Copyright The Hollywood Reporter
The cable company Altice, which services parts of New York City and many of its immediate suburbs, says that it will undergo a corporate rebranding. The company says that beginning tomorrow, it will change its name to Optimum Communications, taking the trade name of its consumer-facing internet connectivity and pay-TV brand. “This is more than a name change – it’s a reflection of who we are and where we are going,” said Dennis Mathew, chairman and CEO at Optimum. “As we accelerate our transformation and deepen our commitment to our customers, employees, and communities, aligning our corporate identity with the strong Optimum brand underscores our focus on simplicity, performance, and purpose. It’s an incredibly exciting time for the organization as it enters its next chapter as one unified Optimum.” Beginning Nov. 19, the company will change its ticker symbol on the New York Stock Exchange to OPTU, reflecting the name change. The cable business is in a state of flux, and Altice (soon Optimum) is subscale compared to the giants like Charter and Comcast. Charter, in fact, is in the midst of a nearly $35 billion deal to acquire Cox Communications. Should that deal go through Charter would also change its name to Cox. In an in-depth interview with The Hollywood Reporter earlier this year, Mathew, a former Comcast executive, explained how the company was thinking about its declining pay-TV business, as well as how it would integrate new technologies to improve its offering. “This has been all about putting the customer at the center, understanding what their needs are, and then having the hard conversations across every part of our business, which includes video, and it includes making sure that we can create the packages and bundles that folks are looking for,” Mathew said. Altice, and soon Optimum, benefit from having prime real estate in and around the country’s largest market, but in a game that is increasingly about scale, it will need to figure out how to proceed operationally. Maybe the new name will help in that effort.
