Welcome, everyone, to our next session. It's a pleasure to welcome to this conference for the first time, Chris Winfrey, the President and CEO of Charter Communications. Chris, thanks so much for, for being with us.
Thanks for having us here.
All right. We're gonna have a lot that we're gonna wanna zoom in on, but I think we'll start by zooming out, just take a little bit of a high-level view before we dig into things. And, you know, you stepped into the CEO role late last year. You've held senior roles at the company for over a decade. Shortly after your appointment, you announced a multi-year strategic plan for Charter. Can you highlight some of the key steps you're taking to position Charter for the next decade of growth?
Sure. So back last December, we held an investor meeting, talked about really our strategy in terms of three E's. The first one being evolution, which is our network evolution. Second being convergence, as well as the rollout of Xumo, which is about to take place soon. The second E is expansion, and most people know all about our rural build program, the nation's largest rural builder now, but also inside footprint for residential SMB and commercial and enterprise, really is an opportunity for us as well. And then finally, the third E is expansion, which is the digitization of our service and investing in our employees, so that we get tenure, so that we get higher quality service.
Inside the company, you know, the way that, you know, in this first year that I've been talking about it is, if you said to a cable person, "You're gonna get to do the largest network build that's taken place since the 1980s, you're gonna get... Or you're gonna get to do the largest physical upgrade that's taken place since the 1990s, or you're gonna get to do convergence in a way that's really been done, not been done anywhere else in the world this way." You know, any one of those would make a cable career, and we get the really the opportunity to go do all three at the same time.
One of the key points is cable, you know, through the decades, has had an opportunity to continue to reinvent itself through new products and new services, and being at the forefront of that is exciting.
All right. Well, you made some news last week, so let's, let's jump into that. As everyone here knows, Spectrum customers cannot watch ESPN channels right now, including ESPN. You had a presentation to the investment community last week where you, you articulated some of the key reasons this has happened. And in particular, you expressed your view that the video ecosystem is broken, in part because programmers have devalued their content by making it available on their streaming platforms, and that the model you have proposed to Disney is the model that you will pursue with all your programmers going forward. When I listened to some of the things I heard you say on that call last week, they were very similar to things I've heard Tom say on this stage for going back almost a decade.
Yeah.
My question is, why is this happening now?
Look, it's the... I should start off first by saying I apologize that our consumers have been put in the middle here, but we felt it was worth it, it was the right time, and that we had to say enough is enough, or else we're gonna have to move on to a different model, and I'll come back to what that is. But the issue is the combination of, you know, prices from the programmers continue to go up at rates that far exceed CPI. That's the first one. Secondly, with what's called minimum penetrations and tying, we're forced to deliver packages and programming channels to customers that they don't want or they can't afford, and we're not getting the flexibility to make it satisfying for the customer.
And the third is that, you know, to compound it, what's taken place is those very rich linear fees that our customers are paying to the programmers are then being funneled into direct-to-consumer products, not available to them unless they pay twice. And when you take a look back and say, "Is that really fair, and is that sustainable?" You know, we've always thought about the video business as being an asset to our broadband connectivity business, and I think it's on the verge of flipping and where it's becoming a liability. And the way we think about it is, anything that we put on a bill, we have to be proud of.
You know, the product that we deliver and the price that customers are asked to pay for, it's on our bill, and we have to be proud of it, and it has to stick, and customers need to feel like they chose it, and that they're willing to pay for it because there's value, and, and we've crossed that point. One of the big issues that we see with all the programmers is that, you know, the capital markets have had a hand in this, is that they're focused on direct-to-consumer businesses as if it was a completely separate business. I don't think it's a separate business. If you have linear programming, you have to take a look at the two together. You have a consolidated set of cash flows, and you've got to think about it.
The idea that you could solve for direct-to-consumer profitability, which doesn't exist today, by letting your linear programming house burn to the ground, which is where all your cash flow comes from, that's what they feel like they've committed to do, and that's not a good outcome. And so that's part of the reason we talked to our investors on Friday is to say, "There's a better path, and we think we can help create that." At the end of the day, it's gonna be Disney who decides, but if we can't get to, you know, that type of model, the alternative world, when you think about it, is pretty interesting.
If you had an environment where we no longer carry Disney content, which is becoming more and more of a potential reality, you have to say, "Well, what other additional sports content would you renew?" You know, at that point, there's very little. And so you'd have a smaller base of customers, but you'd have a smaller package with a much better price, and it would be a package of general entertainment content that customers actually wanted, watched, and valued. And it would stick, and it could actually grow from that point. And it doesn't mean that you wouldn't sell sports. You could still have a reseller, virtual MVPD relationship with, you know, any of those that are out there.
That could be economically beneficial to us, and it would be self-selecting for customers who are actually looking and willing to pay that type of price for sports content. And around all of that, we could sell direct to consumer and SVOD products. And if you think about that ability to go to market with that patchwork of video product, you could actually make sure that your broadband connectivity customer has complete selection of what they're looking to buy, and they're willing to pay the price that's on the bill. And that's an environment where, you know, we could actually be proud of what we're doing. So I think that's a pretty good picture. It's certainly great for the consumer. It might even be pretty good for us as well over time.
... It's interesting, it's almost the exact opposite of what I think a lot of people have assumed for a long time, which was that general entertainment would all go to streaming and sports would live forever in linear. I think you're saying it, it really might be the other way, that sports is better served on a DTC basis.
Look, in the end, it's all gone à la carte.
Yeah.
And the value of the big expanded package with everything loaded in, forcing it down customers who don't want, don't value, or can't afford that content, it's not gonna work anymore unless we put real value in it.
Yeah, you've already gone through the first weekend of college football without ESPN. You could very likely go through Monday Night Football, big game, without ESPN. What are the consequences in your mind of not resolving this quickly? And do you have a sense of urgency on your end to resolve it quickly?
Look, we all have a sense of urgency to resolve it quickly because our customers are stuck in the middle. These are not just our customers; these are Disney customers as well. And so we have a responsibility to try to solve it quickly. Look, we're sitting here today. If I had anything material to highlight, I would. So that should tell you something in terms of, you know, how we're doing. But it's early in the game, and as more video customers who value sports content, as they migrate to alternative sources, our incentive to actually go to do the deal that we're trying to do goes down because the average customer who remains is not gonna be the sports viewer, and therefore, you're gonna be thrusting upon them cost and value that they don't actually value.
And so, I think it's in our interest, to answer your question, all of our interests, to try to, you know, make a decision really very quickly, where are we gonna go? And if we're moving on, that's okay. I think we can do that in a way that might actually create more value for consumers and will be good for us. I don't think it's good for the rest of the video ecosystem, and, as a long time... You know, my entire career has been in cable. I can't say that's what I'm, you know, necessarily chasing, but if it's in the best interest of Charter shareholders and it's the best interest of our consumers, you know, that's certainly where we're gonna go.
What can you share about any conversations you've had with other programmers? Have they contacted you to see if they can figure this out? Because to your point, if you reach a new arrangement or you don't reach an arrangement with Disney and someone's not supposed to renew with you for three years, that's like infinity from now.
Yeah. Look, carriage—I'm not gonna go into individual carriage agreements, but renewals have tended to be shorter because of the uncertainty in the marketplace, so there's less long-term deals out there. The interest in what we're proposing is very high, and it's not new. You know, we've had these conversations with different programmers. Some of this model exists already in the marketplace anyway, so I'm not gonna pick on any individual programmer. But I think there's a real understanding that if you want to preserve the overall value in the ecosystem for consumers and for programmers, this is the right model. This is the way it needs to go. And so we've already had a bunch of reach outs.
We've already had a lot of people who would, despite the fact that we've been a little busy, would like to, you know, either do something outside of a renewal or actually accelerate a renewal with this in context. And so I'm pretty confident that we can get this in place. Look, at the end, Disney's the linchpin. ESPN's the linchpin. And I don't mean that in a bad way, I mean it in a very complimentary way. They have the opportunity to lead here and drive the industry, and if it works, it's gonna be because of them. And so I'm rooting for them to, you know, in some sense, to make that decision, and if not, then we'll go the path. But to your point, I think that happens...
You know, it's, it's not gonna go on forever. It's not gonna go on forever.
Okay. You talked about convergence in sort of your opening remarks. I want to spend a bit of time on that.
Sure.
You know, your lead go-to-market offer now is a converged service bundle. Spectrum One includes fixed, it includes Wi-Fi, includes mobility. To what extent do you see convergence primarily as a product strategy versus a network strategy?
Look, I think it's a product and a network strategy. The fact is that we have a really unique structural advantage inside of the marketplace. We have a wireline network everywhere we provide mobile. We have gigabit Wi-Fi everywhere that we provide service. And we have 5G radio coverage, umbrella coverage, which actually is the slowest radio that we have on our network is 5G. And it's a really attractive product. It's the ability to combine internet and Wi-Fi and mobile all together in a seamless way. So we have the fastest internet, we have the fastest mobile, fastest Wi-Fi. We have the fastest mobile because we have the fastest Wi-Fi. And we're able to, at the same time, have the best product, and whether it's on a standalone basis or together, we save customers significant amounts of money.
You know, on mobile alone, it's hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year. So when you have a better product and you have better price, and on top of that, I have what I think is a long-term structural advantage. So this isn't a first-mover advantage, I think it's a structural advantage.
But as you pointed out, it is hybrid in terms of using your own infrastructure and using someone else's infrastructure.
Yes.
The big wireless carriers are skeptical of this model. They say as new use cases for 5G emerge and the variable component of your business model escalates, it's gonna be hard to scale. How are you thinking about the necessity of operating mobile infrastructure in a more significant way?
Well, you know, the Wi-Fi radios that we have, it is, they're cellular radios, and so, you know, we have a tremendous amount of cellular radios. It's where 87% of our traffic takes place today. We have purchased spectrum in CBRS, and we're doing targeted deployments to CBRS along the way to do additional offload. But the key point is that umbrella coverage that today is covering 13% of our traffic, we have a really good relationship with Verizon. It's good for us, it's good for them, and I think it's gonna last for, you know, for a very long time.
... I spent some time talking about sort of the central product in the bundle, which is your broadband product.
Yes.
You know, since the early part of last year, you and your peers have been adding subscribers at a materially slower clip, and we've talked a lot about the reasons why. Some of it's the market activity, some of it's shifts in the competitive environment. How are you thinking about the long-term subscriber growth potential for Charter, and what advantages do you see Charter having in the broadband market that should push you to a higher cadence of growth over time?
Sure. I think the biggest thing that we have going for us is that demand continues to go up significantly, and there's no sign that consumer demand for bandwidth is gonna go static or decline, and so that's the best thing we have for us. We have gigabit wireline service everywhere we operate. We're gonna have symmetrical and multi-gig speeds everywhere we operate. It's very different from some of the overbuilders. We're not redlining. We're not cherry-picking, whatever you wanna call it. We have ubiquitous coverage of that wireline footprint, and it's gigabit today, and it's multi-gigabit in the future, and it combines with mobile in a way that none of our competitors really can do today and nor have a foreseeable path to do. And like I said before, you get to save customers lots of money.
When you think about that product all put together, nobody else has that product. Nobody else has that speed. Nobody else has the ability to save customers money in that way. And then you take a look at our penetration and say, "We are under-penetrated in internet, and we're certainly under-penetrated in convergence," and that's gonna provide a long runway of growth, and particularly as the consumer demand for bandwidth increases over time.
One of the headwinds recently has been, I think, the surprising early success of fixed wireless. AT&T and Verizon have now cleared their remaining C-band spectrum licenses a little earlier than they'd expected. AT&T has already launched in a handful of markets their own fixed wireless product, and obviously, T-Mobile continues to move along. What have you learned from facing fixed wireless competition for almost two years, and are you expecting any incremental competitive impacts, or do you think you know how to navigate this marketplace right now?
Look, the original, or initial success of fixed wireless access shows that there is a niche market for limited bandwidth, limited capacity, and limited reliability products that exist in the marketplace and arguably has always existed in the marketplace. But as consumer bandwidth needs increase over time, and as the network capacity of these mobile networks shrinks as a result of the utilization, I think fixed wireless access turns into really just another form of DSL, particularly when you take a look at the capabilities of our network today, where we're going with high-split DOCSIS 4.0, consumer demand. And so I think it turns into the next DSL and forms a place of acquisition. Interestingly enough, it's not a price advantage.
I know it looks that way, but, you know, if you take internet and mobile together, which everybody does, you know, we have not only faster products, more reliable products, but already today, you know, we have better pricing.
Let's talk about your network strategy. You know, you outlined a phased upgrade that should enable you to deliver considerably faster speeds. What gives you confidence that you will be able to compete with increased fiber deployments in your footprint, which are rolling out not super fast, but chugging along, and broadly speaking, the confidence that you're not gonna have to further increase the capital intensity of the upgrade?
So the competitive overbuilds have slowed down, because not only the financing cost is higher, but I don't think any of it was positive ROI to begin with, and I think the market's waking up to that. And so the overbuild has not stopped, but it's slowed down. The other key piece is that if you think about our high split in DOCSIS 4.0 network evolution path, it's a path that over three years, which is relatively short, every single passing inside of our footprint will be upgraded to symmetrical and multi-gig speeds, and we can do that for $100 per passing, which is dramatically lower than any of our competitors in terms of where they can build. And not only that, it's not cherry-picking, it's not redlining, it's everywhere. It's ubiquitous coverage, which gives you marketing and sales and service capabilities.
So I think we have, you know, really an interesting path forward there. It brings the benefit of not only having marketing claims in a portion of your footprint, but having marketing claims in front of our entire footprint. Somebody could say, "Chris, that's a lot of money to go spend for marketing claims." But you have to think back to every single time that cable has upgraded its networks for faster speeds. There weren't products at that time that were capable of utilizing that bandwidth. But the unique thing about cable is because, as an industry, we've moved together to do these upgrades, you provide a ubiquitous platform. We don't redline. You know, it's not splotchy. It's everywhere we operate.
You're gonna end up with that inside the U.S., where you're gonna have symmetrical multi-gig speeds everywhere on our planet, which is almost the entire country, which gives product developers and software developers a platform to go develop the next generation of products and services that need and use that bandwidth. If it's only a fraction of the country, there's not enough coverage to make it worthwhile, but if you've got the entire country covered or committed to have the entire country covered, which we have, you drive the demand for new products and services, which drives significant demand for the power that exists inside of our networks. That's been shown time and time again, and you know, I expect the same thing to take place here.
You're not just upgrading the network, you're expanding network, particularly into rural communities. You're about two years into the project. You're running ahead of your penetration targets. What have you learned so far, and why do you think you're doing better than you expected?
You know, the reality is that we have very compelling products, and they have not existed inside of this footprint, and it's not just internet. So even as something as mundane as wireline telephone. These are markets that have had high-priced telephone before. They now have attractively priced telephone, but obviously mobile, we can save tons of money together with our internet and even video, no matter what that product ends up looking like. It'll be a good product for customers, no matter which way we go. And so it's the demand for those type of products that haven't existed inside that footprint. We're getting faster take-up than we expected, and as a result, I expect our ROIs, or return on investment, will be better than what we initially planned.
What do you think could cause you to even further expand that footprint, whether it's BEAD money or something else?
Well, today, you know, we started out with the rural construction, really, as a merger commitment, which we thought would be very difficult, which was upstate New York, and we actually found out that we were able to get these high penetrations, that we could build at scale, and that there was a real model that sat behind. It was somewhat fortuitous because RDOF came following that, and we ended up being the largest participant in RDOF, and we've had success there. We've been able to build at scale, do it at a cost that is very good for passing, because we're getting more passings than we initially planned. And then state grants have come about together with ARPA and other dollars, and we're winning in those footprints as well. We're ahead of target for our rural build.
We could actually be going faster. If we got some help on pole permits and make- ready, we'd actually be able to construct faster. So that leaves us now continuing to bid and win in these state grant environments and execute on all the other pieces. But BEAD coming around the corner is being allocated on a state-by-state basis, as you know. We did not get all of the guidelines and the NTIA instructions that we were hoping for. In fact, some of those are unhelpful to private capital. But we are working with the states who have the capability to request waivers or make modifications, to make sure that it's gonna work for us and work for others, and make sure that we maximize the amount of homes that are getting built out for broadband.
I'm confident that in the states that we operate, they'll have an incentive to go make that happen, and so I'm still really optimistic around BEAD, but it's a little trickier than we originally were hoping for.
Earlier, we were talking about the subscriber trajectory, which has obviously slowed a bit. The ARPU side of the equation has been pretty firm. You've continued to grow your broadband ARPU. Your peers have continued to grow their broadband ARPUs. Looking ahead, what do you see as the key drivers of broadband ARPU? How do you think about price increases versus up tiering?
Mm-hmm.
What's the balance you're trying to strike between ARPU growth and subscriber growth?
Yeah. I know it's maybe not always the most popular thing to say, but our strategy is consistent. We've always thought that the best way to grow in the marketplace was to have higher penetration, to have, you know, good prices and high value for your customers. And as a result, by having higher penetration on a fixed number of passings, your cost per subscriber to operate the network is lower, which allows you actually to have both more revenue as well as lower cost to serve per customer, which allows you to keep your prices lower than they would be otherwise, which allows you to be more competitive, not only today, but more competitive in the future.
In a less attractive place to go in terms of where, I would say, poorly designed ROI capital is being deployed, is less likely to be targeted our footprint, because we've managed to have a volume-focused or customer-friendly operating strategy that drives penetration. Now, having said that, are there opportunities? You know, you do see ARPU growth at Charter at the same time. Are there opportunities to grow our ARPU further by providing more value through tiering and ARPU and additional services? Absolutely. In fact, you could think about mobile. And what's unique for us, we don't think about mobile as a product. We think of it as an extension of our broadband product and connectivity service.
So we're growing broadband on a standalone basis, but if you really want to take a look at what's taking place with convergence and seamless connectivity, you should look at the ARPU combined of those relationships. We also, in fairness, we've not been immune to inflation, and so we have taken-
Obviously, you've been having great traction with Spectrum One, and this has all happened even as industry-wide volumes have been decelerating.
Mm-hmm. Correct.
You have, your first cohort of subscribers who took Spectrum One beginning to get to the end of the promotional period, meaning that they would have to start paying-
Yeah.
-for some of the services that were free. What steps are you-
They're good products, they're good customers. And the price point, yes, it's true for that particular line. You know, they have a paying bill with us already today, but that particular line, it's gonna go from $0 to $30. But you have the fastest product in the marketplace at the best possible price. With that $30, we save customers a tremendous amount of money, hundreds of dollars a year, maybe even $1,000 a year. So it sticks. We also have the experience over the past couple of months. We were, prior to launching Spectrum One, we trialed a variety of different packages, Spectrum One being obviously the winner of that, in a variety of different markets, multiple markets, some of them large, some of them medium-sized. And what we were...
You know, to see which way we were gonna ultimately go, which means that a year on, starting in July, we've had the ability to see these customers roll and to measure the churn, and it is below our expectations.
Mm-hmm.
And so we're really confident of what that means when it happens at scale, beginning in October. It'll stick.
Right. You know, a key point of differentiation between your wireless plans and the national carriers' wireless plans is service pricing. You really draw people with value for service. That's sort of the opposite of the playbook that the big guys like to use. It's always something that's a little bit more promotional, such as a handset. Sometimes they throw in free content. How do you think about leveraging those promotional tools? Do you think you will inevitably need to, in order to reach a bigger part of the market, or do you think you have a lot of runway on the existing plan?
...Look, I think we have tremendous runway because of the value that we provide the customer. And if you think about, so I think we're under-penetrated for both the mobile product and particularly the converged product that we have. Not only is it faster, it works better, seamless connectivity, gigabit wireless everywhere you go. But our strategy has always been to focus on the value of the service that we provide and thinking about fastest speeds, thinking about best price. You know, anybody can give away phones, but at the end of the day, if you don't have the best service and you don't have the best cost for that service, I don't think you win.
Right now we're winning because we have the best service, and we have the best price in the marketplace, and we have the ability to sustain that for a prolonged, you know, for a very prolonged period of time. Our network coverage is increasing, and, you know, and it's going over Wi-Fi.
All right, so we just talked about your confidence in retaining the wireless customers who are part of Spectrum One. Another part of your customer base we've been getting asked about is the portion that's been able to take advantage of the Affordable Connectivity Program.
Yes.
That program has to get... There's recertifications, there's reauthorization. You appear to be the biggest provider of service to people who qualify. How are you thinking about the risk profile of that customer base? What's your confidence level they'll be able to stay with Charter?
Yes. Well, let me start by saying we've really gotten behind the program. We're a believer. It's ACP has brought new customers into the fold who wouldn't have had broadband otherwise, and it's allowed customers who would have been coming in and out of the broadband market due to affordability issues, to remain connected, both for homework as well as for remote work. So we're really proud of our participation in that. This is not a partisan issue, it's a bipartisan issue. It's a red and blue coverage of customers that are benefiting from this, so I'm still really hopeful that it gets refunded. But if it doesn't, at the end of the day, many of these customers were existing Spectrum Internet customers to begin with. Secondly, we do have low-income broadband programs.
We've always had that, so we can preserve those and try to keep the dollars that they contribute into the package low. What I mean by that, most of our customers, most of the ACP, the vast majority, are taking flagship or above, and so they are paying, and so we have places we can move them with a low-income broadband. Maybe most importantly, if somebody calls up and says, "Look, I, I need to save money," which is usually how the conversation starts, "I have a, I have a great way for you to save money. You know, if you have a-- if you have two mobile lines in a household, you're probably paying $140-$150 a month.
If you take it from Spectrum, forget about the first-year promotion, where it'd be $30 for two lines, but if you take it from Spectrum, it's $60. It's $1,000 of savings a year. So I can fund your broadband. I can fund a lot of broadband by saving you money with mobile, which is an interesting and really consumer-friendly way to preserve that relationship. So I don't want it to happen. I think it should get refunded. I think it's been a very good program, but we have a number of tools available to us to preserve that relationship, and it all starts with having a high-quality service.
Let's talk a bit about your commercial business. About 13% of your total revenues come out of your commercial segment. It's actually shown decent growth despite a kind of choppy macro environment. How are you thinking about the opportunity in the business segment? You know, especially as the telcos are increasingly looking to roll out fiber to some of the enterprise and particularly SMB customers they haven't served before.
So when you think of the fiber space, you know, there's really two pieces of our commercial. It's enterprise and it's SMB. And in the enterprise, which is the more customized product, typically all, you know, it's all fiber. And we're doing extremely well in that space. Sales are up significantly, which then converts eventually into revenue, despite the fact that cell tower backhaul has really been on a decline. And so enterprise is doing extremely well. SMB has always been a grower. We're also similarly under-penetrated in the SMB space. Honestly, I think the SMB side is facing some of the short-term headwinds that we've seen in residential as it relates to fixed wireless access. Still growing, but less than what it should be or is capable of doing.
You know, that there are certain businesses that have very low capacity, low bandwidth need, as the minority, but as that's filled, it's stunted the growth a little bit for SMB, and the same issue for residential as that capacity gets filled and as consumer data bandwidth needs increase, I expect SMB to be back where it was in terms of growth. So we're really pleased with what we've got on the commercial side.
All right. So the reason everyone cares about all this stuff is about EBITDA and EBITDA growth and cash generation of the business. And despite the slowdown in broadband subscriber growth and a bumpy macro, you've continued to grow the company's EBITDA.
Yes.
How are you thinking about the key drivers of operating leverage from here?
So operating leverage, the best way to go get it is through more revenue. Same thing, by the way, for capital intensity. People focus on capital intensity. If you have more revenue, you have lower capital intensity. And the way you get more revenue is by having higher penetration and earning rate, all the things that we just talked about. What we haven't talked about is the cost side of the equation, where, you know, maybe the, the biggest opportunity that we have is through digitization of our service. It's really untapped. We've been making investments in that space for some time with machine learning, bots, you know, not full-blown AI as of yet.
But really, the idea there isn't about cost reduction, it's about meeting the customer where they want to go and providing a more efficient service for not only our customers, but providing a more efficient front-end platform and service platform for our agents. Which, together with investments in our employees, which drives tenure, actually reduces our cost to serve through having less transactions. Then the final point I'd make is that as we get through the network evolution, which is the high-split and the DOCSIS 4.0, all the actives in the footprint are gonna be... You know, all the parts in the car will be new, for the first time in a long time.
So our operating cost, our trouble call, truck rolls will go down, our operating costs will be lower as a result, and the need to expand the network capacity, you know, we'll have ample capacity for years to come, and so you get an OpEx and a capital reduction on the back end. So I feel pretty good about our operating leverage over time. But again, it all starts with having great products and services and being able to sell. You know, Tom, you know, who you said has been here for, in Charter's capacity, at least a decade, you know, always said, "There's no problem in cable that's too big that more cable sales won't solve." And that remains true today.
When you think about some of the things you've talked about, you know, you just, you just hit on some of the investments you've made in the business that have impacted OpEx, and you're getting to the point where you're gonna start seeing more operating leverage there.
Mm-hmm.
You outlined late last year the investment that you're gonna make in the network. We sort of have a good feel for what that means for CapEx-
Yes
... over the medium term. As of last week, you are now addressing some structural changes that you think are necessary in the video business, and we'll get some insight as to what we have to work through as you reach or don't reach agreements. Is there anything else that you think you need to address to position Charter going forward, or do you feel like it's increasingly gonna be about executing against this foundation you're putting in place?
Yeah, you've made me realize what a busy year it's been. No, I think we have all the tools in front of us for doing all the right things. The team is executing very well. And I don't see anything else on the horizon that drives significant capital investments, and right now it comes down to just executing very well on what we've laid out. You know, there are other opportunities that could come along the way that are more inorganic. And the sizing of the rural opportunity remains a little bit variable based on the conditions that are placed on BEAD, as well as our success in that. But otherwise, we're lock and load and focused on execution.
What would an inorganic opportunity have to accomplish for Charter to be worth it?
You know, we've always felt that cable assets, properly run, can create a lot of value for shareholders, and if you can acquire them at the right price, and if you're able to make them grow, sometimes after an investment period, to put them in a position to grow, you know, that we're very excited about those opportunities. The downside right now is, you know, all of the remaining cable companies of size are either family-controlled or family-owned, so we don't get to decide when that takes place. But I think everybody knows who we are. I think we would make a great partner for, you know, any of those companies when they're ready.
I think from a regulatory standpoint, the fact that we have a consumer-friendly operating strategy, putting politics aside, means that anybody would take a look at those footprints and know that we're committed to having high-quality products, saving customers money, in-house service in our footprint, which means more jobs, and saving them money on mobile, and providing better connectivity, and expanding into rural areas. You know, we're good for the communities that we serve, and if we had more of it, we would extend that, those policies, those practices, to a broader footprint. You know, again, politics aside, I think the regulatory argument could be very good.
All right, Chris, it's been great having you here-
Thanks.
And we certainly look forward to having you back in the future.
Thank you. Thanks a lot.