Harmonic said that it added six new customers in the fourth quarter for its cloud-based virtualized cable access solution, Cable OS, including an unnamed “Tier 1 North American cable operator.”
Since we already know that Comcast entered into a $175 million multi-year deal in 2019 to deploy CableOS, process of deductive reason suggests there aren’t too many other Tier 1s on the continent. Notably, Raymond James analyst Simon Leopold wrote in a note to investors that revenue from Charter Communications could become “meaningful” for Harmonic in 2022.
Also read: Harmonic Touts Another CableOS Customer Win: Taiwan’s TWT Digital Communication
As for 2020, the Silicon Valley-based Harmonic finished with 44 cable operator customers for CableOS worldwide, up 91% from the fourth quarter of 2019. The software product is now reaching 2.6 million cable modems globally, up 149% year over year.
Speaking to investors, Harmonic president and CEO Patrick Harshman conceded that the global cable access tech business is “still in the early stage of market transformation” to software virtualization.
“CableOS has so far been rolled out to only approximately 5% of the over 50 million cable modem served by our early customers,” he said.
For the full 2020 frame, Harmonic reported total revenue of $378.8 million, down 6% year over year. But Q4 revenue was up 7.7% to $131.5 million.
And annual revenue from the company’s cable segment grew 56% on an adjusted basis after excluding the one-time upfront revenue benefit of $37.5 million from the $175 million CableOS software license agreement with Comcast.
