Charter Communications is bringing its regional Spectrum News channels to more pay television customers through an expanded distribution partnership with Comcast’s Xfinity TV, the companies announced on Wednesday.
As part of the arrangement, Xfinity TV subscribers in northern New Jersey and Connecticut will have access to Spectrum News NY 1, while customers in parts of Florida will be able to watch Spectrum News 13 in Orlando or Spectrum Bay News 9 in Tampa, depending on where they live.
The move comes several months after Charter quietly launched Spectrum News 1 on Xfinity TV in parts of Northern California as part of a public service effort to bring news about the Los Angeles wildfires to more residents of the state, according to a person familiar with the plan.
Charter will double-down on its newsgathering efforts in California by expanding local news production in San Francisco and Sacramento, where Xfinity TV subscribers receive Spectrum News 1 SoCal as part of their packages. The company intends to hire journalists in both cities as part of that effort.
“We are always looking for ways to bring our community-driven reporting to even more people, and this is an exciting opportunity to reach new viewers in some of the country’s largest markets,” Mike Bair, the Executive Vice President of Spectrum Networks, said in a statement. “Unbiased local journalism is a key pillar of our society and, while local news coverage across the country is shrinking, Spectrum News is expanding to provide more access when people need it most.”
Across the country, Spectrum TV subscribers have access to two national networks — Spectrum News Plus (stylized as Spectrum News+), which offers local and national news reports on current events, politics, sports and weather, and Spectrum Noticias, a Spanish-language variant of the national news channel. Spectrum News Plus is also available on the free streaming app Xumo Play.
In the New York metropolitan area, Spectrum News NY 1 was long offered on Altice U.S.A.-owned cable system Optimum TV as part of a reciprocal distribution agreement that saw Charter offer Altice-owned News 12 on Spectrum TV. That deal ended in May when the relationship between Altice USA and Charter fizzled.
According to Charter, the channels were dropped after Altice USA decided to withdraw itself from the “shared collective of partnerships, member organizations and collaborative arrangements that benefit the entire ecosystem of our businesses and customers.”
“Altice has removed itself from these groups and the professional courtesy of peer-to-peer collaboration no longer exists with their company,” a Charter spokesperson said at the time. “As a result, we made a business decision to no longer carry News 12.”
A spokesperson for Altice USA said they didn’t agree with Charter’s decision and “worked hard to preserve the mutual carriage relationship that brings Optimum customers access to NY 1 and Charter customers access to News 12,” though they didn’t offer specifics about their efforts.
