Earnings Labs

Charter Communications, Inc. (CHTR)

Q3 2020 Earnings Call· Fri, Oct 30, 2020

$173.11

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to Charter’s Third Quarter 2020 Investors Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers’ presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Stefan Anninger. Please go ahead, sir.

Stefan Anninger

Analyst

Good morning and welcome to Charter’s third quarter 2020 investor call. The presentation that accompanies this call can be found on our website, ir.Charter.com, under the Financial Information section. Before we proceed, I would like to remind you that there are a number of risk factors and other cautionary statements contained in our SEC filings, including our most recent 10-K and our 10-Q filed this morning. We will not review those risk factors and other cautionary statements on this call. However, we encourage you to read them carefully. Various remarks that we make on this call concerning expectations, predictions, plans and prospects constitute forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ from historical or anticipated results. Any forward-looking statements reflect management’s current view only, and Charter undertakes no obligation to revise or update such statements or to make additional forward-looking statements in the future. During the course of today’s call, we will be referring to non-GAAP measures as defined and reconciled in our earnings materials. These non-GAAP measures, as defined by Charter, may not be comparable to measures with similar titles used by other companies. Please also note that all growth rates noted on this call and in the presentation are calculated on a year-over-year basis, unless otherwise specified. On today’s call, we have Tom Rutledge, Chairman and CEO; and Chris Winfrey, our CFO. With that, let’s turn the call over to Tom.

Tom Rutledge

Analyst

Thank you, Stefan. Despite the significant challenges that COVID-19 has posed, we’ve been able to operate our business throughout the pandemic. Early in the pandemic, we offered our customers a set of programs, including our Remote Education Offer, and Keep America Connected Pledge that supported customers’ needs, resulting in a significantly higher number of customers enjoying our services. In addition, we opened our WiFi hotspots across our footprint for public use, opened up our Spectrum News websites to ensure people have access to high-quality local news and information, rapidly connected and upgraded fiber services to healthcare providers and donated significant airtime to run public service announcements to our full footprint of 16 million video subscribers. Our employees were given additional paid sick time for COVID-related illnesses and a flex time program to address other COVID issues. We also increased our wage for all hourly field operations and customer service call center employees by a $1.50 an hour, and we remain on path to a $20 minimum wage by 2022. Our ability to operate for our customers and communities, despite the challenging environment is a testament to the quality of our in-sourced and onshore workforce, our safety precautions, and in many cases, our ability to operate remotely. Our ads -- our sales and care agents have continued to sell our products and to provide outstanding service to our customers. Most of our stores have been able to remain open throughout the pandemic, serving customers’ need. Our field operations personnel have handled professional installations and repairs, have continued their work in the field, servicing customers in their homes and maintaining the quality of our physical plant. Our plant construction has continued and we’ve actually seen plant miles and passings increase more this year than last. And our product development team has continued…

Chris Winfrey

Analyst

Thanks, Tom. Turning to customer results on slide five of our presentation. We grew total residential and SMB customer relationships by approximately 2 million over the last 12 months or by 6.8%, and by 457,000 in the third quarter. Including residential and SMB, we grew our internet customers by 537,000 in the quarter and by 2.3 million or 8.8% over the last 12 months. Video grew by 67,000 in the quarter, better than last year’s third quarter decline of 75,000 video customers. The positive performance was driven by churn benefits, particularly when bundled with broadband. And similarly, wireline voice declines by only 25,000 compared to a loss of 190,000 in the prior year quarter. Mobile line net adds accelerated again to the 363,000 in the quarter. To put what is already a strong third quarter subscriber results into perspective, remember that our Q2 results of 755,000 customer relationship net adds and 850,000 internet net adds already included the benefit of our COVID programs. And our third quarter results reflect any churn out of those programs. Our year-to-date customer growth, shown on slide 6, remains the right metric for industry comparability, given different reporting. So, in the third quarter, we saw excellent retention rates for our Remote Education Offer. Churn has been similar to regular new customer acquisition churn. We re-launched the program very late in September with de minimis impact on our third quarter internet net adds. Going forward, we expect the acquisition volume of this offer to be significantly lower than the original program. And given the high retention rate of customers added during the first half of this year, we won’t be breaking out this offer separately. Our Keep Americans Connected program completed in late June and we saw a good retention of those customers in the third…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from the line of John Hodulik from UBS.

John Hodulik

Analyst

Okay. Thanks, guys. A couple of questions about broadband. I can’t help but notice that you guys talked about the fact that you’re competing well, really regardless of the infrastructure that you’re going against. Obviously, strong numbers across the board for the industry in terms of broadband net adds. Can you talk about how you’re competing against fiber competitors and sort of market flow share, if you could cite some numbers there? And then, the other number that stuck out to me was the 600 gigabytes of usage and the continued growth there. It looks like maybe we’re a couple of years away from a terabyte on average for broadband-only customers. Tom, how does that affect competition, as you look out over the next few years, I think, specifically against fixed wireless access? Does it make it more difficult for fixed wireless to be a true competitor to sort of wire and cable service? Thanks.

Tom Rutledge

Analyst

Well, John, how do we compete with -- we have -- it’s not just the products, but the products do matter, and it’s obviously what you’re selling as a product, how much capacity, how much speed, how much throughput, what the reliability is, but also how well you service it and how efficient you are at delivering the product. And so, we’re competitive with the infrastructure that we have against all of the various competitive infrastructures we go against, fiber, fixed wireless, satellite and copper-based high-capacity networks. And so, our network is highly capable. It’s easy to augment from a capital investment point of view. It’s very efficient to augment. And we keep our product sets and our service sets better than our competitors, and we prevail in most -- almost everywhere we operate. How do I think about that going forward with fixed wireless? I think that all of the various opportunities for competition require significant capital investment by our competitors. And I think, our network sets up better from a capital investment perspective, going forward, so that we can provide more capacity and more capability at lower costs than our competitors. So, it’s a very competitive environment. There’s a lot of different ways of making the competition work. But, I think, our network has superior capabilities to properly manage.

Chris Winfrey

Analyst

John, I’d just add. I kind of went out of my way in my prepared remarks to say if you want to compare against some of that competition, you really need to take a look because of the moving parts throughout the different quarters. You need to look at the year-to-date results and compare that in terms of what’s Charter doing in front of competition. Tom mentioned, we have competition essentially everywhere we operate we’ve had that. It’s not new. But, we’re performing very well. And if you take a look at our Q3 year-to-date results, I think, that’s probably the most indicative way to really look at it and think about the performance.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Ben Swinburne from Morgan Stanley.

Ben Swinburne

Analyst

Thanks. Good morning. Picking up a little bit on the same themes that John asked about, I wanted to ask, Tom, about the network evolution you discussed going to IP video. Just so I understand, are you taking down MPEG across the system? And is that something that requires a swapping out of boxes? Just what are the capital business implications of moving video over to IP on 3.1? Obviously, that seems like a big transition from historical approach. And then, again, just going back to the broadband results this year across the industry, it seems like we’ve pulled forward penetration in broadband in the United States. If we just look at the year-to-date growth, it’s an unbelievably strong year across the industry. So, I’m just wondering, I don’t know, Chris, if you want to take this one, but just thinking about lapping this year, next year and thinking about the quality of the customers you brought on. I know you’ve seen good churn stats so far. But, should we be thinking about this pull forward having maybe lapping this next year and next year is going to be a below average year? I don’t know if you have any thoughts on sort of where we go from here as we come out of COVID, which is obviously just pulled all this growth into 2020. Thank you, both.

Tom Rutledge

Analyst

Okay, Ben. So, how does the network work? Right now, we actually run three -- actually more than three, but three major networks inside of one physical infrastructure. So, we have DOCSIS 3.1, which is a -- which we use capacity to deliver IP-based services to specific modems households and customers. We also have a DOCSIS 3.0 infrastructure inside of our network, and we have a QAM-based video infrastructure. Most of the network is still dedicated by QAM-based video, the traditional cable TV service, and delivered to consumers that way. So, you can actually -- and today, we have multiple ways of delivering video to our customers and other services. And we have 10 million app-based streaming products -- devices connected to our network where the customer has downloaded an app, and we’re feeding that approximately -- our app, with a full bundle of video packages, and the consumer brings their own device. We also have a significant distribution of QAM-based traditional cable TV services. And we are planning on mixing the two together in the same device. And we do -- for instance, we have Netflix on our set-top boxes in a device we provide, but it’s actually being delivered through a different path to the box. So, the box will look at video from the traditional cable TV path, and we’ll also look at the new IP paths and combine them together in a seamless experience for the customer. So, we have the ability to manage CPE and customers through time and manage the way we use our network in an efficient way to provide a full range of services. And with regard to MPEG, even if we deliver IP video, we’ll -- as we do, we still use MPEG to do it. That’s the digital format of videos in. And there is an opportunity through compression going from MPEG-2, which is still widely distributed by us to MPEG-4. And there’s opportunity through the addition of products to what we call switch to video, which can be either IP or MPEG, traditional QAM-based MPEG. And we can manage how much is switched, how much is an MPEG 2, how much is in QAM, how much is in DOCSIS 3.0 and how much is in DOCSIS 3.1 and actually run all of that at the same time. So, we have a lot of room. And, I think the key takeaway is that traditional video is still the largest single -- it’s more than half the capacity of the infrastructure.

Ben Swinburne

Analyst

Yes. But, you don’t need to replace boxes in order to move that network?

Chris Winfrey

Analyst

No, no.

Tom Rutledge

Analyst

Okay. That’s the key point. Yes, got it.

Chris Winfrey

Analyst

And on your broadband question, I’ll take a crack at it, and Tom may want to add more to it. The industry has grown at a faster pace. And we’ve taken a higher amount of share across all areas of our footprint and infrastructures, as Tom mentioned. Where you’re seeing that come from is broadband nevers and also the acceleration of mobile-only in addition to the significant share shift that we’re seeing is cable generally. I don’t think, whether that was a pull forward or not, I don’t know. But, it doesn’t go backwards. I think, the demonstration -- the need for the product is there. I don’t think it goes away. I think, it’s a permanent, either shift or trend of reducing the mobile-only and requiring more broadband in the household. What I think we are seeing already, and I mentioned in the prepared remarks is late in Q3, you could already start to see the market move to more normal transaction activity. And that includes both, churn and sales. We think that’s indicative where Q4 is probably heading. And I think, probably for next year as well, you’ll have higher levels of mover churn and market churn. And as a result, you have higher sales, as that moves through. And I think, next year right now, probably looks more like a normal year as opposed to 2020.

Tom Rutledge

Analyst

The other thing I would add just in terms of longer run trends, yes, COVID had some impact on broadband adoption, but so does the change in the video business that’s going on rapidly. And as more and more people are using IP-connected devices to bring video services that traditionally would have been delivered either over the air or by cable. That increases overall demand for broadband in the home. And I think, that also is simultaneously going on. So, you have a sort of overall demand change as a result of what’s really going on in video. And so, I don’t know that it changes adoption rates so much going forward. But, as it just shifted the entire amount of people that would be interested in having in-home broadband service, which kind of ties into John’s question about the suitability of wireless access over time, when you have that kind of throughput going through. I agree.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Jessica Reif Ehrlich from Bank of America.

Jessica Reif Ehrlich

Analyst

Thank you. So, even with the increase in broadband demand, which is quite evident, you posted video net adds for the second quarter in a row, significantly bucking industry trends. So, first, have trends in fourth quarter indicated that you can continue those trends, or was it COVID-related, the pulse rate that you were talking about? And second, what specifically about your offering do you believe consumers are responding to? And then, just as a second topic. Tom, just to follow-up on your advertising comments. You said that the core underlying advertising is 90% back to normal. What do you think the drivers there? Because it still seems that local businesses are struggling. So, what are you doing differently, or what metrics you do -- what data are you using that’s different?

Tom Rutledge

Analyst

Well, if you look at our overall connectivity growth as Charter versus the industry, we have higher and faster connectivity growth, generally speaking, to the industry. And as a result of that, we’re pulling through video with that growth. If you just think about overall video penetration, as a percentage of households and you think about changing households over to your network, you’re going to pull through a certain percentage of video. And if you grow fast enough, you’ll grow video, as a result of that. And we said that in the last call in terms of why we think our video growth is positive. We don’t think that the overall video marketplace has changed, meaning we still think fat bundles is a very expensive video or under pressure and will continue to be. And so, you’re going to have continued erosion of that bundle we think through time. But,, we’re just growing faster than that erosion. With regard to ad sales, I’ll let Chris answer that. But, I want to say one thing about local businesses. They are under duress. But, our SMB growth rate is higher this year than it was last year in the third quarter. And so, we’re actually seeing a lot of -- yes, there’s a lot of damage out there, but there’s also a lot of reinvention and a lot of new business formation at the very small business level, and we’re taking advantage of that.

Chris Winfrey

Analyst

Jessica, the Spectrum Reach, which is our advertising group, as you mentioned, is back to 90% of prior year on the non-political, except the local advertising. From what I’ve seen so far, most of our peers are reporting kind of a similar range of their core advertising being back. And so, I don’t think we’re that unique. I think, for the industry, some of that benefit was the lack of advertising in Q2 and people wanted to get back into the market. Some of that was tied to -- a lot of that was tied to what Tom said is the SMB space is behaving well for us on the business side. But also the sports timing in the third quarter, you had a doubling or in some cases tripling of sports activity inside of the third quarter related to a lot of the delayed seasons for the different sports. And that was encapsulated inside of Q3. So, that admittedly helped. From a Charter-specific perspective, we have New York City and L.A., and they’ve been more locked down than other markets. So, from an economic perspective, we have a slight drag or delay in that returning relative to others. But, if you really step back, despite the overall market having negative video trends and everything that’s said about the traditional advertising space, we have a good runway for growth in front of us because of our ability to monetize the long tail of the inventory by tools that we’ve developed to really drive impression-based viewing measurement and to be able to sell our product, our advertising product on that basis. So, traditional channels that weren’t able to be monetized are now able to be monetized and packaged in a really different way and sold it at a different price, together with addressability and a lot of the additional interactive advertising features that you’re well aware of that we’ve been adding to the portfolio. So, even in an environment where video is slightly declining, I think, absent a pandemic, we have the ability to grow our core advertising in political and non-political years alike. And so, that business is -- outside of the pandemic, that business is actually in very good shape.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Jonathan Chaplin with New Street.

Jonathan Chaplin

Analyst · New Street.

Thanks, guys. Two quick ones. So, Chris, you mentioned that next year would be a more normal broadband year. But, you’ve been accelerating broadband subs ever since the Time Warner Cable acquisition. What do you think of as a normal broadband subscriber growth here? Is that sort of 6% year-over-year growth? And then on…

Chris Winfrey

Analyst · New Street.

We love you, Jonathan. Next question?

Jonathan Chaplin

Analyst · New Street.

I still expect an answer to the question though, Chris. And then, on EBITDA growth, the contribution from wireless this quarter was awesome. And I assume that just continues -- the losses continue to recede and that will be a propellant for EBITDA next year as well. Do you have a sense of what that could contribute to year-over-year growth for EBITDA next year?

Chris Winfrey

Analyst · New Street.

So, on both of those, kind of bit of guidance questions, which isn’t what we do. The honest answer to your first question is we don’t know. And we see trends reverting back to normal, which would mean more normalized growth. Does that mean more like 2019? Does that mean continued acceleration somewhere? Yes, I guess, is the answer to both of those questions, I don’t know. But, I think, it’s going to be good, either way. And so, we’re really positive on the outlook for broadband. Obviously, as we look further out to the extent that we’re doing rural build and expanding our footprint to the extent that mobile really has a significant impact both at acquisition as well as churn, to the extent that there’s additional mobile substitution that declines for all the reasons that we talked about before, all of those things would be positive relative to our normal growth rate. And so, we need to see how all that develops. On the wireless side, to your point, you can look at it a few different ways. You can take a look at our losses per mobile line, which is doing very well. You can think about it in terms of what I said before is that once we got to 2 million lines, which we crossed over inside this quarter, that it’s now an incrementally positive business, but for the subscriber acquisition cost. So, it’s already EBITDA positive if we decided to stop growing, which of course, we won’t do. So, the answer to your question is, yes, it’s going to continue to get better. But, the amount that it continues to get better in terms of its contribution to Our EBITDA performance really depends on the growth rate of wireless and that subscriber acquisition cost. The faster you grow, the more you’re going to spend. And we’re going to try to grow as fast as we can. So, it depends on growth.

Tom Rutledge

Analyst · New Street.

The other quick way to think about mobile is, yes, it’s EBITDA positive going forward, and it’s -- and as it’s currently priced. But, if you grow mobile rapidly as we are, you’ll grow your broadband rapidly too.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Kannan Venkateshwar from Barclays.

Kannan Venkateshwar

Analyst

Thank you. Chris, I guess, a couple for you. The first is on the gross addition front, I mean, obviously, the gross adds have been really strong this year, and many of them have come in at a lower price. And in general, gross additions come in at a lower price. So, when you look at ARPU next year, it should be stronger than normal because of the cohort shift this year and the bigger volume of growth additions. So, I just wanted to understand if that’s the right way to think about it, or if there are other things that offset that benefit? And then, secondly, in terms of home passing, you guys have been I think growing at more than 2% this year, which is higher than household formation and higher than most others in the industry. If you could give us some sense of the attach rates for these newer homes passed versus your existing base to give us a sense of what the mix of these newer homes looks like, that would be useful. Thanks.

Chris Winfrey

Analyst

So, I think the answer to your first question on gross additions is it’s going to be a little bit of a mixed bag. Q2 of this year definitely had higher gross additions for all the reasons that we talked about inside of Q2. Q3 did not. As I mentioned, the activity levels dropped significantly, both on -- particularly related to churn, which also has the impact of reducing sales across the entire market because you have less flow. And so, inside the third quarter, one of the reasons our marketing and sales cost was so low, despite the significant growth that we had, was tied to that very fact. So, I think you’re going to see a mixed bag inside of next year as it relates to ARPU impacts from promotional pricing roll off. On top of that, I would argue that the biggest driver of our ARPU development really is less about the individual PSU pricing at roll off and it ties much more to the amount of single play sell-in. And so, that’s the biggest driver that’s going on together with the video to tier mix. So, when you think about our success in selling spectrum stream and choice and essentials products, has a bigger impact than the mix that you were referring to. On the homes passed, when we do new construction to patents is what we call brownfield or greenfield, but we have pretty steady penetration curves over each vintage, if you want to call it that, of what we’re building. And that’s what gives us a lot of confidence to go do more of it because we can see at a high level of consistency in terms of our ability to get to very-high terminal penetrations when we build into markets. And so, that’s what gives us confidence in our ability to go extend that investment concept. I don’t know if that’s helpful in answering the question, but we like the penetration, the speed and the curve of the penetration that we’re getting in these new passings.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Craig Moffett with MoffettNathanson.

Craig Moffett

Analyst · MoffettNathanson.

Thank you. Two questions, if I could. First, if I could just stay with what you were just talking about, with the adoption curves in new markets. Can you share with us how much of this quarter’s growth came from newly passed homes or is it homes passed within last 24 months or so, just to get a sense of where we’re seeing penetration of newly opened markets versus where we’re seeing increases in penetration of mature markets? And then, separately, just given how promotional the wireless market has become in the last few months -- or the last month or so in the wake of the iPhone launch, how does that affect your thinking about your own promotional stance in customer acquisition for wireless? And, how should we think about what cost that might fare for the fourth quarter?

Chris Winfrey

Analyst · MoffettNathanson.

So, Craig, why don’t I take the first one and Tom could grab the second. I don’t have the number in front of me, but it’s not the material driver for our net additions, the new passings construction. It’s been relatively small when you consider that compared to our 52 million passings overall. It’s helpful, but it’s not the material driver of our growth. A simple way to think about it is, if you think about greenfield new construction anywhere historically, past couple of years, has been 500,000 to 600,000 homes. And so, that gives you what you would need to go model and say apply an adoption curve to that number of passings and you can get to a number. And what you’d see is it’s meaningful but it’s not material to our overall internet net additions growth rate.

Tom Rutledge

Analyst · MoffettNathanson.

Yes. I’d say, it’s meaningful, but not material. Yes. I agree with that. Promotional, our basic proposition when you think about wireless is that we can save consumers a lot of money. And if you look at the average wireless bill most households are paying, they can connect to us and buy the right package from us and save a significant amount of household spend, telecom spend, and reallocate that to us. That’s our primary objective. And we don’t -- we have the ability to switch customers over who already have a wireless account to our product. And, we’re not driven by new hardware for the consumer to drive our business. The consumer can bring their hardware with them and connect to us and save money. And so, yes, we’re oriented toward making our price successful in the marketplace and we’ll have to compete with that price. But, we already have a significant price discount to what most people are paying for their wireless service. And as a result of that, we’ve had accelerating growth in wireless connections. And so, we’re offering real value to consumers and real overall savings by having them connect to us, both for their broadband and their wireless products.

Craig Moffett

Analyst · MoffettNathanson.

Thanks. And Tom, I just want to say you guys, I was delighted to see the extension of your contract this morning. So, are we to understand that as you are now under contract until the end of 2024?

Tom Rutledge

Analyst · MoffettNathanson.

Yes, more time in the salt mine.

Craig Moffett

Analyst · MoffettNathanson.

Then, I think I can speak for a lot of Charter shareholders in saying that I think there are going to be a lot of people that are delighted to have you stay.

Tom Rutledge

Analyst · MoffettNathanson.

Thank you very much. It’s very kind of you to say.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Phil Cusick with JP Morgan.

Phil Cusick

Analyst · JP Morgan.

Hey guys. Two, if I can. First, a follow-up on Jessica’s question. What is the video attach rate to broadband sales these days? And how has that changed in the last few years? And second, a little more on wireless. You talked about a network build over time with the inside-out strategy. How does that take advantage of spectrum? And does cellular get integrated into your home routers over time, do you build that in dense outdoor markets like Comcast talked about yesterday? What’s the sort of the plan over time?

Tom Rutledge

Analyst · JP Morgan.

Yes. So, I mean, the attach rate of video to broadband has been declining steadily. And that’s because the overall penetration of video -- traditional video is declining steadily. And so, the reason we are growing video isn’t because that ratio has changed. It’s because we’re growing broadband faster and therefore pulling some video through with it.

Chris Winfrey

Analyst · JP Morgan.

There is an interesting stat attached to that is related is we really don’t sell video. We sell a package of connectivity service. If you asked how many video single play do you sell? It’s about 5% of our video sales are coming through in single play. So, we really don’t sell video. We sell that as an application or a service attached to the connectivity service.

Tom Rutledge

Analyst · JP Morgan.

Yes. And with regard to your second question, maybe I wasn’t clear -- go ahead.

Phil Cusick

Analyst · JP Morgan.

I was just going to say what -- so what is -- if 95% of your sales are attached to broadband and not -- yes, and so what is video as a percentage of this.

Chris Winfrey

Analyst · JP Morgan.

Yes. We’re not providing that I think for competitive purposes, but we’re saying it’s been declining, and that hasn’t changed. We’ve just sold more broadband, which is why we have more video.

Tom Rutledge

Analyst · JP Morgan.

And so, this inside out strategy and how do we use spectrum? And, can you put it in the house? Interestingly, our WiFi capabilities and available spectrum for WiFi has continued to improve. The FCC has just granted significant amounts of WiFi spectrum to the public for use. And we plan to use that spectrum inside dwellings. And so, when we think about spectrum and the spectrum we recently got with CBRS, it’s can you augment your WiFi spectrum with the CBRS spectrum to move traffic onto your own network that you might be paying someone else to carry. And the answer is yes. And you can do that in an efficient way, depending on the location and where you put the radio in such a way that you can actually reduce your overall cost. And as a result of that cost reduction, you get a return on investment on the capital you spend on both the spectrum and the radios that you’ve deployed. There are applications where CBRS spectrum or WiFi spectrum used differently than it has in the past can be used in enterprise connectivity using a 5G factory kind of notions where you would control the inside of a building using spectrum. So, there are individual products where you would want to have multiple radios, potentially, in the same environment. Whether you need to do that in a household in the short run or not is not that clear because there’s so much WiFi spectrum available. But there are applications I can think of like farms and other places like that where CBRS could cover the whole property, 100 acres or 500 acres of property or even more for connectivity services. So, it’s a tool. We look at spectrum as a tool to extend the connectivity, and we plan to use it in ways where it takes our cost structure down.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Bryan Kraft with Deutsche Bank.

Bryan Kraft

Analyst · Deutsche Bank.

Hi. Good morning. I wanted to follow up, I guess, on a couple of topics. So, one for Tom and then one for Chris. Tom, I wanted to follow up on your earlier comments on the HFC network. I think, there’s been more talk recently in the industry about operators over building with fiber-to-the-home. The advantage is obviously being upstream and latency. How are you thinking about the trade-offs now between deploying more fiber-to-the-home versus continuing with HFC, particularly given some of the changes in upstream traffic patterns during COVID? And, can you just help us to understand how that upstream bandwidth and latency improve as the DOCSIS infrastructure evolves? And then, Chris, I wanted to follow up on the build-out or the inside-out strategy that Tom mentioned in his prepared remarks. Can you give us any color on the magnitude or the significance of the capital investment that we could expect there? And maybe just some timing comments broadly speaking. And is that a long time to reach positive ROI, or is it a fairly short duration?

Tom Rutledge

Analyst · Deutsche Bank.

So, Bryan, on the HFC plant, we think that there’s a lot of capacity in the HFC plant, both downstream and upstream. And we think that given the current marketplace and utilization behaviors of consumers that we have plenty of upstream capacity. And we have a pathway using DOCSIS 3.1 technology and later, 4.1 technology to continue to increase that. And we have a vision that in the event that there is a transformative product set that needs upstream that would create value for consumers and then for us that we could fairly rapidly upgrade our plant to get a massive change in upstream capability. So, we build with fiber on the increment because it’s cheaper. But, we think that the HFC plant can be equal to fiber from a capability, latency, capacity perspective, for years to come. And we think that with relatively small capital investments compared to replacement cost new, which is what fiber is, that we can upgrade the network and be competitive for a very-long period of time.

Chris Winfrey

Analyst · Deutsche Bank.

And as it relates to the CBRS build-out, it’s really a function of a few variables. One is the number of subscribers that you have. The more you have, the more economical build would be the usage of those subscribers, the amount of WiFi offload that you can get already, what is your rate on MVNO, and what’s your density in the build cost. And as Tom mentioned, we wouldn’t be building just to build a network. We’d be building tied to a guaranteed effectively cost reduction. And so, the ROI is not only relatively quick, but it’s very clear, and there’s very low risk. And so, we’re not building any inside-out strategy just to have a network or for other network type build reasons, other than cost reduction. And, I don’t think that it’s going to be material in the short term. I think, it will occur for a many multiyear period. And you could argue that as the mobile retail store build-out declines for mobile that could be substituted over time with some additional build-out, which has a direct correlation to cost reduction. And as we start to do that, we’re not doing that yet. We’ll probably provide a little more color on what we think the effective payback of that is. But, I think the thing you should take comfort is that we’re not building just to build, and it’s going to be tied to a clear cost reduction in ROI.

Tom Rutledge

Analyst · Deutsche Bank.

Yes. The thing I would add to it is, yes, we have the $460 million of cost for CBRS spectrum. But the incremental capital is very specific to the location and the amount of traffic that we would save in essentially radio by radio kind of investment. It doesn’t require building out a complete footprint. It’s actually opportunistic by location.

Operator

Operator

And our final question comes from the line of Michael Rollins with Citi.

Michael Rollins

Analyst

Thanks. Good morning. So, over time, you’ve given us a lot of insight into broadband consumption trends. I was curious if you can give us an update of how your video customers are now engaging with your platform, especially as you grow in subs year-to-date, with respect to maybe what percent of your customers engage with your VOD platform or the digital applications that you offer for the cable networks offer and need to be authenticated through Charter? And then, if you take all of that in aggregate, how much time they’re spending with you guys? And then, as you roll that up then, how does that instruct your video strategy going forward in terms of the way you want to aggregate and distribute content? Thanks.

Tom Rutledge

Analyst

I don’t know that I can answer that directly, except to say this. We track what our customers do with their video products. And we also track how they rate our applications and what their customer experience is and what our availability of content is to sell to the consumer. And we try to mix and match that in a way that we create the overall value and the relationship we have with the customer, but also create a product that makes money. And we’ve had some success in managing new ways of delivering video. As I said, we have over 10 million users who are getting their service through applications as opposed through traditional hardware. And so, we look at the business is evolving. We think that people will continue to buy rich packages for years to come, but we also think there are other opportunities to sell a variety of video services to consumers in different formats and that we can improve the customer experience by being a good place for consumers to interact with us to get those video services. And so, we’re working toward that, and we’re making some success. And we’re actually optimistic in the very long term about our video business.

Stefan Anninger

Analyst

Thanks, Mike. That concludes the call.

Chris Winfrey

Analyst

Thank you, everyone.

Tom Rutledge

Analyst

Thank you, all. End of Q&A:

Operator

Operator

With that, ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today’s Charter’s third quarter 2020 investor call. We thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.