Netflix has told analysts to expect only around 4.5 million global paid customer additions in the fourth quarter, its slowest Q4 subscriber growth since 2014, when the streaming service was only available in around 50 countries.

And entering its fourth-quarter earnings report Thursday, equity analysts are also expecting Netflix to discuss a painfully slow rollout of its ad-supported tier, as well as what could be a challenging birth for new password-sharing fees.

Revenue growth, too, is expected to slow to 2014 levels. 

But with Netflix's Nasdaq share prices up 12% over the previous month, investors are bullish, nonetheless.

Sure, adoption so far for Netflix's $6.99-a-month partially ad-supported tier will be "slow to kick in," wrote Jefferies analyst Andrew Uerkwitz in a note to investors, "but when it does [combined with password-sharing changes], it should drive top-line outperformance."

Uerkwitz upgraded Netflix from "hold" to "buy."

Likewise, Oppenheimer analyst Jason Helfstein last week reiterated his outperform rating on Netflix stock, raising his price target to $400 from $365.

"Besides subscriber metrics, [Netflix] stock will likely react to comments surrounding progress of ad tier and new initiatives to reduce password sharing," Helfstein wrote. 

Of course, as Netflix's Q1 report showed us all back in April of last year, things can go decidedly the other way if equity analysts don't like what they hear. Happily for Netflix, it's coming off two redemptive quarters, during which the pledge to sell ads and crack down on password sharers has, along with rekindled sub growth, re-inspired Wall Street.

At around $321 a share, the stock is only slightly below the $340 area in which it stood entering that "Black Tuesday" earnings report last April. We'll see where it is on Friday morning, after the company updates investors in its key initiatives. ■

Xperi Holdings Corp. has revealed plans to separate its intellectual property business from its core technology products operation. 

Xperi CEO Jon Kirchner told equity analysts during his company's Q4 earnings call on Wednesday that it plans to "separate" its IP unit this fall. 

Xperi has already started the process of rebranding its IP operation, putting it under the moniker of "Adeia." (It's a term dating back to ancient Greece and seems to have been used by foreigners, slaves or any non native Athenians to ask for permission to accuse someone of something. All we can say is, it better not show up in Wordle.)

TiVo, which became a patent troll of import in 2016 when it was acquired for $1.1 billion by Rovi Corp., announced plans to spin off its IP business in April 2020, under the leadership of Dave Shull. 

TiVo instead pivoted to a $3 billion deal to be acquired by Xperi, a company vested in technologies including car audio. The deal created a portfolio of more than 10,000 technology patents, along with the heft needed to end a long-running IP dispute with Comcast in Q4 2020. 

IP generated $391.2 million for Xperi in 2021, which was around 45% of the company's total revenue. The company said it has made close to $9 billion on enforcing tech patents in the last decade.

As TiVo found out, however, it makes it harder to partner with technology companies on the product side when you're simultaneously shaking them down in court over patents. 

Notably, on Thursday, Xperi put out its first IP deal release using its new Adeia brand, noting a new deal to license "hybrid bonding" semiconductor tech to Micron Technology.

The new "About Adeia" language: "Adeia invents, develops and licenses fundamental innovations that shape the way millions of people explore and experience entertainment and enhance billions of devices in an increasingly connected world. From TVs to smartphones, in almost any place, and across all types of entertainment experiences, from Pay-TV to OTT, Adeia’s technologies allow users to manage content and connections in a way that is smart, immersive and personal."

Beyond the IP separation announcement, Xperi also said it continues to actively carve out the deals it needs to expand its TiVo Stream 4K operating system beyond its current confines of a niche HDMI dongle. 

"This is our fastest growing category and we are focused on partnerships with TV OEMs, chipset partners and content providers to bring the first TVs powered by TiVo Stream OS in 2023 or 2024," Kirchner said.

Roku reported the addition of 3.7 million active user accounts in the fourth quarter, ending 2021 with 60.1 active accounts. 

That beat the forecasts of skittish equity analysts, who predicted Roku would add less than half of the 5.2 million active accounts it tacked on in Q4 2020. 

However, Roku was badly off target when it came to total revenue, making $865.3 million in the final three months of 2021. That represented a 33% year-over-year jump, but it was around $30 million less than what analysts had pegged. 

Also read: Roku (Not Surprisingly) Mulls Building Its Own Smart TVs

The sum total was more really bad news for the Silicon Valley video technology company on the Nasdaq, where it saw its stock price tumble more than 15% in after hours trading ... after dropping more than 10% during active day trading Thursay. Roku is trading at just under $121 a share at the moment this sentence is being typed, after trading at more than $482 a share last July. 

Quite simply, Roku -- the most popular supplier of streaming operating system software in North America -- keeps growing. But Roku's rate of growth keeps slowing, and investors keep thinking that Roku is about to be surpassed by Amazon and Google at any moment. 

Indeed, nearly every key metric for Roku expanded in a significant way in Q4, but it didn't grow as much as it did in the same three-month period of the quarantined year of 2020. 

Users spent 19.5 billion hours on the Roku platform in Q4, 1.5 billion more than in Q3, but that expansion of engagement is surpassed by the 2.2 billion hours of growth that occurred in Q4 2020. 

"Platform" revenue, which is mostly from selling ads on content that runs on Roku, was up nearly 21% quarter over quarter to $703 million, after growing by 47.6% in the same period of 2020. 

Meanwhile, average revenue per users grew by 2.3% to $41.03 in Q4, after expanding by 6.5% in the same period of 2020. 

Gross profit, which swelled by over 42% in the fourth quarter of 2020, grew by only 4.3% in Q4 of last year to $379.6 million. 

And on and on it goes ... and down and down Roku has went, since peaking last July.

Meanwhile, as Roku makes an expensive pivot into ad-supported streaming, making major programming investments into its Roku Channel, total operating expenses were up in Q4, increasing by 21.4% sequentially and by a whopping 49% year over year. 

And then there are global supply chain issues. 

Maintaining consumer price points on Roku gadgets, including smart TVs made by third party manufacturers who license the Roku OS, is key for Roku to expand active users ... and virtually all of Roku's other key metrics. When someone buys a Roku gadget, chances are they're going turn into an active user, after all, gobbling up engagement hours and advanced advertising impressions.

But making Roku hardware takes computer chips and is more expensive to do than ever. After reporting a narrow $4.6 million profit in Q4 2020, at the outset of the global supply chain crisis, Roku reported a $45.9 million "player" sector operating loss from this past October -  December, as the company bled money on every gadget it sold in order to sustain sales volumes. 

So there you have it -- a company used by more consumers than any other in the U.S., Canada and Mexico to stream video, and which is still growing, remains in stock-market free-fall. 

Roku's wild ride continues. 

AMC Networks said it ended the fourth quarter with 9 million subscribers across a lineup of targeted subscription streaming services that includes AMC Plus, Acorn TV, Shudder, Sundance Now, AllBlk and the recently acquired HiDive.

The subscriber benchmark matched the media company's guidance, as did a 3% year over year uptick in Q4 revenue to $803.7 million. 

With net revenue reaching a record $3.1 billion, up 9% from 2020, and operating income increasing 10.7% to $490 million, AMC interim CEO called 2021 a "strong, pivotal year" for the media company.

AMC, of course, is in a race to offset cord-cutting-related declines in a portfolio of linear channels that includes not just the AMC flagship network, but also joint venture BBC America, IFC, SundanceTV, WE tv and IFC Films.

Also: ViacomCBS Adds 9.4 Million Streaming Subscribers in Quarter 

To put its 9 million subscriber benchmark in place, that's less than half of the 19.7 million paid streaming subscribers touted by Lionsgate, another relative media company small fish seeking DTC scale among much larger predators. 

AMC does forecasts SVOD subscriber growth of 400,000 to 500,000 users in the first quarter and expects to have between 20 million and 25 million subscription streaming users by 2025. 

“Our differentiated and targeted streaming strategy is clearly working,” said COO and CFO Christina Spade on Wednesday's earnings call.

To achieve its goals, AMC would seem to be in need of fresh hits. AMC's 2021 growth spurt was attributed to some degree to the first part of the 11th and final season of zombie series The Walking Dead, which unfurled between August and October. The final 16 episodes of that 24-installment final season began airing this past Sunday night. 

On April 18, AMC will begin airing the final 13 episodes of critically lauded Breaking Bad origins series Better Call Saul. 

What will be left after Walking Dead and Saul leave for good? On Feb. 27, AMC has the Season 4 premiere of Killing Eve, starring Emmy winner Jodie Comer, queued up. But it would seem to definitely more water cooler hit power to drive serious AMC Plus signups. ■

X1, the Comcast video system that was supposed to save the pay TV industry with its voice remote and other advanced technology features, is on the ropes. 

Comcast, the leading U.S. pay TV operator, lost nearly 1.5 million residential linear pay TV subscribers in 2021, almost 8% of its customer base, ending the year with just 17.5 million residential video users. 

Also read: Comcast To Double Programming Spending on Peacock to $3 Billion

The losses are accelerating. The cable company bled 349,000 video subscribers in the fourth quarter, vs. just 227,000 in Q4 2020. Comcast isn't bleeding money on video at this point -- its video revenue was down just 1.2% in Q4 to $5.4 billion. 

But while somewhat anticipated, the quickened erosion of the one of the cable company's core assets still has consequences. 

Cord-cutting, of course, is now an accepted fact among the telecom companies that supply linear video services. Comcast, which added more than 1.2 million residential high-speed internet users in Q4, has for several years offered free of charge its "Xfinity Flex" thin-client video option to its growing ranks of internet-only customers. Flex provides these users access to popular OTT services including Netflix and Comcast's own Peacock, while keeping their video activities on Comcast's managed network. 

Also read: Has Peacock Found Momentum? It Was No. 2 in Signups for Q4

And Comcast is also exploring the expansion of the core X1 experience beyond its footprint, featuring it an OS called "XClass TV" that is now being sold in Hisense smart TVs sold at retail. 

Maintaining control of the Xfinity-branding operating system environment, regardless of its iteration, is crucial for Comcast, given that most of the users of its forward-looking video priority -- streaming service Peacock -- are monetized through advanced ad sales. And Comcast makes more money on advertising impressions within the Xfinity X1, Flex and XClass TV environments that it does, say, on a third-party platform like Roku. 

But for Comcast, the real meat of its Peacock platform control still comes via its X1-equipped linear pay TV subscribers. According to figures released during Comcast's Q4 earnings call Thursday, 7 million of the 24.5 million Peacock active users are those who receive access to Peacock Premium through their Comcast Cable video subscription. 

Undoubtedly, members of that subset will continue to ditch X1 and the full pay TV experience, downgrading to Flex and Comcast Xfinity Internet -- which is OK with Comcast longterm, as long as they keep using Peacock. 

Some of those users, however, are lost from the Xfinity ecosystem, and that is a concern. 

Comcast added 212,000 broadband subscribers in the fourth quarter, narrowly missing analysts’ consensus estimates of 220,000 additions but beating some analysts’ revised targets for the quarter. Meanwhile, the wireless business had its best quarterly subscriber growth ever. 

Comcast finished the year with 1.3 million broadband additions, just like Cable division CEO Dave Watson said the company would back in December,  when analysts, who were expecting at least 1.4 million high-speed internet adds for the year, frantically revised their models.

Many, like Wells Fargo media analyst Steven Cahall, dropped their Q4 broadband targets to between 185,000 and 190,000, in anticipation of an even slower slowdown in the high-speed data segment. In a research note, Cahall said Comcast slightly missed analysts’ consensus estimates of 220,000 broadband additions for the quarter, and that high-speed data performance will continue to be top of mind for investors.

“We expect the 2022E broadband net outlook to be the biggest topic for Comcast, though the company may not provide a quantitative view this early in the year,” Cahall wrote. “The release suggests churn remains historically low, but we think gross adds are weak in a continuation of the [second half] 2021 trends. As such, today's print [earnings press release] may not prove decisive for the broadband debates around cable.”

Evercore ISI media analyst Vijay Jayant, who had expected 190,000 broadband additions in the quarter, said in a research note that Comcast’s performance was “healthy in an uncertain environment.”  

Comcast shares were down less than 1% (25 cents each) in pre-market trading at $48.21 per share. 

The company said it increased its annual dividend by 8% to $1.08 per share and upped its share repurchase authorization to $10 billion. 

Comcast said that it had the strongest fourth quarter broadband retention in its history, but declined to reveal churn numbers. Overall, Comcast added 169,000 customer relationships in the period, as wireless additions of about 312,000 customers (its best quarterly performance ever) helped it outpace video customer losses of 373,000. 

Cable unit revenue rose 4.5% in the quarter to $16.4 billion and 7.1% for the year to $64.3 billion. EBITDA for the quarter was up 7.8% to $7.1 billion and 11.2% to $28.1 billion for the year.

Consolidated revenue increased 9.5% to $30.3 billion in the quarter and 12.4% to $116.4 billion for the year. Company wide, EBITDA rose 17% to $8.4 billion and 12,6% to $34.7 billion for the year. 

"Comcast’s strong operating and financial performance in 2021 was underscored by our highest full-year revenue, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EPS, and free cash flow on record,” chairman and CEO Brian Roberts said in a press release. “We continue to execute extraordinarily well, strengthening our leadership position in connectivity, aggregation, and streaming, while working to have a lasting impact on our communities through our commitment to DE&I and digital equity. Looking ahead, we remain focused on our many exciting organic growth opportunities across all of our businesses.” ■

Back in 2008, Verizon Fios TV was pay TV's hottest property, growing by 303,000 customers in the fourth quarter of that year. 

Back and those days, our linear-focused LCD TV sets were filled with Transformers-themed commercials starring blockbuster film maven Michael Bay, telling us how awesome this new pay TV alternative to cable and satellite was. 

These days? With Verizon's focus clearly directed toward 5G wireless and fiber connectivity, Fios TV isn't as awesome. Verizon reported the loss of another 69,000 Fios TV customers in the fourth quarter, with its base slipping to around 3.645 million customers.

Fios TV is now the sixth largest pay TV platform in the U.S., trailing Comcast's Xfinity TV, Charter's Spectrum TV, DirecTV and Dish Network, as well as virtual MVPD's Hulu + Live TV and YouTube TV.

Like AT&T, Verizon also divested its media portfolio, ditching to private equity company Apollo Management last year for $5 billion.

For its part, Verizon often cross-sells third-party video products, including YouTube TV and the Disney Bundle, prioritizing them over the traditional Fios linear video platform, trying to keep sales moving for its fiber-based, Fios-branded wireline broadband products.

Verizon added 51,000 internet customers during the fourth quarter and 339,000 for the full 2021 campaign. Fios revenue was up 5.6% year over year to $2.9 billion in the fourth quarter.

Calling 2021 a "transformational" year during which it fulfilled the objectives laid out three years ago when he joined the company as CEO, Hans Vestberg told investors, "As we move into 2022, we have the necessary assets to realize our strategy that we laid out in 2019. We are laser focused on executing our 5G strategy and providing value to our customers, shareholders, employees, and society, as 2022 will be the most exciting year yet for Verizon."

Netflix missed its fourth-quarter forecasts by narrow margins, adding 8.3 million subscribers globally, vs. predictions of 8.5 million, and generating $7.09 billion in revenue, up 16% year over year (vs. guidance of $7.12 million).

Still, coming off a quarter in which it launched its most successful show of all time, Squid Game, and two of its most popular movies ever, Red Notice and Don't Look Up, Netflix sent investors running for the exits, predicting Q1 growth of just 2.5 million subscribers. (Netflix added 4 million subscribers in the first quarter of 2021.)

As of 4:45 p.m. EST, the company's stock is down nearly 18.5% in after-hours trading.

For the full 2021, Netflix grew "paid net adds" (i.e. customers) by 18 million globally, vs. 37 million in the quarantine-fueled 2020. But growth in the U.S. and Canada was actually bigger in 2021 -- 1.2 million vs. 900,000 in 2020.  

Netflix ended 2021 with 221.8 million paid customers globally, making it far and away the world's biggest streaming service operator. 

In its quarterly shareholder letter, Netflix acknowledged increased competition, with Apple TV Plus, Disney Plus, Peacock, HBO Max, Discovery Plus and Paramount Plus all launching over the last two years. 

"Consumers have always had many choices when it comes to their entertainment time -- competition that has only intensified over the last 24 months as entertainment companies all around the world develop their own streaming offering. While this added competition may be affecting our marginal growth some, we continue to grow in every country and region in which these new streaming alternatives have launched," the letter stated. 

Netflix just announced its first price increase in over a year, raising the price of its most premium tier to $20 a month. ■

Perhaps the most polarizing OTT company on Wall Street, fuboTV, reported a 98% jump in fourth quarter revenue, passing the six-figure mark for the first time ever in a quarter to reach $105.1 million. 

The virtual pay TV operator added 92,800 customers during the final three months of 2020, reaching 547,880 paid subscribers, up 73% year over year. 

David Gandler, co-founder and CEO of the New York-based streaming company, which merged with FaceBank last year before going public, called 2020 fuboTV’s “strongest fiscal year to date.” 

For the year, fuboTV reported an 83% revenue increase to $268.8 million. 

Revenue from subscriptions was up 91% in the fourth quarter to $91.4 million, while advertising sales increased 157% to $13.1 million. 

Average revenue per user increased 17% in Q4 to $62.84, while total content streamed on the fuboTV platform was up 82% to 544.9 million hours. 

The company continues to report steep quarterly losses, draining $167.8 million in Q4.

FuboTV has attracted its share of bullish media equity analysts of late, integrating components, including sports betting, that seem to render the company as something more than a low-margin vMVPD going forward. 

Fubo TV has its share of bears, too, with LightShed Partners’ Rich Greenfield noting on Twitter this afternoon that the company expects to add fewer new subscribers in 2021 than it did in 2020. Greenfield has stated repeatedly that the company faces the same oppressive gravitational forces that any vMVPD does, and that its growth will be hard to maintain. 

FuboTV closed trading Tuesday up around 8% on the New York Stock Exchange. 

Virtual pay TV service Sling TV added 16,000 customers in the fourth quarter, well off the 175,000 subscribers it gained in the final quarter of 2019. 

Sling TV ended the year with a net loss of 118,000 subscribers. It finished 2020, its sixth year in business, with 2.474 million subscribers. 

The slow final three months came before Sling TV upped the monthly price of its two base tiers by $5 to $35 a month. 

It also came amid an overall slow quarter for the so-called vMVPDs. The market leader, Hulu Plus Live TV, lost around 100,000 paid users. Google didn’t break out fourth quarter subscriber growth for YouTube TV. But the 3 million figure touted last week by YouTube product manager Neal Mohan was flat with figures the company reported back in October. 

During the Dish Networks fourth-quarter earnings call Monday, company president and CEO Erik Carlson said Sling TV remains in a “unique position” to serve as a “complementary” service relative to the major SVODs currently flooding the market. 

However, as the oldest vMVPD, Sling TV “should have more market share” among virtual pay TV providers, Dish chairman Charlie Ergen conceded. 

“We stumbled a little there with the quality of the user experience,” Ergen said. “Our network was the best and the first, but we got a little complacent.”

Ergen added that work is being done on Sling TV’s UI, changes that should start surfacing in the first half of 2021.

“We have room to improve,” he said. 

Also Read: Dish Wireless Moves Forward (Blog)

The slow Sling quarter came as Dish lost another 149,000 satellite TV customers. For the year, Dish lost 526,000 total pay TV subscribers. Carlson attributed at least some of the sustained satellite erosion to the dynamics of the pandemic. For instance, 250,000 Dish commercial accounts were put on pause last year, with customers like hotel chains temporarily shutting down. Around 80,000 of these customers eventually restored service, 69,000 disconnected and the fate of around 100,000 more is still undetermined. Notably, those commercial accounts didn’t factor into the 526,000 figure.

Despite the customer losses, pay TV revenue held largely flat, up 0.7%, for 2020. 

In what Ergen referred to as a “transformational” year for Dish — during which it paid $1.4 billion to buy Boost Mobile, among other wireless moves — the company said that it’s wireless segment contributed nearly $2.6 billion in consolidated revenue in Q4, up 21% year over year. 

Roku capped a transformative 2020 with another boffo quarter, finishing the last three months of the year with a record $649.9 million of total revenue, up 58% year over year.

Roku also saw a 58% revenue bump for the full pandemic year, taking in $1.778 billion. That surpassed the $1.6 billion guidance the company stated at the beginning of 2020.

Roku reported a $65.2 million net profit for the quarter--Wall Street had expected a loss.

The Silicon Valley giant’s market capitalization now stands at nearly $57.5 billion, having transformed itself from hardware/software technology company into an emerging giant in OTT advertising.

The “platform revenue” half of its value equation, driven mainly by ad sales on the fast-expanding Roku Channel, grew by 71% in 2020, reaching $1.268 billion. In the fourth quarter alone, platform revenue increased by 81% to $471.2 million. 

Also read: Roku Staffs Up to Produce Original Shows

Roku’s ad-supported business whizzed past the company’s legacy technology segment back in 2019. Selling players, streaming sticks and smart speakers, as well as the operating system that powers them, is still a big business for Roku, generating $178.7 million in the fourth quarter, up 18% year over year. 

The company also said that 38% of the smart TV’s sold in the U.S. are powered by its OS. 

Roku already leaked a major Q4 milestone back in January—it finished the year with 51.2 million active accounts. Notably, during its teleconference with investment analysts Thursday, Roku noted that its user reach is more than double the size of the biggest U.S. pay TV operators. That's true--the biggest U.S. pay TV company, Comcast, now has just under 20 million video customers. 

According to Roku founder and CEO Anthony Wood, the Roku Channel now reaches 63 million viewers across its households in the U.S., Canada and the UK.

"Our primary impediment to growth at this point is the behavior of TV buyers," he said, noting that most TV dollars still go to linear networks. 

Advertisers spent $65 billion on linear TV last year, Roku noted, even though linear viewership cratered another 21%. The three biggest broadcast networks have a median age of older than 60 now, while 18-34-year-old viewers are streaming more than half the TV they watch. 

On Thursday, it also touted a major increased in average revenue per user—up $5.62 year over year to $28.76 for 2020.

Hours spent streaming on the Roku platform increased massively during the pandemic year, the company added—up 20.9 billion hours over 2019 to 58.7 billion.  

CommScope reported a 31% decline in net sales to $571 million in its Home Networks segment during the fourth quarter, as brisk movement of DOCSIS 3.1 gateways failed to offset the cratering demand for pay TV set-tops.

Overall, Q4 net sales for the Hickory, North Carolina, technology vendor dropped 7% to $2.29 billion, with the Broadband Networks business showing particular strength. Driven by the network capacity needs of its cable operator clients, Broadband Networks net sales increased 17% to $789 million in the quarter. Outdoor Wireless Networks ticked up 1% to $295 million, while the Campus and Events portfolio declined 6% to $477 million.

The conspicuous erosion in video technology sales comes at a precarious moment, with the company kicking off a new business-wide evaluation called “CommScope NEXT” under recently appointed CEO Charles Treadway. 

Also read: CommScope Pitches DAA, Virtualization at Cable-Tec Expo

Outlined in the slide below, CommScope NEXT will kick the tires on everything from head counts to business systems to product portfolios, looking for ways to streamline, cut costs and generate more net sales, more than two years after its $7.4 billion swallowing of Arris Corp.

“When you think about duplicative systems, just think about the acquisition of Arris—we've brought two very large companies together, two $5 billion plus companies. When we put those together, you find a lot of duplicative systems,” Treadway explained to investment analysts during Wednesday’s earnings call. 

“A great example is what we have in the IT side,” he added. “One company runs Oracle, and one company runs SAP. As we move to one system, we're going to have significant savings from that.”

CommScope is trying to offset the decline in full-featured DVR set-tops with OTT-centric devices. But the longer term trend lines don’t look nearly as attractive as the ongoing “dance” the company says it’s involved in with cable operators over broadband network capacity.

“They come back to us when they need more capacity in their network,” said Morgan Kurk, executive VP, CTO and segment leader of CommScope’s Broadband Networks unit, describing the interaction Wednesday.

“They buy physical cards, and then they add additional capacity to those cards in effect,” Kurk added. “It's a software related capacity add over time, and they do that until they exhaust the amount of bandwidth that's available to them. So, it is an opportunity to continue to sell additional licenses to them until they reach a certain point and then they go back to buying hardware to increase that available capacity again. That's the dance that's going on. Of course, there is also the upgrade to the network, whether it is to go to DOCSIS 4.0 which expands the amount of spectrum available and thus the amount of both hardware and software that they can buy from us. And also, the change in architecture from the centralized CCAP to distributed access architecture, whether it's Remote MAC or Remote PHY. This puts more of this equipment out toward the edge of the network to reduce some costs in the headend and to increase the capacity of the backhaul network and to reduce latency. So, all of those things will be going on for the next decade.”

It’s not easy running down a company with a $247 billion market capitalization and 203 million subscribers spread all over the globe.

But The Walt Disney Company showed during its Q4/full-2020 earnings report Thursday that it is the closest among all U.S. companies competing with Netflix to rivaling the leader’s massive scale.

Also read: Disney Plus Subs Rise to 94.9 Million as Profit Drops

The company said that Disney Plus finished 2020 with 94.9 million paid subscribers, all amassed in just under 14 months. Combined with Hulu’s 38.4 million users and 12.1 million ESPN Plus subscribers, Disney now has 146.4 million paid OTT customers worldwide. 

The level Netflix has reached isn't just a number. It's important to remember that Netflix had to surpass 200 million subscribers globally, each spending at least $11 a month, to reach sustainable free cash flow.

OK, agree--Disney still faces a large chasm to get there--not just in subscribers, but in revenue. Disney only charges $6.99 a month for Disney Plus, less in other parts of the world, and it still trails Netflix by nearly 60 million customers. But it's notable that Disney has amassed nearly 150 million paid streaming customers relatively quickly. And no other company besides Disney (market cap $346 billion), save for Amazon, seems close at this point to being able to hoist even remotely symmetrical scale.

Ranking the major U.S. subscription streaming providers is challenging, since their business models are so different, and not all of them report their customer metrics. 

Amazon has, according to Ampere Analysis, around 140.7 million Prime members worldwide. But it’s unclear as to how many of them regularly tap into the Prime Video portion of the business, and rather use Prime for its, er, prime perk—free shipping of Amazon products.

Likewise, Apple hasn’t reported a paid subscriber number for its 14-month-old SVOD service, Apple TV Plus. Ampere estimates that around 42.6 million users worldwide have access to Apple TV Plus, most of them promotionally following the purchase of an Apple computer, tablet or phone.

WarnerMedia has around 140 million HBO subscribers globally, but it reported that only 17.2 million U.S. subscribers had signed onto its new HBO Max streaming service as of the end of 2020. If WarnerMedia, which is about to embark on a major Latin American rollout of Max, can convert the majority of that global user base, its scale will certainly look better. 

NBCUniversal, meanwhile, said that its Peacock service, which combines AVOD and SVOD tiers, had 33 million signups as of the end of the fourth quarter. But The Information said earlier this week that Peacock only has around 11.3 million U.S. households using it regularly. 

Perhaps no chief executive lobbied harder than Comcast’s Brian Roberts for the FCC’s 2017 rollback of net neutrality rules under Trump-appointed FCC chief Ajit Pai.

Now that Biden appointee Jessica Rosenworcel is running the agency, and another reversal of course on net neutrality seems likely, Roberts was asked during Comcast’s fourth-quarter earnings call Thursday about the fast-shifting political winds. 

Not surprisingly, Roberts still favors a “light-touch” approach to rule making. However, he seemed willing to accept a more lasting outcome that wound’t shift every time the White House changed its political party affiliation. 

“If there's a way to codify that and perhaps put this issue in a permanent, more consistent place, that's certainly a possibility,” he said.

Overall, he said there’s nothing new regarding Comcast’s philosophy on the matter. 

“We’ve managed to successfully work with different administrations, with different regulatory perspectives around the broadband business,” Roberts said. “And our view is obviously strongly felt that the long-standing light-touch regulation has worked since President Clinton created that classification that hence reduces regulatory risks for investors and allows the company to invest more and that paid dividends unbelievably all during COVID.”

As he always has, Roberts insisted that Comcast abides by net neutrality. 

“We were never asked to down-res any services,” Roberts said. “And content providers and consumers really benefited. And that wasn't universally the case around the globe with different broadband regimes. But we do believe in net neutrality and have--we're not going to discriminate, block, throttle on some of the other principles that we've committed to.”

Charter Communications reported a narrow loss of 35,000 pay TV users in the fourth quarter and ended 2020 in the entirely outlying position of adding 56,000 video customers for the year. 

U.S. cable operators collectively lost around 500,000 linear pay TV subscribers in 2020. And factoring in the fast-declining satellite TV business, all linear operators will have seen more than 1 million users cut the cord for the year. 

But Charter somehow ended up in the black in a pandemic year in which it added more than 2.1 million residential internet users, 216,000 of them in the fourth quarter. 

Also Read: Broadband Gains are Light But Charter Improves Video Losses 

Speaking to media and telecom investment analysts during Charter’s Q4/full-2020 earnings call Friday morning, Chairman and CEO Tom Rutledge seemed to once again concede that the video performance was an anomaly, caused by “outsized growth in connectivity.”

The video customer growth, he said, was caused by having broadband "market share shift to us from other providers.” As Charter connected these customers to its DOCSIS 3.1-powered high-speed internet, he explained, these consumers also took old-fashioned, bundled video. 

In Los Angeles, customers who sign on for 200 Mbps-speed broadband through Charter can also get more than 125 pay TV networks in a package value-priced at $90 a month on a one-year promotion.

The growth “goes against the macro trend of the industry,” Rutledge conceded. “And that macro trend  hasn’t gone away.”

Certainly, the trend didn’t abate for Comcast in Q4, with the No. 1 U.S. cable operator losing another 227,000 pay TV customers … a factor that seems to make Charter’s video growth all the more confounding. 

Also Read: Broadband Drives Q4 Again For Comcast Cable

Comcast’s X1 video platform is still the state-of-the art in terms of traditional linear pay TV products. And the operator has evolved its video portfolio to include its own OTT device ecosystem, Xfinity Flex, which combines parts of the X1 experience, including voice control, with access to a wide variety of popular streaming apps. 

As for Charter’s Spectrum-branded TV services, its long-deployed Spectrum Guide video OS is designed to utilize older set-tops. Rutledge said Wednesday that “multiple millions” of Spectrum TV customers have the newer “World Box” CPE platform. But it’s hard to tell what percentage of Charter’s 16.2 million pay TV homes have the newer equipment. 

Charter’s Spectrum TV product does include the Stream app, which is designed to let users stream Netflix and other major OTT apps from pretty much any device they want to use. But a dispute with Roku has kept that app from being downloadable on the No. 1 connected TV device platform since December. 

Rutledge said Charter “has the ability” to add a thin-client OTT device platform, similar to Xfinity Flex, that would provide Charter’s broadband-only customers with a video option. Charter has reportedly been in talks with Comcast about licensing Flex, so for all we know, Rutledge was talking about that technology specifically. 

“That opportunity is still in front of us,” he said. 

In any event, as broadband uptake begins to “normalize” (their words, not ours), it’s hard to predict the company’s video growth will be sustained. 

“I don’t think we’ll have quite the internet growth in 2021 that we had in 2020,” Rutledge said. “Maybe we’ll be able to grow with OTT products and smaller packages. The net of those two things is difficult to [predict], but I think we’ll do better than the industry in general when you look at multichannel video growth.”

Comcast said it’s looking for ways to expand its Xfinity Flex OTT platform beyond its footprint of high-speed internet homes. 

“There are opportunities, including smart TVs, that could leverage scale,” said Comcast Cable CEO Dave Watson, during the cable giant’s Q4/full-2020 earnings call Wednesday. “Right now, it’s looking great in our footprint, but we’re making plans beyond that, whether it’s a device or software solution.”

Comcast offers the Flex device for free to its broadband-only users. And there are more of those than ever. Comcast said it added another 538,000 high-speed internet customers in the fourth quarter, and 2 million for all of 2020. Meanwhile, customers who also pay for a full-featured pay TV service from Comcast dropped another 248,000 in Q4.

Flex delivers popular over-the-top apps, including Netflix, HBO Max—and soon, Disney Plus—in a voice-controlled interface that shares many of the same features found in Comcast’s flagship X1 video platform. 

Importantly, Flex has been an important early driver to Comcast/NBCUniversal’s nine-month-old streaming service, Peacock, with Comcast internet customers getting the robust $4.99 iteration of the service for free on their Flex devices. 

Comcast is particularly excited with the advanced advertising schemes it has been able to implement on Flex for various NBCU properties, including Peacock and AVOD platform Xumo, acquired last year. Certainly, having a streaming world controlled by Roku and Amazon doesn’t fit that agenda. 

Comcast has already had discussions with entities including Walmart about shipping TV’s powered by the X1/Flex OS. 

“I think we’ll have more to talk about throughout the year,” added Comcast CEO Brian Roberts.

Comcast added 538,000 broadband customers in the fourth quarter, a record for that period for the cable giant and enough to outpace steep declines in its theme park and content units fueled by the pandemic. 

The 538,000 high-speed internet additions pushed Comcast’s total broadband additions for the year to 2 million, its best year on record. Video customers declined by 248,000 in the period, nearly twice the 149,000 lost in the same period in 2019. 

The broadband gains culminate what has been a record year for the segment, fueled by work-from home orders and home schooling driven by the pandemic. In Q3, Comcast added 633,000 broadband customers, its best growth quarter in that segment ever.  

ALSO READ: Peacock Signups Increase to 33 Million, Comcast Says

“Outstanding performance at Cable drove very strong fourth quarter results for our company,” Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts said in a press release. “Our theme parks in Orlando and Osaka reached breakeven; and, encouragingly, Sky returned to customer growth in all three of its markets, bringing our total customer relationships and overall revenue in Europe essentially back to 2019 levels."   

But the broadband additions were enough to push revenue up by 6.3% in the quarter to $15.7 billion and cash flow up by 12.3% to $6.6 billion. For the year, cable revenue was up 3.4% to $60.1 billion and cash flow rose 8.6% to $25.3 billion.

Those gains helped offset continued losses at NBCUniversal’s theme parks — where revenue was down 62.9% in Q4 and fell 68.9% for the full year — broadcast television and filmed entertainment units.

Broadcast television revenue fell 12%, fueled by a 9.6% decline in advertising revenue. Retransmission consent and other fees were up by about 10% in the period.  

At its cable networks, revenue fell 6.4% to $2.7 billion in the quarter, due to lower licensing,  content and distribution fees. Ad revenue in the period was down 4.2%. But lower production expenses during COVID-19 helped boost cash flow in the segment up 22% to $1.3 billion.

ALSO READ: NBCU Plans to Shut Down NBCSN Cable Sports Net

At the theme parks, the pandemic decimated attendance, and mainly reflect operations in its Orlando, Florida and Osaka, Japan parks, which were opened on a limited basis during the year. 

U.K. satellite company Sky saw some gains, as total revenue was up 3.3% in the quarter (but down 3.3% for the full year), while cash flow sank 82.3% to $129 million. Total customer relationships were up by 244,000, more than three times the 77,000 additions in Q4 2019 which offered some encouragement. As more countries begin to roll out COVID-19 vaccines, Comcast was optimistic that its fortunes would improve.  

“With the vaccines rolling out throughout the world, we are optimistic that the parts of our business that had been most impacted will soon be back on a path towards growth,” Roberts said in the press release. “This confidence is shared by our board of directors, which has announced an increase in the dividend for the thirteenth consecutive year. In addition, it is now our expectation that we will be in a position to begin repurchasing shares again in the back half of this year. While this is certainly the most challenging period we have faced, I could not be more proud of how our management team and employees continue to pull together and deliver. Today’s results are a testament to their commitment and dedication.”  

AT&T CEO John Stankey said the company’s anticipated ad-supported, price-reduced iteration of HBO Max will debut in the second quarter.

“Building large subscription bases of customers who pay us every month for something has been one of the hallmarks of our business,” he told investment analysts during Wednesday morning AT&T quarterly earnings call, indicating a need to expand HBO Max's reach. “We need to evolve that, and this is the next step in making this happen.”

HBO Max is priced at $15 a month. AT&T has not disclosed how much a price-reduced version partly supported by ads would cost consumers. 

The revelation came after the nine-month-old HBO Max streaming service enjoyed its best quarter yet, adding 7 million customers to reach 17.2 million subscriber activations overall. The total domestic HBO subscriber base finished 2020 at 41.5 million.

In addition to trying to grow that base and convert the bulk of its customers to the new HBO Max app-based service, AT&T’s WarnerMedia division is also poised to launch HBO Max to Europe and Latin America. HBO has around 61 million subscribers worldwide. 

For HBO Max in the U.S., growth was fueled in the fourth quarter by the top OTT device platforms, Roku and Amazon Fire TV, finally offering app support for the service. 

Notably, the streaming service also began a term as the focal point of WarnerMedia’s theatrical release strategy in the pandemic, with Wonder Woman 1984—a film originally scheduled for wide global theatrical exhibition in the summer of 2020—debuting on Dec. 25 on HBO Max, the same day it premiered in a small handful of still-open theaters. 

Stankey used Wednesday’s call to defend the day-and-date release decision for Wonder Woman 1984, as well as the 17 Warner Bros. films on the company’s 2021 slate. 

“We’ve seen other studios continue to snowplow releases,” he said. “It’s going to see a very crowded theatrical field in late 2021 and early 2022. We just don’t believe that just because there’s more content showing up in theaters, that’s going to dramatically improve the size of audiences in theaters.”

By choosing to bolster the new streaming service with its slate, AT&T and WarnerMedia have made “lemonade out of lemons,” and have maximized profits on what is a “spoiling asset,” Stankey explained. 

He added that there are “things on the margins” WarnerMedia might have done differently to sooth the company’s angry creative partners. But that WarnerMedia is well on its way to compensating producers, talent and guilds and soothing any sore feelings. 

Moving further along in 2021, Stanley said there will be “spikeyness” in regard to HBO Max’s subscriber growth, with major tentpole releases driving signups more than mid-range movies. 

“But we feel pretty good about where we are in the early innings of this,” he added. 

Verizon said that two-thirds of customers who signed up for a free promotional deal for a bundle of Disney Plus, Hulu and ESPN Plus have retained their service, following the end of the one-year promo.

Verizon didn’t disclose how many of those customers kept the entire $12.99 bundle vs. those who downgraded to individual services. 

Verizon began offering the bundle free with unlimited 4G LTE and 5G wireless plans during the November 2019 launch of Disney Plus, and it proved one of the key drivers to the new SVOD’s fast subscriber growth. 

The wireless company is open to more promotional tie-ups, its CEO told investors this morning. 

“We’re not going to have a hundred different type of offerings, but you know Discovery Plus and Disney Plus, they are so-called Super A brands we want to work with. We will look for more of these [as we see subscribers] willing to upgrade and to migrate,” Hans Vestberg said. 

Verizon, meanwhile, also reported the loss of 72,000 Fios TV subscribers in the fourth quarter, reducing its pay TV base to below 4 million. The company reported just 51,000 lost pay TV customers in the fourth quarter of 2019. 

"On the Fios side, of course, we will continue with the video right now," Vestberg told investors. 

Verizon added 95,000 Fios Internet users, up from 35,000 in the year-ago quarter. 

Also, for the very first time, Verizon’s moribund media division experienced revenue growth for the first time since it purchased Yahoo in 2017. The unit, which includes Yahoo, AOL and—up until recently—HuffPost, generated $2.3 billion in the fourth quarter, up 11.4% year over year. 

Verizon took a $119 million charge in the fourth quarter related to the sale of Huffpost to BuzzFeed. 

By every useful measure, 2020 was a pretty excellent year for Netflix.

Share prices were up 62% for 2020 (and up 117% after today’s post-earnings spike to nearly $600). Netflix added 37 million subscribers, up 22% to 203.6 million (though perhaps it’s better to think of Netflix’s one year of adds as nearly equal to all of Hulu’s customer base). The Big Red N even brought in more money than it spent, ringing up $25 billion in revenue, up 24%. 

That’s all great. Now what? 

In 2021, Netflix won’t have much time for a victory lap. The mass of competing subscription or hybrid services continues to grow, with ViacomCBS confirming this week that the rebuilt Paramount Plus goes wide March 4. P+ will join just-launched Discovery Plus and all the other newcomers of the past 15 months in an overstuffed battle for buyers’ attention.   

The tussle for viewer attention doesn’t stop there. This week, Fox-owned free, ad-supported service Tubi laid out its own sterling numbers in a piece pitching its charms to advertisers. Among those numbers: 58% growth in watch time in 2020, equaling some 2.5 billion hours, by 33 million monthly active users.  

That’s still far less than Netflix, but Tubi is almost certainly not unique in the growing appeal of its free streams of a wide array of pretty good, if not original and new, content. Tubi’s many FAST competitors also are finding lots of value-seeking refugees from the pay-TV bundle.

Together, the FASTs are starting to manifest significant viewership, with improving interfaces and  and better ad experiences, providing yet another way for TV viewers to not pay for Netflix. 

And execs such as Tubi Chief Content Officer Adam Lewinson make a useful point: the history of TV watching has mostly been about free, ad-supported content. Why won’t that be the case in streaming as a broader slice of the populace settles into the future?   

Netflix has taken an important step in its long-term financial strategy, announcing it no longer plans to issue billions of dollars of additional high-yield debt to finance its content splurges. 

Even better, the company expects to be permanently cash-flow positive by 2022. If it actually can achieve that (the company was cash-flow positive for much of 2020, but expects only to more or less break even in 2021). 

That may help quell one source of abiding investor angst, separating any troubling convergence in the trend lines for subscribers, revenue, expenses, and debt. Operating margin is supposed to grow 2 percentage points this year, good, though below the company’s own goals. That still grates on analysts’ nerves. 

“It is still hard to gauge the growth rate in program expenses from here,” Northlake Capital Management founder Steven Birenberg told the Observer. “Is there a point where they can drive global sub growth but dramatically slow the growth rate of content spend? There’s so much content now that you would think there is enough not renewed each year that they can just reinvest those savings into originals and there are still enough new shows and movies that subs grow and churn stays low.”

There are reasons for the analysts to chill out. Debt will get paid down to between $10 billion and $15 billion, the company has $8.2 billion in cash, and plans to repay a tranche of bonds coming due Feb. 1 out of cash on hand. Even better, it plans to start returning some money to shareholders, through share buybacks (as if a $600 share price wasn’t enough).  

So, the fundamentals of a reliable long-term balance sheet are starting to emerge, not just a giant shell game built on a promise of eventual profits. 

More importantly, Netflix is an international company in ways only Disney Plus, among its competitors, is close to emulating.

Already, five in six new Netflix households are overseas, the company said. And it has nearly as many overall subscribers in the Europe-Middle East-Africa region (66.7 million) as the United States and Canada (73.9 million). 

“We’re becoming an increasingly global service with 83% of our paid net adds in 2020 coming from outside the UCAN region.,’ says the company’s quarterly investor letter. “Our EMEA region accounted for 41% of our full-year paid net adds, while APAC was the second largest contributor to paid net additions with 9.3m (up 65% year over year).”

That’s a good thing. 

It’s worth noting the company’s new marketing campaign highlights its slate of weekly major movies. That compares to the Hollywood giants, who are gingerly busting their long-held distribution windows thanks to the pandemic. The most aggressive of those reshaped plans is HBO Max’s, for a blockbuster every three weeks or so. And WarnerMedia executives still say that’s a one-year plan, though few in Hollywood believe it. 

The bigger point, as Disney, WarnerMedia, Apple, Amazon and NBCUniversal tout the blockbusters they’ll bring to their platforms, is that Netflix continues to swamp them all in sheer volume, and often, in significant quality (Q4 awards contenders included Mank, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and The Midnight Sky). 

The real big news, though, is how Netflix takes care of all those international viewers, and how its competitors are going to have to evolve if they want to move beyond fighting for a tiny piece of an already saturated U.S. market.  

Already, one of Netflix’s biggest shows of 2021 isn’t made in the United States, or even in the English language. It’s the heist series Lupin, a French Netflix original that already has hit No. 2 in the United States. 

More importantly, it’s already hit No. 1 in France, Brazil, Italy, Argentina, Vietnam “and many more” of Netflix’s 192 or so territories. The company projects 70 million households will watch Lupin in its first 28 days, one of Netflix’s key metrics tracking the velocity of popularity for new shows. Expect to see more of those kinds of international hits lift Netflix in all the places its U.S. competitors can’t reliably go. 

So, the road to the next 200 million subscribers for Netflix doesn’t go through Hollywood, or even Silicon Valley. It’s a path to better balance sheet, with stops in just about every market in the world. 

Fox Corp. reported lower earnings in its fiscal fourth quarter as the COVID-19 pandemic cut into advertising revenues.

Net income fell to $122 million, or 20 cents a share, in the fourth quarter, from $454 million, or 73 cents a share, a year ago.

Revenues fell 4% to $2.51 billion.

Advertising revenues were down 22%. The company blamed lower local advertising at its TV stations, fewer live sports games and fewer hours of scripted programming at Fox Entertainment. Local advertising was down 35% at the stations, while Fox News ad revenues were up.

Distribution revenues were up 8%, led by Fox’s television segment.

At Fox’s cable networks, EBITDA rose 12% to $674 million from $602 million. Revenue slipped 2% to $1.27 billion from $1.3 billion. Earnings were up because of lower programming rights and production costs. 

Television EBITDA fell 21% to $169 million from $214 million a year ago. Revenue fell 6% to $1.11 billion. Ad revenues were down 29% to $184 million, despite the contributions from Tubi, which was acquired earlier this year. Affiliate revenues were up 22% thanks to increased fees from Fox affiliates and higher average rates from distributors.

“Fox delivered strong results for the fourth quarter and full fiscal year, even in spite of the unprecedented environment in which we all continue to operate, underscoring the strength of our brands and content offering,” said CEO Lachlan Murdoch. “We continue to expand the way audiences interact and connect with our brands while simultaneously diversifying and enhancing our revenue base. We entered the COVID-19 crisis on sound operational and financial footing and we expect to emerge from this pandemic more competitive, more focused and even more strongly positioned to deliver value for our viewers, partners and shareholders in the years ahead.” 

Pay TV providers are set to report the worst year in their history in terms of video customer losses, according to a handful of analysts. Yet, despite the losses and the increases in cord-cutting, cord-shaving and cord-nevering, those analysts are probably more optimistic about the future of the industry than they have been in years.

Comcast kicked off the fourth-quarter earnings season Jan. 23, reporting a decline of 149,000 video customers. The rest of the sector is expected to report in the coming weeks, with AT&T going on Jan. 29, Verizon Communications on Jan. 30 , Charter Communications on Jan. 31 and Altice USA on Feb. 12.

Cord-cutting has been on the rise for years: 2019 was worse than 2018, which was worse than 2017 and so on. Evercore ISI media analyst Vijay Jayant estimated cable would lose about 1.96 million video customers in 2019, up from the 1.26 million it lost in the prior year. Satellite-TV providers would see their losses more than double from 1.2 million in 2018 to 3.25 million in 2019, mainly due to heavy losses at DirecTV. Jayant estimated that DirecTV would lose about 800,000 video customers in Q4, down from the 1.1 million it lost in Q3.

Video Losses Aren’t Troubling

“Interestingly, complacency doesn’t seem to be an issue with respect to video,” Craig Moffett, MoffettNathanson principal and senior analyst, said in a note to clients. “There, cable investors seem to be keenly aware of the downside to estimates. It’s just that they (appropriately) don’t seem to care very much.

“The age of worrying about video subscriber losses finally seems to be behind us,” Moffett added. “Good riddance.”

But the fourth quarter, like the quarters behind it, will be characterized by broadband growth. Jayant estimated that cable operators will continue on their path of accounting for more than 100% of overall domestic broadband growth, adding 832,000 customers in Q4 compared to the addition of 612,000 in the same period last year.

“Cable’s clear speed advantage in roughly half the U.S. is driving continued strong share performance,” Jayant wrote. Jayant’s optimism for the sector is shown in his “outperform” ratings on Comcast and Charter (the top-rated stock in his coverage universe). Evercore ISI analyst James Ratcliffe has an “outperform” rating on Altice USA.

The slowdown affecting over-the-top providers also is expected to continue. Jayant predicted that virtual multichannel video programming distributors (vMVPDs) like SlingTV, AT&T TV Now, Hulu with Live TV, fubo TV and Philo would gain about 804,000 customers in 2018, less than half of the 2.3 million additions the sector enjoyed in 2018.

For the full year, Jayant estimates, pay TV subscribers (including OTT, cable, satellite and telco) will have declined by about 5.4 million, more than three times the 1.5 million the sector lost in 2018.

On the flip side, total cable, telco and satellite broadband subscriber additions are expected to reach 2.8 million in 2019, up 12% from the 2.5 million additions in 2018. Cable broadband adds are expected to be 3.1 million in 2019 (up nearly 15% from 2.7 million in 2018) while telcos are expected to lose 402,000 broadband customers, an increase over the 342,000 the sector lost in the prior year.

Mobile Share on the Rise

On the wireless front, Jayant wrote that while telcos Verizon and AT&T still dominate, cable managed to take some share in 2019, driven by higher net additions at Charter and the launch of Altice USA’s aggressive offering late in Q3.

Jayant predicted that the postpaid wireless base, including cable operator customers, increased by about 2.2 million in Q4, a rise of 160,000 subscribers year-over-year and 560,000 sequentially. He believes cable operators (mainly Comcast, Charter and Altice USA) captured about 25% of postpaid net additions in Q4 2019, up from 17% in the prior year.

Wireless, primarily a retention tool for other cable services, is starting to break out of that box as subscribers rise. Charter added a surprising 276,000 wireless customers in Q3 (most analysts had expected a gain of about 230,000) and Jayant sees the momentum continuing into Q4, with 263,000 additions. Overall, he estimates Charter will add about 923,000 wireless lines in 2019 (up from 134,000 in 2018) and 1.04 million in 2020. He sees Altice USA stepping on the wireless accelerator in Q4, adding about 80,000 wireless customers in 2019, rising to 550,000 additions in 2020.

Wireless growth is expected to return to Comcast after a bit of a slowdown. Jayant predicted the largest U.S. cable company will add about 778,000 wireless customers in 2019 (down from 855,000 in 2018), rising to 909,000 additions in 2020.

21st Century Fox executive chairman Lachlan Murdoch opened the company's fourth quarter earnings call Wednesday with a statement about Fox News Channel, which he noted "has been the news over the past few weeks."

He said the company "moved quickly and decisively to protect the business, protect its employees and protect the unique voice Fox News broadcasts."

He did not mention former Fox News chairman Roger Ailes by name. Ailes resigned last month after being accused of sexual harassment by former FNC anchor Gretchen Carlson.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.

21st Century Fox reported higher net income for its fiscal fourth quarter.

Net income rose to $567 million, or 30 cents a share, from $87 million, or 6 cents a share, a year ago, when the company had costs associated with the sale of Sky and Endemol Shine Group. Segment operating income was $1.45 billion, compared with $1.54 billion last year.

Revenue rose 7% to $6.65 billion.

"We delivered full-year revenue and earnings growth on the strength of gains in affiliate and advertising revenues despite considerable foreign exchange headwinds and difficult film comparisons," said executive chairmen Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch.

21st Century Fox's cable network programming segment reported flat operating income in the quarter despite a 10% increase in revenue. Revenue was up 10%, but expenses rose 15% as sports programming costs went up and political coverage costs increased at Fox News Channel.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.