Even for Charter Communications, a company that actually added 56,000 video users in 2020, it seems like the end days in regard to traditionally bundled linear pay TV. 

With U.S. pay TV operators losing another 6 million customers last year, Charter’s chairman and CEO, Tom Rutledge said bundled linear services are being “priced out of the market” by lower cost direct-to-consumer streaming platforms.

Speaking Tuesday at Morgan Stanley’s annual Technology, Media & Telecom conference, Rutledge said Charter will remain in the video business. But he seemed to describe a future in which the cable company resells third-party OTT services. 

“It’s important that we be a video connectivity company as well as a broadband company and a mobile company,” Rutledge said. “We need to satisfy a customer’s full range of connectivity issues.

“I think we can manage our video relationships with customers going forward and we can sell streaming packages and be a storefront and an aggregator,” he added. “The industry will segment into much narrower niches. People still spend a lot of time on the big screen and there’s an opportunity there for us to be the best provider of those products because of our customer relationships, and to have a higher-quality product and a more valuable product.”

Rutledge also pointed out that from Disney Plus on down, none of the direct-to-consumer services recently launched have been nearly as profitable as linear pay TV was just a few short years ago.

“The new streaming and on-demand products really haven’t been successful from a linear perspective yet,” Rutledge said.

Perhaps the most surprising comment during an active week of first-quarter earnings reports came from Charter Communications Chairman and CEO Tom Rutledge, who revealed that his cable company has had discussions—seemingly recent—about licensing X1 from Comcast.

“We've had discussions with [Comcast] about licensing their X1 platform and their new IP video platform," Rutledge said during Charter’s Q1 earnings call, responding to the very last investment analyst question. "And if we can make that the best platform for us, we'd certainly be willing to do that, and we think they'd be a great provider."

Related: Charter’s Rutledge: 'We’ve Had Discussions' With Comcast About Licensing X1

Comcast, of course, licenses its X1 advanced video delivery platform to the No. 3 cable company in the U.S., Cox Communications, as well as all three major cable operators in Canada, Rogers Communications, Shaw Communications and Videotron.

But Charter is years and hundreds of millions of dollars down the line, developing and deploying its own Spectrum Guide cloud-based video system. This initiative not only includes the $135 million joint purchase of the key technology vendor for that platform’s UI, ActiveVideo, but also development of the WorldBox QAM/IP hybrid set-top platform, jointly cooked with Cisco.

So recent were these talks?

Rutledge’s mention of an “IP video platform” seems to be a reference to Comcast’s just announced Xfinity Flex service, which provides some indicator.

Speaking to numerous unnamed sources, Light Reading reported that members of Charter’s video team had visited Comcast’s home town of Philadelphia within the last several weeks.

Would Charter actually consider switching to X1 syndication?

According to Light Reading, these talks between Comcast and Charter have gone on for years.

It doesn’t appear as though X1 has a marked churn-reducing advantage over Spectrum Guide, with Comcast shedding 371,000 video customers in 2018 vs. Charter’s 244,000.

And Rutledge seemed to stop the speculation right where it started, noting, “We like having our own UI, and we like having the ability to change that UI at the pace we want to change it and have it reflect our marketing strategy.

“If we could check all the boxes in terms of flexibility and low cost, we could be a vendor of Comcast and their platform,” he added. “But to date, we haven’t been able to do that.”