Paul Allen-backed cable company Charter Communications issued its Q1 08 earnings report this morning and for once the news was, well, if not good, then not terrible either. The struggling operator posted decent financials, with revenues and cash flow rising around 11% year-over-year and high-speed, telephony and digital TV services growing at fairly good (albeit slowing) rates.
The best news for Charter is a slow-down in the loss of its basic customers. From Q4 07 to Q1 08, Charter lost 11,900 basic video customers, not the best of news but better than the 66,400 customer lost during Q4 07. (Download our spreadsheet data for Charter to get a closer look. All the data is adjusted pro forma to take into account the complex system swaps and sales Charter has engaged in over the past few years.)
Still, at the end of the quarter Charter served 5.2 million basic subscribers, representing a penetration rate of only 44%, one of the lowest penetration rates in the industry.
Making up for this decline was strong growth in other subscriptions. Charter gained 102,800 net new digital customers during the quarter, a run-rate sharply up over Q4 07 and Q1 07 levels. By quarter's end, Charter served 4.3 million digital customers representing 58% of basic subs.
High-speed data grew by a net 85,700 customers, down by a third over net gains for Q1 07 but up around 70% over Q4 07 net broadband gains. At the end of the quarter, Charter had 2.7 million high-speed customers, representing about a quarter of the homes capable of buying the service.
Charter gained about 125,700 net telephony customers during the quarter, on par with Q1 07 net voice gains but down from the surge of 155,300 net new telephone customers added during Q4 07. Charter had topped the million-customer mark for telphony by quarter's end.
Total revenues rose 11% year-over-year to $1.6 billion while operating cash flow rose by the same percentage to $545 million.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:46 PM | Print | Comments (0)(Updated commentary at the end of the post.)
MG Siegler has this well-justified rant against uber-tech news site Ars Technica. His basic complaint is that Ars Technica is "really good at stealing other's ideas" because they ripped off a piece he did likening the global spread of the iPhone to the game of Risk. MG links back to an earlier piece by Duncan Riley that makes the same point.
It's true that great minds think alike and that ideas can arise among many people simultaneously. It's called synchronicity or zeitgeist or sometimes just coincidence. We all see it all the time and we know it when we see it.
That's not the case with Ars Technica. What MG doesn't mention is that I complained about this very issue back in 2006 when I discovered that Ars Technica was actually excerpting my blog posts without appropriate linkbacks or attribution. I soon heard from others who bore a similar grudge against the site.
My complaint is actually featured in the Wikipedia write-up of Ars Technica. Moreover, in an otherwise glowing piece about Ars last month, Kara Swisher references my blog post that calls out Ars for its lack of originality and its borderline ethics.
In short, Ars Technica has been called on this issue time and again, its editors and writers are obviously aware of how peers view the publication, and yet Ars Technica continues to sift through the blogosphere and mainstream media with shameful sticky fingers. I stopped reading the site long ago for this reason (and because even after I wrote my blog post, I couldn't help but see fishy, reiterative posts on the site, real or imagined.)
How can a publication earn the disrespect of its peers and readers and consistently ignore the criticism? I can only conclude that this Ars Technica habit pays off with traffic, links, diggs and money.
It's one thing for a battle-scarred, hard-nosed presidential candidate to abandon any sense of shame in a desperate last-chance to win a nomination that she believes is rightfully hers. But it's another thing for a successful publication with tons of resources and talented writers to jettison any sense of pride of authorship.
Why does Ars Technica do this when it doesn't need to, when it could clearly craft first-rate pieces without ever having to rip anybody off? It's a weird little tempest in a teapot that perhaps hints at some kind of upper echelon editorial stinginess that filters down through the writing team.
Update: OK, a lot of bloggers have complaints about Ars Technica's attribution policies and have shared them with me again today, and apparently shared them with MG Siegler (who has received a lot of emails) via private comments that they don't want shared with the world. Why? Because they're hoping Ars Technica will toss them a scrap with some kind of link, however overdue or misplaced, because Ars Technica drives a lot of traffic. I can sympathize but is traffic really worth it?
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:28 AM | Print | Comments (8)
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