• by Wayne Friedman , January 31, 2020

Although revenue from its video cable business remains stagnant, Charter Communications -- like most other cable TV-based operations -- continues to gain overall residential revenue when including broadband and mobile.

Charter’s fourth-quarter revenue was up nearly 5% to $11.8 billion -- with broadband/internet revenue 12% higher to $4.4 billion and cable video revenue 2.6% more to $4.5 billion.

Investors like the news -- Friday morning trading of Charter’s stock was up 5% to $516.50.

Fourth-quarter total residential and small/mid-size subscriber increased by 268,000 -- up 8% to 29.2 million. This growth was largely due to continued growth in its broadband/internet business, which grew 313,000 in the current period -- up 8% versus 289,000 in the fourth quarter of 2018.

Broadband subscribers are up 5%, totaling 24.9 million.

Charter’s cable video subscribers continued to lose ground -- as with most of the industry’s cable operations. It lost 106,000 subscribers versus 36,000 in the fourth quarter of 2018 -- now totaling 15.6 million.Charter made revenue gains from monthly price increases.

Charter’s landline voice business dropped 152,000 subscribers against 83,000 in the year-ago period -- now at 9.4 million, down 13% in revenue to $450 million.

At the same time, its still-young mobile phone business grew 288,000 mobile lines to reach a total of 1.1 million, with $236 million in revenue in the quarter -- more than double that of a year ago.

Charter’s local advertising sales were down 23% to $434 million due to comparisons that included higher political revenue of a year ago.