Cable operators RCN, Grande Communications, Wave Broadband, enTouch and commercial fiber-services provider Digital West said they will officially consolidate their brands under the Astound Broadband name effective today (January 12).

“This is an exciting time for our company with our new name solidifying our commitment to ‘astound’ our customers each and every day through our national fiber-rich network, fast reliable service, mission-critical connectivity, and award -winning customer service,” Astound Broadband CEO Jim Holanda said in a statement. “Keeping ourselves grounded in our deep-rooted focus on customer service is at the core of what we do. We’ve been part of our local communities for years. Our dedicated teams will continue to serve the areas where they live and work.”

Astound Broadband has more than 1 million customers, which is enough to rate as the sixth largest cable operator in the U.S. 

To ease the transition, each region will retain sub-brands under the Astound umbrella — Astound Broadband powered by RCN, in the Northeast; Astound Broadband powered by Grande in Texas and Astound Broadband powered by Wave on the West Coast. The former Harris Broadband systems in Central Texas and WOW properties in Illinois, Indiana and Maryland will follow by mid-year. For business services, the combined companies will be unified as Astound Business Solutions. 

In an interview, Holanda said the sub-brands will probably last between 12 and 24 months, and then all of the systems will be branded under the Astound umbrella, “to ease customers and communities into it, to understand that they’re still dealing with the same local management, the same local employees and the same great service and company that they’re accustomed to.” 

Repainting trucks and issuing new uniforms to employees has already begun. 

In an interview, Holanda said the work to unite the companies under one name probably started about 2½ years ago.

“We knew after we bought Wave that at some point if we kept buying cable companies that we were going to have to unite the brand under a single name,” Holanda said, adding that while several names were considered, “We kept coming back to Astound.” 

The rebranding process was further delayed by the pandemic and later by former parent TPG’s decision to sell the company to Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners. The Stonepeak deal closed in August, near the end of the quarter, which made a rebranding unfeasible, and then 2021, a series of purchases helped push back the date even further. Astound closed its purchase systems in Anne Arundel, Maryland; Chicago and Evansville, Indiana in from Wide Open West for $661 million in November. Later, Grande Communications purchased Harris Broadband. 

Cable watchers should be familiar with the Astound Broadband name — it has been used as the moniker for the parent of the five smaller operators for years and dates back to former parent TPG’s 2017 purchase of Wave Broadband. Holanda said Wave purchased a Northern California provider named Astound Broadband about five years ago, which made selecting the name even easier. 

“We owned the domain names, we already had that in place, so when we started really digging into the research, not only did we love the [Astound] name and the aspirations of it, the fact we owned it made it almost a no-brainer at that point,” Holanda said. ■

In a year dominated by a pandemic and a nationwide inability to agree on practically anything, Patriot Media not only managed to help engineer the biggest system sale of the year for private-equity giant TPG Capital — the $8.1 billion sale of Astound Broadband to Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners — but it came in a way that will likely positively affect cable valuations in the years to come.

Led by CEO Jim Holanda, Multichannel News’s 2020 Executive of the Year, Patriot has been a constant in Astound’s operations in its various forms for about a decade, starting with the 2010 purchase of RCN by Abry Partners. After Abry sold RCN and Grande Communications to TPG in 2016 for $2.25 billion, Patriot continued to manage the assets and help TPG build its cable stronghold, later adding Wave Broadband and enTouch Communications to the mix. 

ALSO READ: Steve Simmons: The Original Patriot

Astound — there is still a question as to whether the new private-equity owners will keep the name — is the sixth-largest cable and broadband provider in the country, with about 1 million customers. But make no mistake, the company’s success over the years is a result of the astute stewardship of Patriot Media, which has steered somewhat disparate assets — a mixture of rural and urban systems, overbuilds and incumbent operations across eight states and the District of Columbia — through a business climate that could at times be hostile. 

“[Holanda] has really become the face of the middle market broadband industry,” said Garrett Baker, managing director at Lazard and group head of middle market telecom, media & technology. “Once you get past the big MSOs — Comcast, Charter, Altice — he’s become the most visible and most respected executive in that next level. He’s really become the biggest voice in the room and the face of that part of the industry.” 

In Cable Since the ’80s 

Holanda got his start in the cable industry on somewhat of a lark. After graduating from The Ohio State University in 1987 with a degree in political science, he and a college friend moved to Southern California and started looking for jobs. In 1988, his college buddy, a former cable installer, found the same work with Comcast.

“I had a college education and he had cable experience, so the deal was they had to hire us both because we only had one car,” Holanda said. 

After six months as a cable installer, Holanda moved up to Comcast’s accounting department and, after taking some additional accounting and business courses, moved to the finance department. In 1995, shortly after Comcast purchased systems from Maclean-Hunter, it moved him to another finance job in New Jersey. He stayed in New Jersey for another three years, moving on to Charter Communications when an opportunity to run systems arose.

“I grew up on the finance side of the business, but I always wanted to be in operations,” Holanda remembered. “When Charter bought AT&T in St. Louis, [then-Charter CEO] Jerry Kent and [then-chief operating officer] Dave Barford asked me to be the general manager and vice president of operations for all of St. Louis and the whole market. It was my first operations role.”

Holanda helped Charter integrate the AT&T system and spent four years at
the company, rising to regional VP of operations for its Central Region. In 2003, he joined former Simmons Communications founder Steve Simmons in his new venture, Patriot Media. 

“Steve’s a very convincing and compelling individual,” Holanda said, adding that Simmons drove home the point that getting the opportunity to build a company from the ground up doesn’t come often, even in the cable business. “I’ve learned over the last 18 years that I am, deep down, an entrepreneur.” 

That last quality, Simmons added, was a key reason why Holanda was hired.

“He recognized the importance of equity,” Simmons said. “I could see he had a real entreprenuerial spirit. After two days of grueling interviews — I even gave him my projects to analyze and a written exercise — I hired him. Every year for 18 years I’ve been thankful that decision was made. He’s been spectacular.”  

The going was anything but easy from the start. Patriot’s first system was a property in the Princeton, New Jersey area that needed a lot of work. 

“The Central New Jersey system, it was a complete and utter mess when we bought it,” Simmons said. Patriot had to create call centers, rebuild the plant, redo the channel lineup, overhaul technical operations and how people were trained and completely revamp the marketing systems and strategy. 

“I don’t want to skip over the challenges the Patriot Media team had when we entered Central New Jersey,” Simmons continued, adding that when he initially met with the mayors of the communities the systems served prior to buying the properties, he learned they had banded together to try to get the old owner ousted. About 12 months after Patriot bought the systems, those same mayors got together to praise the company for the massive changes they made.

“It was a real turnaround,” Simmons said. 

Patriot sold that system to Comcast in 2007, and soon after bought Puerto Rico cable operator Choice Cable TV, with the help of its Princeton system backer, Spectrum Equity Associates. That was just before the 2008 global recession, a period when deals were falling apart as banks and other financial institutions began tightening their belts. By applying the same strategy it used in Princeton, Patriot got Choice Cable back on its feet. 

“We owned that asset for seven and a half years, tripled cash flow over that period of time and made significant investments,” Holanda said. 

While running Choice Cable, Patriot and Spectrum Equity hooked up with Boston private-equity firm Abry Partners to look at its next target, then-publicly traded overbuilder RCN. Abry bought RCN in 2010 for about $1.2 billion, naming Simmons chairman and Holanda CEO of the overbuilder.    

The RCN deal also gave Holanda and the Patriot team first-hand, early exposure to the true power of broadband. Simmons remembered that RCN wasn’t necessarily a distressed company, but it needed work. But the company had already proven it wasn’t afraid of getting down in the dirt.  

“I think they realized that even though some of these businesses had challenging competitive profiles, they still had underlying positive trends, specifically around broadband,” Baker said. “They [Patriot] were able to take challenged businesses and put them together, created synergies, created growth strategies and eventually built a great business out of it.”

Still, overbuilders had a reputation of being tough businesses that require a lot of investment and face stiff competition from incumbents. Despite those drawbacks, RCN had something its competitors didn’t, Holanda said.  

Spotted Key Asset at RCN

“Clearly, after 20 years of being on the traditional side of the incumbent cable business, I never thought I would own or operate an overbuilder,” Holanda said. But as the companies conducted their due diligence, they found that RCN’s networks, built in the late 1990s and early 2000s, had two to three times the fiber of traditional cable networks, and much more excess fiber capacity per node. While the average cable system had 500 to 700 homes per node, RCN had built to under 150 homes per node.

“That network advantage was something that jumped out at us right away,” Holanda said. “It took us a little while to wrap our heads around that overbuilder nomenclature, but at the end of the day, a customer is a customer. 

“And whether you’re competing against a telephone company for those customers or a cable and telephone company, we’ve always seen competition ever since the satellite guys got into the video business, so we were used to it and not afraid of it,” he added. “Obviously, it turned out to be a really good gamble.”

That was evident in the rising valuation of the company. TPG bought RCN and much smaller Grande Communications in 2016 for about $2.5 billion — more than twice the original price Abry paid — keeping Patriot as an equity partner. In 2018, the company bought Northwest broadband company Wave Broadband for $2.36 billion and enTouch Communications was added earlier this year. Collectively, the assets are known as Astound Broadband. 

The mix of Astound’s assets, in rural, urban and midsized markets, has also proven to be an advantage, something larger cable operators are just beginning to see. For the past couple of years, Charter Communications and Comcast have been edging out their networks to smaller areas adjacent to their service footprints to take advantage of the demand for high-speed internet service.

Those moves by bigger companies haven't impacted Patriot’s or Astound’s business, Holanda said. 

“It hasn’t impacted us other than it kind of reaffirms the strategy that we’ve been pursuing for the last eight years,” Holanda said. “We already knew it was a good investment. It’s nice to see the industry recognizing that as well.” 

Boosted By Solid Backers

Holanda said having the support of its backers throughout the years also has been a big benefit to Patriot. Companies like Spectrum Equity, Abry and TPG have all helped finance Patriot’s moves over the past 18 years — and have allowed managers to run the business their way. 

“Private equity does not make quarter-by-quarter and year-by-year decisions about the business,” Holanda said. “They want to understand how we’re going to set it up for success over the next three years, the next five years, the next seven years.”

That includes Patriot’s earlier private-equity owner, TPG, which bought into RCN and Patriot about three years ago. Initially, Holanda said, TPG wasn’t looking to sell Astound. It was investigating several different scenarios, including going public, to push the company forward. 

“There wasn’t a rush to exit, but it was hard to ignore the fact that cable multiples were hitting record highs in the back half of 2019 and the early part of 2020,” Holanda said. “Being prudent equity investors, if there was an opportunity to take advantage of that in the public markets or the private markets, we wanted to be able to set ourselves up to do that.” 

Then, the pandemic hit and everything was put on hold, switching the company’s focus to day-to-day operations and keeping employees and customers safe. While there was initially  some doubt as to how COVID-19 would affect the economy, early signs were encouraging: federal stimulus packages were strong, the Federal Reserve kept loan flows humming and the bond market was performing well.

Patriot first created a new debt structure for Astound, allowing its investors to take a dividend. More importantly, that new structure included a portability feature that would eliminate the financing risk if they ultimately decided to sell the company or go public. 

That helped spur interest from potential suitors, and Holanda said he was surprised at the number of players (more than a dozen) that expressed interest in buying Astound.

But the combination of a robust broadband market, available capital and favorable financing made Astound an attractive target. And even in the pandemic, there is a lot of idle cash looking for a home. 

 “It hasn’t been front-page news, but the residential broadband market, broadly speaking, is stronger now than it’s ever been in my career,” Baker said. Fueling that strength are deep-pocketed infrastructure funds once focused on energy, airports and toll roads, he added. “The infrastructure funds, of which Stonepeak is one, are entering the industry incredibly aggressively,” Baker said. 

ALSO READ: Holanda: Astound Will Continue to Grow

Stonepeak partner and senior managing director Brian McMullen said the private-equity company isn’t a total stranger to residential broadband — it has an interest in Canadian residential provider Xplornet Communications — but Astound was a unique opportunity.

“We've looked at dozens and dozens of opportunities in North America and Asia-Pacific,” McMullen said. “We’ve looked at incumbent telcos, fiber-to-the-home overbuilders and we’ve looked at cable. There’s puts and takes across all the above, but we thought that Astound, and its network footprint, aligned really well with what we were looking for.” 

The sale of Astound to Stonepeak — the deal is expected to close in Q2 of next year — gave a needed lift to cable valuations overall. With a price that some analysts estimated to represent a multiple of 14.1 times 2020 forward-looking cash flow, the purchase further solidified the importance of broadband service and could help raise valuations for public cable companies.

In a research report last month, Bernstein media analyst Peter Supino pointed to the Astound deal as a benchmark for future valuations, adding that it was able to attract a hefty multiple even without the operating synergies usually inherent in such transactions. 

“Astound’s sale price appears to be highly relevant” to public cable operators like Altice USA, Charter Communications and Comcast, Supino wrote in a November note to clients, adding that applying the same multiples to the publicly traded stocks would result in increases to their share prices ranging from 32% to 91%.  

Stonepeak manages more than $29 billion of capital for investors, but its portfolio consists mainly of data centers and fiber companies, not cable or broadband service providers. Add to the fact that Astound was managed well, meaning there is little fat to cut from operations, and the sale price is even more impressive.

Holanda said the business isn’t a one-trick pony. Astound has a three-pronged growth opportunity: residential broadband; commercial services, growing at a double-digit percentage rate annually; and edging out the network to adjacent communities within its footprint. 

“Those three combined growth strategies allow us to grow our cash flow faster than most traditional cable companies,” Holanda said. “And if you add back the ability to continue to do add-on acquisitions, which we’ve had a long history of success with, we have the ability to grow this business from a whole lot of different angles. I think Stonepeak appreciated that early on.” 

Kept Executive Team Together

Another key to Patriot’s success has been its ability to retain key executives. Most of the company’s senior management and six of its eight local market leaders have been with the company for a decade or more. Having that kind of experience and expertise allows everyone to have a voice at the table, Holanda said, whether that means finance executives can talk about marketing or marketing people about network issues.

“To have that kind of group thinking leaves everyone hyper-focused on the business all the time,” Holanda said. “I think that is a tremendous key to our success. … To have that kind of leadership stability at the local level as well just gives the organization a tremendous ability to focus on what
the right long-term decisions are on behalf
of customers.” 

That continuity also was a factor for Stonepeak in its decision to pull the trigger on the Astound deal and to work with Patriot.

 “If you look at the people around Jim, it’s an absolutely fantastic team,” McMullen said. “It’s a team that has been together a long time. There’s a lot of continuity, which I think speaks to Jim’s leadership, it speaks to the culture of the business and the organization.”  

The three major publicly traded cable distribution stocks, up about 34% this year as positive sentiment around broadband growth has driven shares, could be even higher if private valuations are considered, according to a report by Bernstein media analyst Peter Supino.

The three top publicly traded cable distribution stocks -- Comcast, Charter Communications and Altice USA -- have ridden a wave of strong sentiment fueled by even stronger broadband additions. But using data from a recent private equity purchase in the sector -- Stonepeak  Infrastructure Partners $8.1 billion purchase of Astound Broadband -- Supino believes that the stocks’ prices could be between 32% and 91% higher. 

Supino estimated that Stonepeak valued Astounds at about 14.1 times the broadband company’s estimated $576 million 2020 cash flow. Considering that Astound is essentially an overbuilder in most of its markets, faces stiffer competition and has no inherent synergies with its new owner, applying that same valuation to publicly traded cable stocks would result in some serious upside. 

Astound consists of four companies -- RCN, Grande Communications, Wave Broadband and EnTouch Communications -- with about 1 million subscribers  across eight states and Washington , D.C., and has about 23,000 miles of fiber in its network. Stonepeak partnered with Patriot Media, which had been running the systems for former owner TPG for years, to continue to manage the systems. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter or 2021.

“Astound's sale price appears to be highly relevant to Altice, Charter and Comcast,” Supino wrote. “First, Stonepeak does not appear to bring material operating synergies (adjacent sales, billing systems, real estate, etc.) to the deal, so ‘the price is the price’ (notwithstanding tax assets). Second, we believe that Astound's systems are frequently third-to-market ‘overbuilders,’ which means they participate in markets which are inherently more competitive than the average of the US cable industry. Third, we do not see major fat to cut—TPG has been the owner of Astound, so we believe that the organization is efficient.” 

Applying those multiples would lift Altice USA’s stock price, ($34.07 on Dec. 1) up 91% to $65 each; Charter would rise 32% from $662.25 per share to $876.70 each and Comcast would gain 47% from $51.02 per share on Dec. 1 to $74.90 each. 

With the ink barely dry on TPG’s sale of its Astound Broadband assets to Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners for $8.1 billion, Jim Holanda, CEO of Patriot Media, the company that will manage the assets for its new private equity owners, said that future growth will be fueled by a mixture of organic opportunities and possibly new deals. 

TPG agreed to sell Astound on Nov. 1, for about $3.6 billion in cash and $4.5 billion in assumed debt. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of next year. 

In an interview Monday, Holanda said that Astound will remain focused on several core objectives under its new owners -- growing its  residential and commercial customer base, expanding its commercial and residential networks, and accretive mergers and acquisitions when they make sense. 

“We’re happy at this size,” Holanda said. “We’re the sixth largest MSO behind Comcast and Charter and Cox and Altice and Mediacom. We’re bigger than other public cable companies like Cable One and WOW. I think we have the scale we’re very comfortable with. But if there are opportunities to grow through mergers and acquisitions or organically, we’re going to continue to pursue those, because they historically have been very accretive for us and have accelerated our growth.”

Astound Broadband has more than one million subscribers and operates under the RCN, Grande Communications, Wave Broadband and EnTouch Communications brands across seven states and Washington, D.C. Holanda has been a part of the company practically from the start. Patriot was formed in 2002 by Holanda and cable Hall of Famer Steve Simmons to buy RCN’s Princeton, N.J. assets (later sold to Comcast), managed RCN and Grande Communications for ABRY Partners beginning in 2010,  and continued that role after TPG bought RCN and Grande in 2017.  From that base TPG went on to purchase Wave Broadband in 2018 and EnTouch in September. 

In an interview, Holanda said that TPG began looking at its options for Astound earlier this year, refinancing its debt in late August to take advantage of lower interest rates. At that time, the private equity firm introduced a portability structure to the debt, which made it easier for a potential buyer to assume its leverage. 

“That woke up people to the fact that there was no financing risk in purchasing the business,” Holanda said. “Obviously we have seen lots of infrastructure players now coming into the fiber and residential broadband space.”

Holanda said he didn’t know any of Stonepeak’s partners before the deal, but its reputation in the fiber business has preceded it. Stonepeak’s portfolio includes investments in Cologix, which operates data centers in the U.S. and Canada; fiber distributed network provider ExteNet Systems; and Canadian rural broadband provider Xplornet.

“Clearly there has been a lot of activity on that side and we were hoping we would be able to find an infrastructure provider with a long term view of the business as a logical next partner in our evolution,’ Holanda said. “In the months I've gotten to know Stonepeak, we’ve been very very impressed with them. They have deep conviction in the business, a great deal of knowledge given their prior investments in infrastructure and again have a very strong balance sheet in terms of their ability to allow us to grow across all of these various disciplines.”

While it has been broadband-centric for the past five years, Holanda said Astound still has a strong video presence, dating back to the integration of streaming services like Netflix and Hulu into its offerings back in 2014.

“We also have been seeing the macro trends and shifts in the business, and as content costs continue to skyrocket out of control and impact people’s budgets, we just want to give people as much optionality as possible to put together whichever package of services they are comfortable with. Holanda said, adding that the company has its own IPTV streaming platform and is currently streaming its full lineup and VOD library to RCN customers on any device in the home. Grande customers will receive that capability in the fourth quarter, expanding to Wave customers in the first half of next year. 

About two months after it was put on the block, TPG Capital sold its Astound Broadband cable systems with more than one million customers to a joint venture between private equity firm Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners and Patriot Media in a deal valued at $8.1 billion including assumed debt.

TPG put Astound -- a combination of RCN, Wave Broadband and Grande Communications -- up for sale in September, reportedly asking about $8 billion for the assets. TPG purchased the assets in three separate deals, agreeing to pay $2.25 billion for RCN and Grande in 2016, and completing its $2.36 billion purchase of Wave in 2018. They purchased Entouch in September, adding 22,000 customers. 

According to reports, Stonepeak and Patriot are ponying up about $3.6 billion in cash for the assets and assuming $4.5 billion in debt, putting the total price tag at $8.1 billion.

Patriot Media is led by long-time cable executives Steve Simmons and Jim Holanda, and currently manages Astound. It will continue to run the properties after the deal closes, expected in the second quarter of 2021.

Astound, consisting of RCN, Grande, Wave and enTouch, is the sixth largest cable operator in the country, serving more than one million customers with 23,000 miles of fiber across Chicago, Eastern Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New York City,  Northern California, Oregon, Texas, Washington, DC., and Washington.

“We are delighted to partner with Steve, Jim and the Astound team for the next chapter of growth. Astound is the premier operator of critical broadband infrastructure in the United States with a long history of delivering market leading customer service and network performance to communities across the country. In our increasingly connected society, we believe there is an extraordinary opportunity to deliver faster speeds and greater coverage, fundamentally enabling many aspects of everyday life,” Stonepeak partner Brian McMullen said in a press release. 

As part of the partnership with Stonepeak, Patriot Media said it will continue to invest significantly in the network and in technology.

“We have created a market leading broadband platform with national reach, broad capabilities and expertise, and exciting growth potential,” Astound CEO Holanda said in a press release. “We are very eager and excited to partner with a premier investor such as Stonepeak to further accelerate our growth and take our companies to new levels of customer satisfaction and performance. We also want to thank TPG for their great support and partnership over the past four years.”

Simmons formed Patriot Media in 2002 after buying RCN’s Princeton, N.J., systems with private equity company Spectrum Equity Associates. He grew the operator to about 350,000 subscribers before selling it to Comcast for $483 million in 2007. Three years later Simmons and Patriot took over management of RCN and Grande, after they were purchased by Abry Partners, staying on in that role when Abry sold the properties to TPG in 2017.

“As we continue to grow our platform, our core objectives remain the same: to deliver exceptional service to our customers and communities, a best-in-class experience for our employees, and outstanding results for our investors,” Simmons said in a press release. “Our mission and management vision are aligned with Stonepeak and we very much look forward to our partnership with them.”

BofA Securities and Lazard  are acting as financial advisors to Stonepeak, and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP is serving as legal counsel. J.P. Morgan Securities LLC and Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC are acting as financial advisors to Astound, and Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, LLP and Seyfarth Shaw, LLP are serving as legal counsel.

“We’ve had a long-held theme and belief in the growing value of broadband infrastructure, culminating in our successful investment in Astound Broadband, in partnership with Patriot Media,” said David Trujillo, partner at TPG. “We’re proud to have been part of the company’s journey, which has been characterized by significant platform expansion, strong growth and great leadership. We wish Steve, Jim and the outstanding Patriot management team well, as they continue to grow Astound in partnership with Stonepeak.”

Private equity firm TPG said it has completed the purchase of Houston-area broadband and video service provider EnTouch. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

TPG said EnTouch will join its other pay TV and broadband services -- RCN, Grande Communications and Wave, collectively known as Astound --  which combined have more than 1 million customers. 

The deal was first announced in February.  

“With the acquisition of EnTouch, the company will be joining the Grande Communications eco-system, which also includes RCN and Wave Broadband, allowing customers to take advantage of Grande’s higher internet speeds and streaming services,” said RCN, Grande and Wave CEO Jim Holanda in a press release. “The addition of EnTouch creates further opportunities for sustained growth in our Texas service area and continues the expansion of our reliable, robust fiber-rich network on a national scale for both residential and business customers.”

According to TPG, the addition of EnTouch expands its existing Texas presence to servicing both residential and business customers in Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, Corpus Christi, Waco, Temple, San Marcos and Midland/Odessa.

“As part of Grande Communications’ service network, we will continue to focus on providing customers with high-quality technology and customer service,” said Sam Luxton, President and CEO of EnTouch. “Together, we will offer new and improved products and services and continue to grow and innovate.”

The news comes as TPG is reportedly seeking out a buyer for its pay TV properties, valuing them at about $8 billion. 

One World Sports has added three more distributors to its growing affiliate roster.

The global sports service has inked deals with Service Electric, enTouch and Paul Bunyan Communications, under its master agreement with the National Cable Television Cooperative.

Service Electric serves subscribers throughout the Lehigh Valley and Wilkes Barre, Penn., as well as Hunterdon, N.J., and surrounding areas.  

Paul Bunyan counts subscribers in Bemidji and Grand Rapids, Minn., while enTouch serves the greater Houston area.

“Soccer and other global sports are increasingly popular in every region of the United States, especially among our core audience of hard to reach 18-to-34-year-olds,’” said Randy Brown, executive vice president, distribution, of One World Sports.  “Our recent agreement with the NCTC, which opened the door to these latest launches, reinforces our growing industry support.”

One World Sports, which also counts Verizon FiOS, Dish Network, Charter Communications, Cablevision’s Optimum TV and Mediacom Communications among its affiliates,  provides more than 3,000 hours annually of exclusive best-in-class sporting events – including socer, notably the New York Cosmos (pictured), baseball from Japan, basketball from China, cricket from England, ice hockey from Europe and Russia, and golf and soccer from around the globe.