Altice Concludes Cheddar Buyout To Extend News Footprint

Altice USA, Inc. (NYSE:ATUS) recently completed the acquisition of Cheddar Inc., a live streaming financial news network, to augment its presence within the news domain. With this strategic buyout, Altice extended its portfolio of high-quality news coverage across digital, mobile and linear TV formats.

Since its inception, Cheddar has created a niche market focused on young professional and millennial audiences with its digital-first, live business, general news and college network coverage. Broadcasting live news feed for about 19 hours a day, it reportedly generates more than 400 million video views each month. The news is broadcasted through two networks: Cheddar Business — a business news network focusing on economy, and Cheddar News — a fast-paced, young, non-partisan general news and headline news network.

In addition, Cheddar has established a significant presence in public spaces of 600 college campuses, such as gyms, cafeterias and student unions through the CheddarU network. It also owns and operates the website RateMyProfessors.com, where more than 5 million students rate and review their professors each month.

Riding on such exposure, Cheddar perfectly complements Altice’s hyperlocal and global news offerings that include the most watched news channel in the Optimum footprint News 12 Networks, and international and current affairs news network i24NEWS. The combination of Cheddar and Altice businesses will likely offer more opportunities for collaborative and complementary programs, thus fortifying its presence in the cut-throat news market. The buyout further enables Altice to reach out to a wider audience pool and monetize content through its a4 advertising platform.

With a4, Altice has brought to the fore unique skill sets for advertisers to identify the target audiences across screens, and local and national TV. Advertisers can then create an effective media plan, execute the buy and measure cross-screen reach, frequency and attribution to measure the program’s efficacy. Leveraging the superior reach of a4, advertisers can reportedly extend their content to more than 90 million households, 85% of broadband subscribers and 1 billion devices in the United States. This, in turn, would significantly benefit advertisers to screen their advertising messages to target pool of audience, thereby reducing operational costs.

We remain impressed with the inherent growth potential of this Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) stock. The stock has outperformed the industry in the past year with an average return of 41.1% compared with the 9.3% rise of the latter.

Some other top-ranked stocks in the industry are Knowles Corporation (NYSE:KN) , sporting a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), and Juniper Networks, Inc. (NYSE:JNPR) and Motorola Solutions, Inc. (NYSE:MSI) , carrying a Zacks Rank #2, at present. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

Knowles has long-term earnings growth expectation of 10%. It surpassed earnings estimates in each of the trailing four quarters, the average positive surprise being 14.8%.

Juniper has a long-term earnings growth expectation of 6.2%. It beat earnings estimates in each of the trailing four quarters, the average positive surprise being 15.4%.

Motorola has a long-term earnings growth expectation of 7.7%. It beat earnings estimates in each of the trailing four quarters, the average surprise being 9.1%.

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