Other dire scenarios are possible. Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch has told investors in several recent earnings calls that Fox is slated to negotiate renewal of about a third of its carriage contracts over the next 12 months or so. Imagine if Charter or one of its rivals insisted that its customers not be forced to pay for Fox News Channel, which is the linchpin of Fox’s finances. That network is expected by S&P Global Intelligence to generate more than $1.
Charter isn’t the sector’s flashiest competitor. The company is headquartered in a new building close to a train station in downtown Stamford, CT. But it has emerged as a tough negotiator. In 2017, Charter moved cable networkslimiting the number of customers who would pay for it, partially out of frustration at the networks’ performance. It has also unveiled plans to offer a bundle of networks without sports included, a move that would reduce costs for subscribers.
Charter’s aggressive stance toward a programmer might not be so surprising, however. Liberty Broadband, a company controlled in part by media entrepreneur John Malone, owns about a quarter of Charter’s stock. Malone made a good chunk of his wealth by taking stakes in big media companies like Discovery, News Corp. and Time Warner when he ran TCI, then the nation’s largest cable distributor, in the 1980s and 1990s.
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