Post-Merger, Charter Has the Scale to Start Thinking Beyond the Cord

A quixotic endeavor? Not to Rutledge. The Charter chairman and CEO, regarded as one of the cable biz’s top operational minds, has pledged to hire 20,000 employees post-merger to boost customer service, on top of the new company’s workforce of nearly 90,000. “We intend to continually improve the way we do business in order to be the very best at what we do,” he said after the three-way merger closed last week, following a year of regulatory reviews. He’s not all talk. Since taking the helm in 2012, Rutledge has upped Charter’s customer-satisfaction ratings on the American Customer Satisfaction Index, as TW Cable’s already bottom-of-the-barrel scores have drifted lower in each of the past four years. Charter held steady at 4.3 million residential cable TV subscribers at the end of 2015, flat for the year — but a win given that the pay-TV industry overall shrank by 385,000 subscribers (down 0.4%), according to Leichtman Research Group.

Rutledge’s initial focus will be the massive undertaking of integrating the three companies’ sales, billing, and technology teams and systems, which he has acknowledged will be a “tremendously complex” two-year process. For example, Charter will now have 11 regional operating divisions, up from four. But the potentially new-and-improved Charter may soon have to think outside the box. The company — along with its pay-TV peers and rivals — must face the increasing prospect of cord-cutting amid a groundswell of new broadband-video services. Analysts expect Charter, now that it has the muscle to negotiate more flexible programming deals, to break the unwritten rule of the cable fraternity and launch a nationwide internet-TV service. Dish Network has done that with Sling TV; AT&T is gearing up to take DirecTV over-the-top later in 2016; and Hulu has pegged a 2017 launch for a live TV package.