WOW! Reports 10,200 Lost Subs
The company received a buyout offer from private equity firms last year and is still evaluating the deal.
WASHINGTON, March 17, 2025 – WideOpenWest (WOW!) reported a loss of 10,200 broadband customers in the fourth quarter of 2024, the company announced Friday, for a total of 470,400. That’s down 19,700 year-over-year.
The cable operator said 5,400 of the lost subs were attributable to the Hurricanes Helene and Milton, which rocked the Southeast last year, and that the Affordable Connectivity Program shutting down in June 2024 had a negative impact on the year. Subscriber growth isn’t expected to turn positive in the first quarter of 2025 – the company forecast losses of 4,500 to 6,000.
WOW! passed 11,600 new homes in the quarter: 9,300 in greenfield markets and 2,300 in “edge-out” projects in areas adjacent to WOW!’s footprint. The company slowed down its build out in the third quarter while it secured a $200 million loan in October to help pursue those fiber projects.
WOW! said it counted 31,500 new greenfield passings and 8,300 new edge-out passings in 2024, with its total homes passed hitting 1,962,100.
Executives on the company’s earnings call said WOW! could get an additional $175 million in financing under the loan agreement in October 2025. The influx of cash is aimed at getting to 400,000 new greenfield passings by 2027, of which 61,900 have been built out so far.
“There would probably be the need to raise incremental capital along the way,” WOW! CFO John Rego said. “But the $375 million between the two raises, I think, gets us pretty far along.”
Last may, WOW! received an unsolicited buyout offer from investment firms DigitalBridge and Crestview – the latter being the cable company’s largest shareholder with a 38 percent stake. The company had formed a special committee to evaluate the proposal, which would value the company at about $400 million, and Friday added only that the committee’s work is ongoing.
The company ended 2024 with more than $1 billion in debt and $38.8 million in cash. Net losses for the quarter were $10.6 million and for the year were $58.8 million.
It was a rough year for cable generally, with Comcast, Charter, and Cable One all shedding subscribers and fixed wireless products from the big mobile carriers getting more popular. Analysts have predicted the worst is in the past, but the outlook for 2025 still isn’t exactly rosy.
WOW! does have a mobile product, something the cable giants are leaning into in an effort to keep subscribers around with a bundled service. Teresa Elder, the company's CEO, acknowledged WOW! hasn't pushed its mobile offering as aggressively as its peers, but said the company was using pricing and its Youtube TV partnership to lower churn.
