Charter Executives Say Disney Rejected Their Proposed “New Model” Distribution Deal For Spectrum; “Moving On” From The Traditional Video Business Now A Distinct Possibility

deadline.com:

Addressing Thursday night’s carriage impasse with Disney, Charter Communications executives told Wall Street investors on a conference call today that their linear video business is “at the edge of a precipice.” Charter CEO Chris Winfrey said any resolution to the outage, which left almost 15 million customers in the dark at the start of football season, would need to happen quickly.

Otherwise, he said, Charter will take pains to preserve broadband relationships with customers who drop video service. That would reduce “the likelihood that we’re going to be willing to foist those high costs” on consumers, he said. “And so, our likelihood of being willing to do a deal decreases over time as those downgrades to video occur.

And our likelihood of heading into a ‘moving on’ scenario with a completely different video product structure goes up significantly.” “We’re at the edge of a precipice that Disney itself predicted,” CFO Jessica Fischer, perhaps alluding to comments from Disney CEO Bob Iger last September, before he returned to the company’s executive suite.

Iger earlier this summer said in a CNBC interview that linear networks “may not be core” to the company, setting off speculation of private equity or other investors taking control of them and removing their troubled financials from Disney’s books.