Charter Communications CEO Chris Winfrey said the company’s continued integration of streaming services for Spectrum TV and Internet customers will have “a fairly significant impact on acquisition and retention.”

Speaking to Wall Street analysts, Winfrey said she expects deals with Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, NBCUniversal and other programmers in the last year to start bearing fruit in 2025. The acquisition and retention benefits will be evident “certainly for video, but also with Internet when combined,” he said.

Charter shares jumped 15% after the opening bell on Friday after the company reported better-than-expected quarterly results. The broadband and wireless provider that is also #1 Pay TV US operator, reported a nearly 2% increase in revenue for the July-September quarter to $13.8 billion, while earnings per share were $8.82. The revenue and profit numbers both beat analysts’ consensus forecasts.

Winfrey emerged from the shadow of longtime former Charter CEO Tom Rutledge in 2023, becoming a closely watched industry figure following Disney’s declaration of war in the companies’ transportation negotiations. The accompanying 10-day outage of ABC, ESPN and other channels ended with a landmark deal that dropped linear carriage for networks like Freeform and Nat Geo Wild, while guaranteeing integrations and marketing support for Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ . The matchup garnered widespread attention, playing in a key slot on the sports calendar and depriving millions of college football and tennis customers of the US Open.

While Winfrey is bullish on the Disney deal and others that have followed its template, he issued a caveat on the call. “On the one hand, we’re excited about the space because it adds value,” he said of the streaming integrations, which the company says offer monthly savings of up to $78 to top customers. “On the other hand, I want to be careful. We do not forecast the growth of video. We’re simply saying it’s a way to add utility to our seamless connectivity relationships in a way that hasn’t existed. From our past experience, we know the value that can appear in the overall package by getting it right.”

Charter shed 294,000 video customers in the quarter to settle at 12.4 million. Broadband also fell by 110,000 to 30.3 million, although subscriber losses exceeded analysts’ estimates.

Mobile, an increasingly important segment for providers like Charter, Comcast and others, added 545,000 subscribers in the quarter. As of September 30, Charter served 9.4 million mobile lines.

A lot of lock and key is involved in fully implementing streaming integrations and also in marketing them to customers, Winfrey explained.

“It’s easy to get impatient with how quickly we can fully implement it in a way that is easy for customers to understand, appreciate, subscribe to and use,” he said. “In its current state, it’s a great value proposition, but it’s not always easy to find, and it’s not always easy to subscribe to and manage existing subscriptions.” So far, there has been “good uptake”, he added, but the setup “isn’t exactly the most customer-friendly proposition at the moment”.

After Charter’s publication indicated a lower-than-expected overall capital spending outlook, Winfrey clarified that the streaming integrations will not result in major expenses for the company. “There was a misconception in the market that we were going to do a big, huge marketing campaign that would have a financial impact next year,” he said. “That’s really not the case.”