Charter Communications today made several executive moves including a promotion for CFO Chris Winfrey, who will now serve as chief operating officer.
Winfrey, who has been with Charter for more than a decade, in his new role will oversee all cable operations including field and customer operations, marketing, sales and Spectrum Enterprise across Charter’s footprint.
"Over the past 11 years Chris' influence on Charter has expanded far beyond that of a typical CFO; he has been actively involved in our business operations and that deep knowledge, combined with his previous operational experience in Europe, will serve us well as Charter's next chief operating officer," said Charter CEO Tom Rutledge in a statement.
Charter has also named John Wickham as vice chairman, tapped Finance EVP Jessica Fischer as its next chief financial officer and added oversight for Charter's Network Operations to Chief Product & Technology Officer Rich DiGeronimo’s existing responsibilities. All four will report to Rutledge.
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Charter lost 50,000 video subscribers during the most recent quarter after dropping 63,000 residential customers but adding 13,000 business customers. The company ended the quarter with 16.01 million total video subscribers.
Rutledge attributed his company’s video subscriber trends to selling different video packages that he said are more tailored to consumer needs. He said that newer direct-to-consumer products in the market are churning at higher levels and that it’s leading to a “re-adoption process” for Charter’s video products.
“To some extent, we think our video business is stabilizing. But, on the other hand, the fundamentals trends haven’t stopped, which is that prices are being continuously passed through to consumers and there’s real pressure on the total cost of the bundle,” he said. “The reason we’re relatively better is that we’ve been moderate with our pricing and we’ve created new packages that cost less.”