Charter CFO Unpacks Its $34.5 Billion Cox Megadeal – The Hollywood Reporter

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Jessica Fischer also told an investors conference Charter’s big streaming bundle strategy is helping to stem cable TV subscriber losses.
By Etan Vlessing
Canada Bureau Chief
Charter CFO Jessica Fischer talked up the benefits of her company’s $34.5 billion acquisition of Cox during an investors conference appearance.
“The number priority is being able to deliver our high value products, which includes our mobile and video product, and to do that in our pricing and packaging structure and with the brand and to package all of those together,” Fischer told the J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference during a session that was webcast.
“You should expect us to roll all of those things in a pretty short window post-close,” she added about the coming integration. The proposed acquisition of Cox would see the combined entity take the Cox name and use the Spectrum brand name for the consumer market. 
And underpinning that integration will be offering higher quality, yet affordable products to retain residential video customers. “It’s about applying our operating strategy, which is about being able to roll higher quality products to our customers, being able to roll them at a value the way that we do in our existing footprint, and using that to generate operating synergies inside of the business,” Fischer argued.
The Charter CFO discussed the cable and broadband giant’s big streaming bundle strategy to combine ad-supported tiers of premium subscription streaming services into Spectrum pay TV packages, and offer them at no additional cost to consumers.
“We can ultimately do well by generating higher customer lifetime value by bringing customers into stickier packages, which is what we’ve been doing,” Fischer argued. Charter during its most recently first financial quarter shed 51,000 residential video subscribers, compared to a loss of 167,000 residential video customers during the same period last year.
Charter had posted a rare gain of 44,000 pay TV subs during the fourth quarter of 2025 amid continued cord-cutting across the industry as it used packaging and pricing efforts to hold onto residential video subscribers amid competition from YouTube and streaming rivals.
In May 2025, Charter unveiled the $34.5 billion deal with Cox Communications to combine the businesses and create a cable TV giant with greater scale in broadband Internet connectivity and video to take on tech giants in the video and advertising spaces. The transaction is expected to be completed in mid-2026 as Charter works to get regulatory approvals.
Federal regulators including the Department of Justice and the FCC having already approved the proposed merger with Cox Communications, with only California having to greenlight the transaction. That has the cable and internet giant needing to meet a Sept. 15, 2026 deadline under federal law for big mergers to complete all antitrust reviews before closing a deal.
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