Altice USA shares fell as much as 16% in early trading Thursday, after CEO Dexter Goei said broadband subscribers would be down by as much as 15,000 to 20,000 customers in the third quarter.

Shares in the New York-based MSO were trading as low as $21.21 early Thursday, down 16% or $4.05 per share. The stock closed at $22.06, down $3.20 or 12.7% each on Sept. 23.

Some analysts had expected Altice USA to add about 22,000 broadband customers in Q3, down from the 26,000 it added in the same period last year but higher than the 15,000 it added in Q3 2019. Other cable operators have said that they expect broadband growth to slow in Q3, as the positive customer growth effects tied to the pandemic begin to wane. 

At the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference Thursday, Goei said that high-speed internet customer additions would be negative. 

“Our numbers are going to be negative coming into Q3 in terms of internet adds, probably to the tune of 15,000 to 20,000, which gets us to a trend of being flattish to slightly up for the year,” Goei said, adding that the operator averaged about 72,000 internet adds in 2018 and 2019 and 145,000 additions last year. “If we are flattish to slightly up this year, we’ll be breakeven over the last four years. That is disappointing.”

Also Read: Analyst Makes Case for Altice USA to Go Private 

Goei said that lower than expected gross adds, the result of “underwhelming” back-to-school performance in its markets in late August and into September, was the main culprit for the negative broadband additions. But the CEO is hopeful that new efforts launched at the beginning of September, like increasing the speeds of its Altice Advantage Internet product to 50 Megabits per second (a 65% boost), renaming it Optimum Advantage and keeping its price point at $14.99 per month, will boost subscriber rolls. In July, Altice said it would rebrand its Altice Mobile product as Optimum Mobile, the first step in aligning all of its brands under the Optimum name. 

Also Read: Analysts Search for Meaning in Altice USA Leadership Change 

“These are getting some traction,” Goei said. “We are hopeful that in Q4 we’ll see back-to- normalized trends and positive net adds and we continue to be very, very focused on increasing our investment in the network and our distribution channels.”

Goei also commented on the recent departure of chief operating officer Hakim Boubazine, adding that the executive had a long successful history with the company, but that it was time for a change. Boubazine said earlier this month that he would step down at the end of the year, and in the meantime would serve as a special adviser to the company. Goei would take on his duties in addition to those of CEO. 

Goei said despite Boubazine‘s success in the past, operating trends have been “a little underperforming” over the past few years. He added that the change will help the company execute more quickly on its goals, as well as allowing the organization to react to change in a more flexible way. 

“We thought it was a good time to make that change,” Goei said. “Me coming in really helps flatten the organization, allows people to have a lot more say in their opinions and it rises quickly to my attention and be able to react in a much more flexible way. The tenets and the foundations of what we want to do remain the same. … The buck will stop with me.” 

Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts focused his comments at the virtual Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference Wednesday on the future, adding that the company’s performance over the years is proof that “scale matters.”

“The last couple of years demonstrates we’re in good businesses, but also how scale matters,” Roberts said. “So if one business is going down with some temporary hit from COVID, we have others that are surging. We have a great team of people, a culture that has been decades in the making, and I think we execute at a high level.”  

That may or may not have been a reference to Comcast chief financial officer Mike Cavanagh’s warning at the Sept. 14 Bank of America Media, Communications & Entertainment conference that broadband growth appeared to slow “a little bit” faster than expected in August. That comment drove Comcast stock down 7.3% that day, costing the cable operator about $20 billion in market capitalization and driving down other stocks in the sector.

Roberts instead pointed to the success of the cable unit’s broadband business, which has grown to about 31 million subscribers, and its 60 million customer relationships. 

“We’re really a broadband company,” Roberts said, adding that the strategy is to deepen those broadband relationships with consumers through innovative products and new ways to distribute them. 

Roberts said the announcement Wednesday of its XiOne product  is the latest example of its “develop once, deploy everywhere” strategy, which includes whole-home WiFi via its Xfinity Pods, its Xfinity Flex broadband-only service, its Gigabit gateway and even a feature that tells Peloton owners via text message that their exercise bike needs to be closer to their WiFi pod for better reception.

Also Read: Comcast Introduces XiOne Streaming Device to Rule Its Entire Global Footprint

“We’re building a moat around the most important part of the company, and we’re innovating and we’ve shifted the whole technology focus to broadband in homes and I think it’s really paying off,” Roberts said. 

Comcast also is focusing on streaming, adding that its Peacock service has about 20 million monthly users and 54 million signups a little more than a year after launching the service nationally. Roberts noted that Comcast also has its eyes on international streaming, with Peacock coming to its Sky subscribers later this year, and its August partnership with ViacomCBS for streaming content in Europe.   

“We’re looking at other partnerships like that around the world,” Roberts said.

Regarding sports rights, Roberts said what NBC Sports does best are big events like NFL football and the Olympics. While Roberts conceded that the recent Tokyo Olympics was “tough,” he pointed to the 120 billion minutes of programming that were consumed by viewers and was optimistic about future games in Beijing (2022), Paris (2024) and Los Angeles (2028).

“It really makes our company super-relevant for those 17 days, and no one quite can compete with advertisers for attention in the way an Olympics can every two years,” Roberts said. “We’re not that far away from Beijing, and we’ll get right back at it, but we’ll get to a normal rhythm as we go out and we look forward to Paris and we look forward to LA. We love our association with the Olympics.” 

With other sports, Comcast and its Sky satellite unit have the ability to “pick and choose,” pointing to earlier decisions not to get into a bidding war with streaming sports service DAZN for rights to Italy’s Serie A league and last year’s deal for rights to Germany's Bundesliga that resulted in a reduced fee. Sky recently extended its rights deal with the Premier League to 2025.

“These are really hard calls,” Roberts said. “You don’t always want to prevail, and sometimes you’re right and sometimes you're wrong, but I think the sustainability of sports is a critical part of what our company does well.” 

Charter chairman and CEO Tom Rutledge argued that cable operators should embrace over-the-top and direct-to-consumer offerings to give customers more options, but added he still doesn’t see a compelling model for cable operators to offer their own OTT service.

At the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference in New York Tuesday, Rutledge said Charter is already putting direct-to-consumer services onto its user interface platform that can be delivered to TV sets and other devices via the internet.

“We embrace whatever products our customers want to use as part of our value proposition, we’re not fighting it in any way,” Rutledge said. “We will enable those direct-to-consumer services, and to the extent that they pressure the bundle from a pricing perspective, that may work out to our advantage in many ways.”

But Rutledge said he doesn’t see any advantage in cable operators going over-the-top themselves.

“The bundling of the significant players in content still exist in the OTT world just as it does in the MVPD world,” Rutledge said. “There’s not a lot of differentiation we can cause by selling it over the top. What’s the advantage? Going outside of our service area? I don’t know the value of just replicating our own service OTT.”

READ MORE: More outages as Charter, union continue stalemate

Rutledge added that technically you can stream any content, the real question is how it’s packaged, presented and priced whether it’s going to satisfy the consumer.

“We’re selling in our fully featured rich package of video to about 98% of video orders, most consumers want it,” Rutledge said. “If you price it right and make it fully featured and fully valued, we think it is still a sticky product.”

He added that Charter is experimenting with some niche offerings targeted at data-only customers, but even that group is more influenced by pricing than anything else.

“We haven’t seen a breakthrough yet that makes us think we should change our business model, but we keep pushing around the margins to see if there is anything there,” Rutledge said. “Interestingly, data-only customers, who you’d think would be the coolest cord cutters around, tend to be the easiest people to sell bundles of fully featured video to, because they’re price driven. They actually do want it all and its price that keeps them from buying it all.”

READ MORE: Comcast's Roberts tries to calm investors after dip on subscriber losses

Rutledge added that Charter has restarted its all-digital initiative, put on hold during the early stages of integrating Time Warner Cable into the fold, and all its system should be fully digital by the end of 2018.

“Our assets actually work better in a two-way on-demand world than they did in a linear world from a value perception perspective relative to competitors,” Rutledge said. “I think we have a big advantage against satellite going forward that is even more pronounced now than it was a few years ago.”

On the minus side, Rutledge added that prices are still high and ratings are down as viewers are diverted to other activities like social media, but he still sees growth ahead.

READ MORE: AT&T looking to improve on Comcast's model (B&C)

“I think there are challenges to the video business that didn’t exist, and they are going to continue to be challenging, but we still have increasing advantages on a relative basis,” Rutledge said. “I think we’ll have more video customers three years from now than we do today. I’m not sure the whole category will be bigger, but I think we will be.”

Helping to boost those numbers will be the addition of new products, like wireless. Charter expects to begin employee field testing of its wireless offering through its Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) agreement with Verizon, in 30 to 60 days, with a broad launch expected in Q2 next year.   

Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts tried to ease investor fears at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference Tuesday, telling an industry audience that despite expected video losses in the soon-to-be closed third quarter, the company is performing well financially and operationally.

Comcast stock took a hit Sept. 7 after executive vice president XFinity Services Matt Strauss said at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Media, Communications & Entertainment conference in Los Angeles that the nation’s largest cable operator would lose between 100,000 and 150,000 video customers in Q3 as a result of competitive issues and damage from Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma. Strauss had said that despite the subscriber losses, Comcast was expected to meet its financial targets for the period, but that seemed to be lost on investors, who drove the stock down as much as 7% on Sept. 7. Comcast shares closed that day at $38.60 each, down 6.2%.

Comcast stock continued to fall in subsequent trading – it closed at $38.21 on Sept. 8 and $37.83 on Sept. 11. Roberts’ comments seemed to have some initial effect – the stock was up slightly in earlier trading – but was down later in the day, priced at $37.70 each at 2:30 p.m. on Sept. 12.

READ MORE: Charter's Rutledge says the battle is not against OTT video

Roberts started off his Communacopia presentation by addressing the issue, adding that Comcast was “in great shape,” and should end the third quarter with positive RGU growth as broadband subscribers continue to rise.

“Our investment in and focus on innovation is really paying off,” Roberts said. “We have the best products in the industry, our management team strong, and we have a good competitive position. We hit a competitive patch this quarter that was compounded by these two storms.”

The loss is particulary harsh as Comcast finished 2016 with positive growth in video (161,000 customers) for the first time in a decade. In the first half of the year, it continued to remain ahead of the curve, adding 41,000 video customers in the first quarter, while losing about 34,000 in Q2. It should also be noted that the third quarter is traditionally the weakest for cable operators, as college students and customers with summer residences disconnect service.

Roberts continued that the success of its X1 platform has become the company’s real asset, but video is the heart and soul of that platform,” he said. Comcast is expected to end the year with more than 1 million broadband additions, the eleventh straight year the company has added 1 million or more high margin high-speed data customers. Its business services unit is performing at a $6 billion revenue run rate and its newest product – XFinity Mobile – is proving popular with customers.

Comcast launched XFinity Mobile in May, as part of its Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) agreement with Verizon Communications. The product is available to existing XFinity customers and is characterized by its flexible plans – customers can opt for unlimited data, or can subscribe to a By the Gig plan that costs $12 per gigabyte per month. 

Roberts said that initially, most users are opting for the By the Gig plan.

“These prices we believe bring real value to the customer,” Roberts said.

AT&T will begin beta testing a “wireless-centric,” direct-to-home video offering built off its DirecTV Now service in the fourth quarter, with an eye toward a full launch next year, CEO Randall Stephenson told an industry audience Tuesday.

Stephenson, at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference in New York, said that AT&T has been moving in this direction since it purchased satellite TV provider DirecTV in 2015. That purchase, Stephenson said, allowed the company to obtain wireless distribution rights to DirecTV’s content in record time. A year after the purchase, DirecTV launched an over-the-top product dubbed DirecTV Now at a lower price point than traditional pay TV services.

READ MORE: Comcast's Roberts tries to calm investors

Pay TV subscribers have been on the decline for years – the second quarter was the worst ever for pay TV companies, which shed more than 900,000 video customers in the period. Stephenson said that with average monthly revenue per pay TV customer well above $100, the reason should come as no surprise.

“It’s a price issue,” Stephenson said of the decline. “Content costs continue to escalate, prices on the cable bundle continue to go up, so people are opting out of the cable bundle.”

He estimated that 20 million households have shed their cable service in the past several years, adding that those who are cutting the cord are younger and tend to live in apartment complexes, an ideal environment for an internet-based video offering.

“We concluded early on you need a wireless-centric approach to that market,” Stephenson said. “As soon as we closed DirecTV, we went to work getting the rights of all the content to deliver to a mobile device, it was the main benefit that came with DirecTV. And we were able to get these rights in very short order. Within a year we were standing up DirecTV Now, this is not a $115 bundle of content, this is a $30-to-$60 bundle of content. Here is a much lower-priced bundle of content that is well integrated with our wireless service, it’s created a very unique and I think compelling value proposition in the market.”

Wireless video delivery has been seen as the future for pay TV as more and more people regularly watch content on mobile devices. But streaming services have run into capacity issues as traffic increases. DirecTV Now notoriously ran into service issues after its initial launch, and streaming problems are commonplace during popular events – most recently the Mayweather-McGregor Pay-Per-View boxing match, where thousands of customers that paid to stream the fight last month via the Showtime app couldn’t access it. 

Stephenson said the key to reliably deliver these new services is to consistently deliver 1 Gigabit per second data speeds.

READ MORE: Rutledge says Charter is not fighting OTT video

AT&T is on a trajectory that moves it toward 1 Gigabit per second data speeds and has sufficient spectrum to handle capacity issues. 5G technology, expected to be widely deployed in the next two years – will address the problem.  

Despite those issues, Stephenson said the software-based solution will be the platform on which AT&T delivers all video in the future because it delivers video efficiently and at a lower cost which can then be passed to the customer.

Stephenson also talked about the pending merger with Time Warner Inc., which the company hopes to receive regulatory approval for by the end of the year. Stephenson reiterated that he intends to keep Time Warner separate from AT&T’s other businesses.

“I know very little about running a media company,” he said.

But he does believe that the inclusion of the content giant into the AT&T fold will present new opportunities, and added that he expected other distributors to eventually follow suit.

Stephenson said the integration planning for Time Warner is complete and that he believes the logic behind the deal is more apparent today than when they first announced the merger last October. Most attractive is the treasure-trove of data that AT&T has across its communications products that can in turn be used to enhance the video business.  

“We have data at the device level and at the location level,” he said, adding that AT&T has particular insights into viewing habits on traditional TV sets, smartphones, tablets and PCs. The use case, no surprise, for a media company in terms of taking advantage of that data is advertising. The advertising opportunity we think is significant.”

Charter Communications could be the next cable operator to test the wireless waters, informing Verizon Communications of its intention to invoke its Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) rights with the carrier.

Charter chairman and CEO Tom Rutledge said a wireless product is in the company’s future, but gave few details at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference Wednesday.

“We have told Verizon we’re interested pursuing that MVNO agreement and we are in the process of effectuating it. We’d like to pursue that relationship, and we’ve talked to other companies about MVNOs,” Rutledge said at the conference.

The Charter revelation comes on the heels of Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts’ announcement earlier in the week that it would launch a wireless product in mid-2017, utilizing its own Verizon MVNO agreement. Comcast received those MVNO rights as part of SpectrumCo’s sale of wireless spectrum to Verizon in 2011. Comcast invoked those MVNO rights last October.

Charter wasn’t part of the SpectrumCo consortium, but it recently closed on the purchase of two former members – Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. It was widely believed that Charter would exercise those MVNO rights.

Just what Charter will do in the wireless field remains to be seen. Rutledge didn’t give many details but he did acknowledge that the video business was becoming increasingly mobile.

“To get from where we are to true mobility is going to require the use of our Wi-Fi [network], it will require the relationships we have with MVNOs, and it’s going to require us to actually build out [our] network at some point in the future,” Rutledge said.

Rutledge said the MVNO alone is primarily a traditional smartphone technology platform, not deeply integrated and has its limitations.

“From a value proposition, if you package and price it properly and you can get an appropriate wholesale discount so you can do that with a little bit of margin, you can drive your penetration much deeper,” Rutledge said.

Charter, he said, has about 50 million homes passed and about 25 million subscriber relationships. But the 25 million non-customers within the footprint “is our upside. To the extent mobility can help us drive that, the economics of filling in your penetration from an ROI perspective are fantastic,” Rutledge added.  

Discovery Communications CEO David Zaslav sees big potential in its latest entry in the direct-to-consumer business, calling the programmer's Eurosport Player offering the international sporting world's answer to Netflix.

Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference Thursday, Zaslav called the DTC offering, the “Sports Netflix,” adding that it already has about 200,000 subscribers at $8 per month. With a potential market of 700 million residents in Europe, Eurosport’s direct-to-consumer opportunities are boundless.

Discovery has the European rights to the Olympic Games from 2018 to 2024 and owns a number of rights for other sports like skiing, skating and cycling in several other countries which it shows on its three Eurosport channels. But not all of that content can be aired on the networks. That’s where the direct-to-consumer offering could come in.

“If we can build that direct-to-consumer business for $8 per subscriber, we’re in a whole different game, and it’s a meaningful game,” Zaslav said. “For us, Eurosport direct-to-consumer fills the full circle.”

That strategy is similar to one ESPN is planning with BAMTech. At the Goldman conference Tuesday, Disney chief Bob Iger said that direct-to-consumer offering could allow subscribers to purchase specific seasons, teams or dates.

New York – Altice NV CEO Michel Combes told an industry audience Wednesday that the acquisitive Dutch telecom company won’t be flexing its M&A muscles in the U.S. for the near term, instead focusing its energies on executing the business plans of its existing assets.

Altice made a splash last year with the $9.1 billion purchase of mid-sized cable operator Suddenlink Communications, and further extended its U.S. aspirations with the June purchase of Cablevision Systems for $17.7 billion.

At the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference here, Combes said that significant U.S. M&A activity is “a bit over” for the time being as Altice focuses on execution and integrating its U.S operations.

Altice USA CEO Dexter Goei said that the transition is already happening. At the former Cablevision, investments made in customer service, the Optimum brand and quality products are already paying off in improved subscriber metrics. The New York area systems lost about 2,000 video customers in the second quarter – its best performance in four years – and Goei said that in 2017 the unit should continue to recapture market share. At the former Suddenlink, its Operation GigaSpeed high-speed data initiative has helped drive broadband growth, although tough competition from satellite TV service providers has eaten into video growth. Providing a better video experience could help reverse that trend, as other larger operators have shown, Goei added.

“We’d like to do that as well,” he said.

Altice USA is focusing on increasing broadband speeds in all of its markets – Goei mentioned that prior to the purchase, half of Optimum customers wanted 25 Megabits per second and the other half wanted 50 Mbps. Now, he said, Optimum is phasing out 25Mbps – it has a 5 Mbps low tier service and a 60 Mbps service – and about 40% of new customers want 100 Mbps speeds.

At Suddenlink, which has a 50 Mbps flagship service and 100 Mbps and greater tiers, Goei said that 40% to 45% of gross additions are in the higher tiers.

DirecTV Now, the new OTT-TV service from AT&T, is still on track for a Q4 launch, and will come out of the chute with a lineup of more than 100 channels, Randall Stephenson, chairman and CEO of AT&T, said Wednesday at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia Conference.

RELATED: AT&T: DirecTV Now Will Be a Game Changer

“We are very close,” Stephenson said of the launch, noting that it will be an app-based service with no truck roll requirement, while also giving a nod to zero-rated mobile data policy that is baked into the economics of the service – DirecTV Now streams delivered on AT&T’s mobile network won’t count against a customer’s data plan.

“We’re talking 100 plus channels at a very, very aggressive price point. And when you buy this content, the data required to stream it on your mobile device is incorporated into the price of the content,” he said, adding that the service is about “90% there” with respect to carriage agreements with programmers. Recent AT&T renewal pacts with programmers have added channels from NBCUniversal, HBO, Disney and, Scripps Networks Interactive to the upcoming OTT mix.

RELATED; Turner, AT&T Renew Carriage Deal

Stephenson was also pressed on the OTT service’s cost structure (Comcast, for example, has argued that the economics of an OTT TV offering don’t add up), but the AT&T exec is confident that the model will work because it uses a completely different cost structure than a more traditional MVPD offering.

“This is a very, very low cost customer acquisition product. It is a very low cost to install product meaning the customer has just done it once they downloaded the app. There are no set-top boxes, they are no truck rolls involved in this,” he said.

Stephenson also acknowledged that DirecTV Now could cannibalize the existing pay TV sub base, but said measures are being taken to limit that exposure in the short-term with a model that limits a subscriber’s access to one or two streams.

“I do think, yes, that there is risk of cannibalizing the existing product. And I think that’s always a good sign,” he said, noting that DirecTV Now will be targeted to what he estimates to be 20 million homes without a pay TV service.

RELATED; Study: Virtual MVPDs Could Lure 15M Subs by 2020

“We think a significant number of those would like [a] 100-plus channel, pay TV subscription, if or at a very, very attractive price point.”

Pricing for DirecTV Now has not been announced, but the margin on it will be “thinner than we we’re accustomed to,” Stephenson said. “But I’m always willing to take thinner margins, when there is low capital intensity in the product.”

Stephenson was also confident that DirecTV Now will be able to scale to meet the streaming demands.

“We're not trying to do something where you just get buffer fatigue while you're waiting on content,” he said. “We want this to be an…MVPD-like experience on a mobile device. And we feel pretty good we're going to be able to pull that off.”

Comcast dropped impressive hints this week that it plans to leverage its fast-growing WiFi capability and its extensive Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) agreements to plunge into the increasingly competitive world of mobile video.

At Goldman Sachs' Communacopia conference on Wednesday (Sept. 16), Comcast Chairman and CEO Brian Roberts stopped short of providing any specific timetable but said, "We're thinking we are very much part of this conversation on a go-forward basis."

Roberts acknowledged that Comcast has added about a million public WiFi hotspots around the country in the past few months, an increase of 10% over the 10 million hotspots in place at the end of the second quarter in June. He called the established WiFi base "an asset of the company."

"We are working on ways to take our WiFi, our 11 million hotspots, our MVNO relationships" into the "competitive space" of mobile video, Roberts said.

He cited Apple's recently announced plan to lease smartphones as an example of "plenty of activity around us." But Roberts stopped short of mentioning Verizon Wireless' soon-to-debut Go90 mobile video service, or the T-Mobile/Bright House WiFi hotspot video test.

Also looming in the future (at least three to five years away) are broadcast TV visions of mobile reception via the evolving ATSC 3.0 standard.

Roberts jabbed at Verizon and Apple by noting, "We haven't seen [their] announcements in action yet." He reiterated his view that wireless ventures "work better on WiFi, and peoples' bills don't go up."

"We are hopeful that as people make decisions, they are going to want our WiFi and our [programming] relationship, our broadband as part of that," Roberts said. "If we can enhance that by someday having an offering, we will see.

"We will have more to talk about down the road," he added. "It is an area that I think we can create value for our shareholders and give more value to the consumers."

Elsewhere in his conversation with Goldman Sachs analysts, Roberts addressed the mobile issue in remarks about increasing program costs, citing opportunities to spread costs across multiple platforms.

"We continue to want to add more capabilities, more wireless rights, more out of home rights, more ease-of-use, more back seasons, more episodes, so that [when] you buy a subscription it's really clear what you get," Roberts said.

Comcast's attention to WiFi and out-of-home video coincides with this week's Ooyala forecast that by the end of this year about half of all online video starts will come via mobile devices. Ooyala said smartphone viewing currently outranks tablet viewing by an 8:1 ratio.

Roberts' remarks about WiFi and mobile video followed his emphasis on Comcast's improvements in broadband, cable and content offerings driving some of its best results in nearly a decade.

Exactly one year ago the Comcast top executive offered similar WiFi drum-thumping remarks at a Bank of America Merrill Lynch Media Communications and Entertainment conference.

Sometimes just a few words paint an immense picture. At this week's Goldman Sachs "Communacopia" conference, both Jeff Bewkes of Time Warner and Les Moonves of CBS uttered a total of four words that can be interpreted as the prelude toward direct-to-viewer service by the premium networks in each mogul's empire, HBO and Showtime respectively.

Bewkes used the words "up until now" and Moonves said "absolutely" in discussing their considerations for selling premium channels content directly as a streaming video service. Such streams would presumably offer an alternative to pay TV channels within a cable or satellite TV subscription. Neither CEO cited details or timetables, but their terse acknowledgements suggest that they are accelerating their consideration of streaming plans.

To be fair, Bewkes and Moonves, like all other top media executives, must be evaluating alternative distribution options all the time. Their separate, coincidental references at the high-profile Goldman Sachs annual event can be seen as simple acknowledgement of their duties to examine and revise their businesses in the context of shifting market situations - in this case, the migration to streamed, on-demand entertainment.

Yet their sparse words resonate with media interests who are pushing for cable-trimming options.  Clearly, HBO and Showtime are in no position now to reveal publicly any plans, which might include separating each network's original productions from the full slate of movies and programs that could be available in a streamed service. The rights issues alone will take years of negotiations.

In full context, Bewkes said "the broadband-only opportunity up until now wasn't [viable.]"  Moonves rhetorically asked if he'd consider streaming Showtime; his "Absolutely" response was an implied "yes" within "I don’t know when the timing is right. It’s very exciting."  Moonves also discussed the prospect of streaming "a Showtime channel in the future ... all over the world.” 

Bewkes devoted more of his Communicopia remarks to doubling the original content carried on Time Warner's Turner channels, which would also create an inventory of new shows for future broadband streams. He did riff about the opportunities for expanding HBO Go, the current "TV Everywhere" service that authenticated subscribers can stream to their digital devices.  Observers at the conference perceived that Bewkes' attitude toward direct-to-viewer services was more cordial than in his remarks at last year's event.

While the few words with their vague signals of streaming intent are a long way from actual implementation, the very recognition of the opportunity marks an important benchmark in producers/programmers/distributors' migration toward direct streaming.  The impact on affiliates is a topic worthy of many, many more words.

Inevitably, barrels of words will be forthcoming about these options.  But no one know exactly when.

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Media analyst Gary Arlen recalls an industry conference a few years ago at which he predicted that HBO would stream its content directly to broadband viewers, and a top HBO executive on the panel responded, "Never." GArlen@arlencom.com