Charter's Rutledge: We’re Not Fighting OTT

Charter chairman and CEO Tom Rutledge argued that cable operators should embrace over-the-top and direct-to-consumer offerings to give customers more options, but added he still doesn’t see a compelling model for cable operators to offer their own OTT service.

At the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference in New York Tuesday, Rutledge said Charter is already putting direct-to-consumer services onto its user interface platform that can be delivered to TV sets and other devices via the internet.

“We embrace whatever products our customers want to use as part of our value proposition, we’re not fighting it in any way,” Rutledge said. “We will enable those direct-to-consumer services, and to the extent that they pressure the bundle from a pricing perspective, that may work out to our advantage in many ways.”

But Rutledge said he doesn’t see any advantage in cable operators going over-the-top themselves.

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