Cable operator Charter Communications, in which John Malone's Liberty Broadband owns a big stake, would love to see financial relief for its subscribers for sports events that have been canceled amid the novel coronavirus pandemic.
Charter chairman and CEO Tom Rutledge on the company's Friday first-quarter earnings conference call said that he and his team have talked "for years about the reality of programming costs and how sports drives" most of them.
He highlighted that monthly video programming wholesale costs for pay TV giants are in the upper $60 range, with more than half of that coming from sports. "Sports is the major driver in the cost of content" and makes the whole service bundle expensive and difficult to sell, he said.
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