Company type | Brand |
---|---|
Industry | Telecommunications |
Predecessors |
|
Founded | 1973Cablevision) 2004 (as Optimum) | (as
Headquarters | Long Island City |
Area served | Arizona, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, West Virginia, Long Island |
Key people | Dennis Mathew (Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, Altice USA) Marc Sirota (Chief Financial Officer, Altice USA) |
Services | Cable Television, High Speed Internet, Telephone, Mobile Phone, Advertising |
Parent | Altice USA |
Website | www |
Optimum is an American telecommunications brand owned and operated by Altice USA. [1] It is the fourth largest cable provider in the United States and a Fortune 500 company. Optimum offers Internet, television, mobile and home phone serving in 17 states.
This section contains content that is written like an advertisement .(December 2022) |
Altice One is the company's flagship home entertainment platform, and combines TV, and streaming apps.
Optimum TV offers cable television service in three tiers:
Optimum offers internet speeds up to 940 megabits per second, with four tiers available:
The company also offers a low-cost broadband option, Altice Advantage Internet.
Optimum offers landline VOIP telephone service branded as Optimum Voice; the service utilizes a telephony-capable cable modem to provide the service, either alone or combined into a household's main cable modem box.
On September 5, 2019, Altice USA entered the wireless industry with the launch of Optimum Mobile, a nationwide mobile virtual network operator service. Optimum Mobile delivers advanced LTE and 5G coverage by combining Optimum's own fiber and mobile core infrastructure with two networks in the U.S. Optimum Mobile is also available to non-Optimum customers.
Optimum provides small and mid-sized businesses with internet, phone, TV, mobile, Smart WiFi and ad services.
Optimum began as a "30-channel [2] system built in the 1970s" [3] using "copper cable" technology. Modernizations and expansions of their services included "a fiber optic network" and more channels, with an expanded set of offerings. As of 2020, the name is still used. [4]
The original Optimum pre-digital technology was limited in the number of channels it could carry. [3] The trademark (styled as OPTIMUM) was "first in use in commerce in August 1994". [5]
Following Optimum being acquired by Cablevision, [6] the brand Optimum TV [7] [ better source needed ] was used to market a more expensive offering with more channels. [3] By 2004 the name Optimum Voice was used to offer "a new phone service" based on cable-modem technology. [8] Like competing offerings from AT&T, "it stops working altogether if the power goes out".
The Optimum name was also used to offer Cable-based Internet access; [9] Optimum also pioneered in optionally bundling this with TV access, using "streaming" technology. In what was termed "digital service" Interactive Optimum was not first, but was early in steering the introduction of video-on-demand, alternate camera views for sporting events, and VCR-like rewind and replay. [6] Optimum Select was a related offering, "in which viewers could click on their remote controls to receive more information". [10] Similarly, regarding Optimum's branding and HBO Now, writes the New York Times, "Cablevision’s Internet subscribers can order the service on the company’s website, Optimum.net .., or by calling." [11]
Although references such as "Cablevision's Optimum" [12] do not include the Altice name, both names [13] reflect major market share: one study showed Optimum Voice as the eight-largest phone service provider in the U.S. [14] The name's value was used for about two years when an acquisition held June 2010 through February 2013 was named Optimum West. [15] [16]
In late 2001, Interactive Optimum (iO Digital Cable Service) [6] combined "telephone, Internet, entertainment" with "60 channels of digital music and 20 channels of topics like antique car collecting, vegetarian cooking or wedding planning'. The New York Times described other cable companies in 2002 as having offered "merely a way of improving television reception". By 2004, there were 15 competitors, but the entire subscribing customer base for what others called "Interactive TV" was described as "still rare". [17] Advertising Age reported that "several high-profile ventures that had their plug pulled for troublesome economic or technological reasons".
Even so, by "playing catch-up" [18] iO and the rest of the company's offerings increased customer count from 689,000 (2004) [17] to over 3 million (2016). [19]
Altice bought the Optimum brand and Cablevision for $17.7 billion in June 2016. Cablevision was combined with Suddenlink Communications to create Altice USA, the fourth largest operator in the United States. [20]
On March 1, 2021, Altice USA announced that it would acquire Morris Broadband in North Carolina for $310 million which was later closed on April 6, 2021. Altice later announced that Morris Broadband would be rebranded into the Optimum name, making it the first time since 2011 when under its predecessor, Cablevision, in which Optimum had systems outside of the New York area. [21] [22]
In April 2022, Altice USA announced that SuddenLink was to be rebranded into Optimum. Because of this, Optimum will automatically expand its footprint to eleven additional states, in addition to expanding in North Carolina with its previous acquisition with Morris Broadband. [23] The rebranding was later completed by August 1, 2022. [1] [24]
With the introduction of more than Optimum's original 30 channels, narrowcasting was added to the service's offerings, [6] since it was now economical to provide "programs of much significance to small audiences."
A New Jersey company that named itself "Optimum Networks Inc." was sued by then-owner Cablevision Systems Corporation (CSC) for violation of the OPTIMUM trademark in 2010. [5]
NTL Incorporated, branded as ntl:, was a United States-listed British company founded in 1992, which provided cable television, cable internet and fixed-line cable telephone services. While NTL had its headquarters in New York City, the company's activities focused heavily on the United Kingdom, with operational headquarters in Hook, Hampshire.
StarHub Limited, commonly known as StarHub, is a Singaporean multinational telecommunications conglomerate and one of the major telcos operating in the country. Founded in 1998, it is listed on the Singapore Exchange (SGX).
Altice USA, Inc., commonly known as Altice, is a rapidly growing telecommunications provider with headquarters in New York City, owned by the Franco-Israeli businessman Patrick Drahi. The company delivers pay television, Internet access, telephone services, and original television content to approximately 4.9 million residential and business customers in 21 U.S. states. Altice USA is based at One Court Square in Long Island City, Queens, New York City. The company's operational center located at Cablevision's former headquarters in Bethpage, Nassau County, New York, on Long Island. With its combined brands, Altice USA is the fourth-largest cable provider in the U.S., serving customers residing in the New York metropolitan area as well as in several Midwestern and Southern U.S. states.
Charter Communications, Inc., is an American telecommunications and mass media company with services branded as Spectrum. With over 32 million customers in 41 states, it is the largest cable operator in the United States by subscribers, just ahead of Comcast, and the largest pay TV operator ahead of Comcast and AT&T. Charter is the fifth-largest telephone provider based on number of residential lines.
Scientific Atlanta, Inc. was a Georgia, United States–based manufacturer of cable television, telecommunications, and broadband equipment. Scientific Atlanta was founded in 1951 by a group of engineers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and was purchased by Cisco Systems in 2005 for $6.9 billion after Cisco received antitrust clearance for the purchase. The Cisco acquisition of Scientific Atlanta was ranked in the top 10 of largest technology acquisitions in history and was Cisco's largest acquisition to date. Prior to the purchase, Scientific Atlanta had been a Fortune 500 company and was one of the top 25 largest corporations in Georgia.
Telenet Group N.V. is the largest provider of cable broadband services in Belgium. Its business comprises the provision of analog and digital cable television, fixed and mobile telephone services, primarily to residential customers in Flanders and Brussels. In addition, Telenet offers services to business customers all across Belgium and in Luxembourg under its brand Telenet Solutions.
Suddenlink was an American telecommunications subsidiary of Altice USA trading in cable television, broadband, IP telephony, home security, and advertising. Prior to its acquisition by Altice, the company was the seventh largest cable operator with 1.5 million residential and 90,000 business subscribers. After Altice acquired Cablevision Systems Corporation on November 30, 2016, Suddenlink was combined with Cablevision. Together with Optimum, the name used by Cablevision for its products, Altice USA became the United States' fourth largest cable operator with 4.6 million subscribers, and the sixth largest Pay TV service provider with 3.5 million subscribers. On August 1, 2022, Suddenlink rebranded into Optimum.
Service Electric is a group of affiliated cable television companies serving eastern Pennsylvania and western New Jersey. The company is headquartered in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in the Lehigh Valley.
Hot Telecommunication Systems Ltd. is a company that provides cable television, last-mile Internet access, broadband and telecommunication services in Israel. It also provides various data transmission services and network services at different rates, services to the business sector and other ancillary services.
Numericable was a major French cable operator and telecommunications services company. Numericable was originally created in 2007 from the merger between former competitors Noos and NC Numericable networks. Numericable Group SA was founded in August 2013 to act as the parent company of Numericable group companies and to offer its shares on the stock exchange. The company provides cable broadband services in France, Luxembourg and Portugal, offering digital and analog television, Internet, and phone services to homes. From 2008, Numericable also offered mobile telephone services to its customers.
Comcast MO Group, Inc. was created by US WEST Inc., one of the original Baby Bells Regional Bell Operating Companies, acquisition of Boston-based Continental Cable and combined with its previously acquired Atlanta-based Wometco/GTC. Wometco/GTC adopted the MediaOne name a year earlier. Media One Group was acquired in 2000 by AT&T Broadband, which was subsequently acquired by Comcast in 2002.
The News 12 Networks are a group of regional cable news television channels in the New York metropolitan area that are owned by Altice USA. All channels provide rolling news coverage 24 hours a day, focusing primarily on regions of the metro area outside Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island.
YouSee is the largest quadruple play service provider in Denmark, and is a part of Nuuday which is a spun-off company from TDC Group, the largest telecommunications company in Denmark which was split into two separate companies. YouSee currently has 994,000 customers, down from its peak of 1.4 million in 2015.
Community Home Entertainment (CHE) is a former American cable television company which began providing analog cable services to the Bronx, New York, in 1983 with most customers residing in Co-op City. Since then they have grown rapidly extending their offerings to broadband Internet and digital cable services.
UPC was the largest cable operator in Switzerland with around 1.1 million residential and business customers and was formed in 1994 through the merger of several cable operators. UPC has been a subsidiary of Liberty Global from 2005 until its discontinuation in 2022.
CloudTV is a software platform that virtualizes CPE or STB functionality, enabling pay-TV operators and other video service providers to bring advanced user interfaces and online video experiences such as YouTube and Hulu to existing and next-generation cable television and IPTV set-top boxes and connected consumer electronics devices.
Verizon Fios is a bundled Internet access, telephone, and television service provided by Verizon Communications that operates over a fiber optical network within the United States.
Patrick Drahi is an Israeli billionaire magnate and investor with interests in media and telecoms. He is the founder and controlling shareholder of the European-based telecom group Altice. A former French citizen, he lives in Switzerland.
Altice Europe N.V. is a French multinational telecommunications and mass media company with official headquarters in the Netherlands, founded and headed by the French-Israeli billionaire businessman Patrick Drahi, and the second largest telecoms company in France, behind Orange.
Cablevision Systems Corporation was an American cable television company with systems serving areas surrounding New York City. It was the fifth-largest cable provider and ninth-largest television provider in the United States. Throughout its existence and in its final years, Cablevision exclusively served customers residing in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and a small part of Pennsylvania. However, at one time it provided service in as many as 19 states. Cablevision also offered high-speed Internet connections, digital cable, and VoIP phone service through its Optimum brand name. Cablevision also offered a WiFi-only mobile phone service dubbed Freewheel.
The cable television system has a 30-channel capacity. Subscribers ...
in the older systems we maxed out on channels available.
instructional programs about bird-watching or fine wines.
After years .. and several false starts .. the first .. to offer the technology
Cablevision's premium service, called Optimum Gold, will ...