3rd Qtr conference call

[RemyM]

Just finished listening to the conference call. Here are the highlights.

76% Digital penetration, this allows them to turn off more analog channels to free up space and to employ switched digital video, like they are doing for international channels. They spent $8 million to set up switched video.

525,000 HD subs, double what they had a year ago.

In response to a question about HD they said they can add "hundreds" of HD channels as HD can be added to switched video. No specific additions were mentioned and no mention of VOOM being added even when asked about the widening loss at VOOM networks. The response was that Echostar is their partner in VOOM and Echostar is adding more HD customers.

Multi line OV is coming soon for residential, and OV for business will be expanded to allow for up to 8 lines.

The full conference call is available here:
http://www.cablevision.com/index.jhtml?pageType=presentations

 

[hbk409]

76% Digital penetration, this allows them to turn off more analog channels to free up space and to employ switched digital video, like they are doing for international channels. The spent $8 million to set up switched video.

In response to a question about HD they said they can add "hundreds" of HD channels as HD can be added to switched video.

I would hate for them to do the hd with switched video I have the international channels on switched video and very time i try to watch them, there is a lot of pixelation and breakups, or they video just does not come in.

 

[cforrest]

Their numbers are slowing on the OV, IO and OOL, if you look at Sept 05, June 06 and Sept 06. Pretty much saturated the market and gains will be much slower, one reason why 2 line OV is coming for residential. As for the switched video, they seemed pleased to leave international on it only and weren't gung-ho on putting HD on it, but could if needed. Tom was once again stressing how much capacity they have, the usual BS. Was a boring conference call this AM, as I am sure Remy could attest to, having listened to the replay of it. As for DVR, I found it funny they wouldn't tell one caller how many DVR subs they have, since they are in court over the NDVR. Wonder if they fear having a low number of DVR subs, would make the court costs over NDVR even more of a problem with investors.

 

[Sean Mota]

Conference call transcript

Jim also touched briefly on our HD video subscribers which continued to grow as well. At the end of the third quarter we had more than 525,000 HD customers, up 16% from the second quarter. This is more than double the number of HD video customers we had in September of 2005. As part of the continued expansion of our high-definition lineup, we added WOR TV to our offering in September. We now have 22 HD channels at no additional cost to our digital cable customers.

Jessica Reif Cohen - Merrill Lynch
Where will you be in terms of HD channel capacity next year and beyond?
Tom Rutledge
Well, we have ultimately the ability to carry hundreds of HD channels and we are in the process of architecting our system to grow with the growth of HD. As our digital penetration gets deeper, it is now in the mid '70s, we have the ability to move channels from analog to digital and clear that spectrum and use it for HD. We've been doing that throughout the year. We've discontinued all of our analog paid TV distribution this year. We have moved several analog channels to digital spectrum with good consumer results, and freed up spectrum.
So we don't see a crunch. We look at the switch video launch of 60 channels of standard definition foreign language programming as a way to use our network efficiently. You can add more channels in switch video if we need to. We can add HD to switch video and essentially we have unlimited channel capacity and can carry everything on it simultaneously to all of our customers.

Here's the link to the transcript: http://media.seekingalpha.com/article/20161

Make sure to follow the quote copywright policy if you are going to quote the transcript.