless network.”

“And that’s faster than 5G,” he said, noting that Charter’s wholesale MVNO agreement to use Verizon’s 5G network merely acts as “our radio backup” in the event Charter’s own infrastructure is unavailable. 

As Charter and other cable companies continue to sap the bulk of mobile customer growth from wireless companies with cheaper, faster services, the latest Ookla internet speed rankings show T-Mobile catching up with cable wireline broadband on the home internet side with a similarly undercutting proposition. 

According to Ookla, T-Mobile's 5G network delivered a median download speed of 221.57 megabits per second in Q3, which was shouting distance from the Q3 home broadband speed champion, Cox Communications, which delivered a market-leading download speed of 260.09 Mbps.

The data is based on customer usage of Ookla’s Speedtest app. 

T-Mobile, which offers high-speed 5G wireless home internet service for $50 a month, added 509,000 fixed wireless access customers in the second quarter, during which the entire cable industry added less than 10,000 users combined. 

For his part, Winfrey declared cable’s “converged network advantage.” Initiatives like the cable industry's ongoing effort to upgrade to multi-gigabit DOCSIS 4.0 network services tend to be executed footprint-wide, he said, while AT&T’s current fiber wireline efforts may cover 20% of footprint. 

That makes it difficult for wireless companies like AT&T to compete with cable via national converged network offerings. 

Stepping away from the competitive cable vs. wireless discussion, meanwhile, Winfrey also took a moment to tout the billions of dollars in subsidies the Biden administration is throwing at cable companies to execute the buildout of rural internet. 

“This is a unique moment in time for cable and we need to take advantage of it,” Winfrey said. “When has the U.S. government has ever gone out and given you money to build networks? And when is the last time that cable has received a chance to look great in terms of solving the digital divide?”

Charter Communications CEO Christopher Winfrey said the longer his cable company’s distribution tiff with Disney drags on, the less likely it is that both sides will ever agree to a renewal deal to restore ESPN, ABC and more than 20 other cable channels to Charter's Spectrum TV program guide. 

“As more video customers who value sports content migrate to alternative sources, our incentive to do a deal is reduced,” Winfrey said, speaking Thursday at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference.

Winfrey's speaking engagement directly coincided with the release of another Disney statement, in which the media company accused Charter of refusing multiple Disney offers to resolve the impasse and “functionally” exiting the video business. Disney also said that 71% of Charter pay TV subscribers watch Disney content. 

Also Read: How Ready Is Charter To Let Disney and ESPN Walk? It Plans To Funnel Blacked-Out ‘Monday Night Football’ Fans to Fubo and YouTube TV

Still, as he has since the dispute broke on August 31, Winfrey conveyed a seemingly sincere ease with “moving on” without Disney underpinning its business of bundled linear video distribution. 

He said that “rich linear fees that our customers are paying are being funneled to the direct-to-consumer products” of content partners, including Disney.

Also read: Is Bob Iger Really Feeling the ‘Squeeze’ From John Malone? Well, So Far, Charter's Down More Than Disney on Wall Street

“The idea that you could solve for DTC profitability by letting linear burn to the ground” is “not sustainable,” Winfrey added. “We have always thought of video as being an asset to our broadband connectivity business, but it’s on the verge of flipping and becoming a liability.”

Winfrey has urged Disney to dispense with the traditional carriage contract staple requirement of “minimum penetration,” which would allow Charter to deliver lower-priced bundles that deliver more value to customers who aren't into live sports. 

Also read: Charter Says Disney Blackout Presents Opportunity To Fix Broken Pay TV Model

Winfrey said Charter could also achieve this goal without Disney.

“In an alternative world, if you had an environment where you don't carry Disney content, what sports content would be left? The answer would be very little, but we could deliver smaller packages at a much better price.”

Winfrey culminated his address on the topic by framing the issue as being in Disney's court, describing the company and ESPN as “linchpins” for the pay TV ecosystem and urging it to “make a decision quickly as to where we’re going to go.”

If a redesigned way of doing pay TV business springs from this dispute, he said, “it will be because of them.” 

Charter Communications chief financial officer Chris Winfrey, citing the company ‘s past success with wireline phone service, said its wireless service could have a similar trajectory over time, growing mobile subscribers as much as four-fold over the next several years.

At the JP Morgan Media & Communications conference Monday, Winfrey said that Charter’s approach to the wireless business has helped it grow that product significantly since it launched in 2018. Pointing to the company’s success in the wireline phone business, it’s not much of a stretch to assume the same growth path could be ahead for wireless. 

Charter launched Spectrum Mobile in June 2018, part of an MVNO agreement the company has with Verizon Communications. In Q1, Spectrum Mobile had 2.7 million residential and business subscribers, nearly double the 1.4 million in the prior year period. Wireline phone customers peaked around 2016 at about 11.5 million and were at 10.4 million residential and business customers in Q1.

Also Read: Cable Knocks on Wireless Giants’ Door 

Wireline penetration rates have been about half of broadband penetration over the years. As more and more cable companies begin to bundle wireless with broadband service, those penetration rates are expected to climb. 

“I don't think people took us seriously when we came into the voice market,” Winfrey said, adding that today, Comcast and Charter are the largest wireline phone service providers in the country. “And the way we did it is because we weren't the incumbent, we had the ability to save customers money, we had the ability to bundle it, and as a result we took down phone pricing dramatically across the entire industry and the entire US. Over 20 years we became the largest operators. At its peak you could almost count as clockwork that voice subscribers would be about half of broadband and if it hadn’t been for mobile substitution, those numbers were continuing to increase. I think our opportunity is at least that.” 

Charter finished the first quarter with 29.2 million broadband subscribers and has been growing at a 7% annual rate over the past 3 years. Charter’s wireless customers have doubled over the past two years, and if it were to continue that pace, would reach about 15 million customers by mid-2023. While that may be a bit optimistic, many analysts predict that Charter will add about 1.1 million mobile customers annually over the next few years, even at that pace it could have nearly 15 million wireless customers by 2030.

At the JP Morgan conference, Winfrey said Charter does not view wireless as a standalone product, but rather as an extension of its broadband service. He added that all of its sales channels are required to sell wireless with its other products.

“We ask that mobile is part of every single selling opportunity we have, whether that's in inbound sales, whether that’s in the stores, whether that’s in direct sales,” Winfrey said. “Every single one of our sales channels, including online, is required to have that conversation.”

Charter Communications chairman and CEO Tom Rutledge received $38.8 million in total compensation in 2020, a period where the company broke records in broadband subscriber growth and its stock price rose 35%, according to the company’s annual proxy statement filed Thursday.

According to the filing, Rutledge’s base salary rose slightly to $2.1 million from $2 million, but he received $30 million in option awards in 2020 after not receiving any in the previous two years. Rutledge signed a new employment agreement in October that will keep him chairman and CEO at least through 2024. Overall, Rutledge’s total compensation was $37.7 million, nearly five times the $8.7 million he received in 2019.

Charter added more than 2 million broadband customers in 2020, a new record fueled by work-at-home orders as a result of the pandemic. In 2020, Charter’s stock price rose about 35% from $485.08 on Dec. 31 2019 to $653.49 on Dec. 31 2020.

Also Read: Charter’s Giffen Good

Chief operating officer John Bickham also received a big windfall in the form of option awards -- $31. 5 million -- in the period, pushing his total compensation for the year to $36.5 million. Bickham, who said in February that he will retire at the end of 2022, received about $5 million in total compensation in 2019. 

Other senior executives that saw big increases in compensation were chief financial officer Christopher Winfrey, who received $11.2 million in total compensation (up from $2.5 million in the prior year), and senior executive VP David Ellen, whose total haul rose from $3.3 million in 2019 to $10.8 million in 2020. Winfrey received $8.1 million in option awards and Ellen received $6.75 million in option awards during the year.

The average Charter Communications broadband-only customer is now using 700 gigabytes of data per month, according to Christopher Winfrey, the cable operator’s CFO.

Winfrey disclosed the rather shocking figure Monday while speaking at the virtual Deutsche Bank Media, Internet & Telecom Conference. The release of the data point comes after OpenVault, a company that consults cable operators on network strategy and operations, said that total average usage could reach 650 gigs by the end of the year. 

Average usage was 339 gigs in January 2020, right before the pandemic began. At the current rate of expansion, a large number of U.S. wireline broadband users could soon start bumping their heads on usage caps. 

For its part, Comcast, the biggest supplier of high-speed internet in the U.S., has delayed deployment of a 1.2 GB monthly data usage limit. But the operator did say that it will institute usage-based pricing starting next year. 

For his part, Winfrey said the high level of wireline broadband usage is the No. 1 reason wireless companies won’t be able to pry broadband marketshare from cable with fixed wireless products.

“The average wireless customers uses only 10 gigs a month,” Winfrey said. “The difference in utilization rates is significant. I don’t think that current wireless networks are designed to handle that kind of traffic.” 

Cable operators currently control about 70% of the U.S. wireline broadband market.

Winfrey, meanwhile, was also asked about Charter’s commitment to the video business, given that the operator was the only big U.S. cable company to add TV customers in 2020.

Charter was able to add 56,000 linear customers simply because it grew its broadband business by an astronomical 2.215 million subscribers in a pandemic year.

“I don’t think it’s sustainable to add video subscribers absent of the unique conditions we saw last year,” Winfrey said.

 Charter Communications said it has promoted Jessica Fischer, senior VP finance and treasurer, to executive VP finance, reporting to chief financial officer Christopher Winfrey.

With the promotion, Charter said Fischer adds oversight of procurement, investor relations, internal audit and corporate planning.

Also Read: Charter COO John Bickham to Retire in 2022

“Jessica’s experience and ability to translate complex financial operations and transactional concepts into commercial plans have been an asset to Charter through the company’s recent integration and subsequent successes,” Winfrey said in a press release. “With her strong leadership, financial communication skills and these additional responsibilities, she will play an even greater role in the company’s future.”

Fischer also will continue to oversee the tax and risk management functions and will be based out of Charter’s Stamford headquarters.

Also Read: Charter, Byron Allen Resolve $10 Billion Discrimination Lawsuit

Separately, Charter said that executive VP corporate finance and development Charles Fisher will add full oversight of all treasury activities, which previously reported to Fischer. He will continue to manage all aspects of Charter’s capital markets, M&A and strategic investing activity, and will continue to provide corporate development for Spectrum Reach and Spectrum Enterprise.

Since joining Charter in 2017 Fischer has overseen the company's treasury and cash management activities, risk management, and directed Charter’s operational and strategic tax groups. Prior to Charter she was a partner in the National Tax Department at EY, where she advised clients on the tax structuring and implementation of partnership transactions in the media and telecommunications space, including advising Charter on its transactions with Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks in 2016.

Charter Communications said late Wednesday that long-time president and chief operating officer John Bickham will retire at the end of 2022. In addition, the company said chief product and technology officer Rich DiGeronimo and chief financial officer Christopher Winfrey will expand their duties.

Bickham is a 35-year veteran of the cable industry, joining Charter in 2012 from Cablevision Systems (now Altice USA) where he worked with current Charter chairman and CEO Tom Rutledge. Rutledge had been CEO of Cablevision and was named Charter CEO in December 2011. The two had also been colleagues at Time Warner Cable.

“It has been a privilege to work alongside John for nearly 30 of his 35 years in the cable industry,” Rutledge said in a press release. “He is widely regarded as one of the best operators in cable and has been instrumental in the successful integration of our three companies, and subsequent trajectory as the fastest growing cable company in the nation. I am grateful that he will remain as President & COO to provide continued leadership and support throughout this transition.”

Bickham will continue to oversee the field operations, customer operations, network operations, and financial planning and analysis (FP&A) and business planning teams, led by EVP field operations Tom Adams; EVP customer operations Cliff Hagan; EVP network operations Magesh Srinivasan; and EVP FP&A and business planning Jim Nuzzo.

Charter said that effective immediately, DiGeronimo will add oversight of Charter’s ad sales business -- Spectrum Reach –  headed by EVP David Kline – to his current responsibilities of leading the company’s product and technology unit. DiGeronimo will report directly to Rutledge.

Winfrey will assume operational leadership for sales and marketing, and Spectrum Community Solutions overseen by EVP and chief marketing officer Jon Hargis and EVP of Spectrum Community Solutions Adam Ray. Winfrey will report to Bickham on operations and to Rutledge as CFO. He also will retain responsibility for Spectrum Enterprise led by EVP Bill Archer.

“We have developed a sound operating strategy and an outstanding leadership team at Charter,” Rutledge said. “Chris’s influence on our operations has expanded beyond traditional finance areas, and I look forward to seeing the impact of his leadership more formally within our cable operations. Under Rich’s guidance, the technology team has shaped the customer experience through our leading products and services, and it is that innovation and collaborative spirit that will benefit Spectrum Reach as it helps businesses reach their audiences in new ways.”

David Ellen, senior EVP; Catherine Bohigian, EVP, government affairs; and Rick Dykhouse, EVP, general counsel and corporate secretary, will continue to report to Rutledge.

Charter Communications is making some executive changes, expanding the role of chief financial officer Christopher Winfrey and chief product officer Rich DiGeronimo while announcing the planned retirements of a trio of executives, the company said Wednesday.

Winfrey will expand his areas of oversight to include Charter’s large enterprise business, Spectrum Enterprise, and its Spectrum Reach advertising business. Charter EVP and president of Spectrum Enterprise Phil Meeks and Charter EVP and president of Spectrum Reach David Kline will report to Winfrey beginning July 1. As planned, Meeks will retire in January 2020. Winfrey will continue to report to Charter chairman and CEO Tom Rutledge.

DiGeronimo will add technology officer to his title beginning July 1, overseeing engineering and IT, in addition to his current leadership of Charter’s product team. DiGeronimo will continue to report to Charter President and COO John Bickham.

Executive Vice President of IT and Engineering Jim Blackley will continue to report to Rutledge and assist on the transition until his planned retirement in 2020.

Cliff Hagan, SVP of shared services, customer operations, will be promoted to EVP customer operations, succeeding Kathleen Mayo, who will retire in August.

“These changes demonstrate the depth of leadership at Charter and positions the company for continued success,” Rutledge said in a press release. “Chris, Rich and Cliff are proven leaders whose contributions have been significant to the current success at Charter. Their skill, passion, and commitment to excellence should continue to serve the company well into the future.”

“I also want to thank Phil, Jim and Kip for their countless contributions to Charter over the years,” Rutledge continued. “With his leadership and understanding of the telecommunications industry, Phil has built the enterprise business to the success it is today; Jim has been the driving force behind the design, development, and introduction of technologies that have transformed our platforms, the industry and advanced this company; and Kip’s innovative vision and commitment to a company-wide focus on the customer has been key to developing a well-trained and properly equipped service operation dedicated to delivering the best customer experience. They are true industry icons whose leadership, knowledge and operational expertise were key components behind the success and growth experienced at Charter. They will be missed and we wish them great retirements.”