WideOpenWest, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the WOW! Fourth Quarter 2020 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, all participants, after today's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Andrew Pozen. Thank you. Please go ahead, sir.

Andrew Pozen Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining our fourth quarter 2020 earnings call. With me today is Theresa Elder, WOW's Chief Executive Officer, and John Rego, WOW's Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started, I'd like to remind everyone that during our call, we will make some forward-looking statements about our expected operating results, our business strategy, and other matters relating to our business. These forward-looking statements are made in reliance on the safe harbor provisions of the federal securities laws that are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, including most recently the economic uncertainty related to the COVID-19 pandemic that may cause our actual operating results, financial position, or performance to be materially different from those expressed or implied in our forward-looking statements. you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements. We disclaim any obligation to update such forward-looking statements. For additional information concerning factors that could affect our financial results or cause actual results to differ materially from our forward-looking statements, please refer to our filings with the SEC, including the risk factors section of our Form 10-K files with the SEC. In addition, Please note that in today's call and in our earnings release, we refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. Such measures include adjusted EBITDA, transaction adjusted capital expenditures, and capital expenditures excluding expansion capital expenditures. While the company believes these non-GAAP financial measures provide useful information for investors, the presentation of this information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. Now I'd like to turn the call over to WOW's Chief Executive Officer, Theresa Elder.

Thanks, Andrew. Welcome to WOW's fourth quarter earnings call. In addition to our press release and quarterly trending schedules that are available on the investor relations page on our website, we have also included a presentation that we are using to compliment our prepared remarks. Our commitment to and execution of our broadband first strategy led to a strong fourth quarter and a solid year. The adversity that characterized 2020 did not distract our team from making great progress this year. We adjusted and adapted throughout the year as the COVID-19 pandemic gripped the country. We quickly moved most of our workforce to working from home, accelerated the launch of self-help and digital options like self-install kits and live agent chat for our customers all while we focused on delivering meaningful results including record full-year high-speed data net addition and record quarterly and full-year high-speed data revenue in the fourth quarter our total revenue increased three percent from the same period last year driven by growth in our high-speed data business, which grew more than 13% year over year to a record 151 million, more than offsetting a decline in our video and telephony business during the quarter. Our fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA was 123 million, up 13% from the same period last year. The momentum in the fourth quarter bolstered our strong results for the year, with total revenue up slightly from last year to $1.1 billion, as growth in our high-speed data revenue offset declines in video and telephony. Full-year HSD revenue increased nearly 9% to a record $567 million. we ended the year with adjusted EBITDA of $437 million. The industry trends that we have been talking about for the past three quarters, including the shift in video consumption away from linear TV to streaming alternatives, the acceleration of cord cutting, and the continued increase in the importance of high-speed broadband all underpin our broadband first strategy. We are capitalizing on this opportunity and seeing the impact of these trends on our results, which exceeded our expectations. During the fourth quarter, we increased our total number of subscribers for the sixth consecutive quarter, despite a net reduction in total RGU. Importantly, we are adding HSV-only customers and keeping a significant proportion of customers who disconnect their video service but maintain their broadband service, which shows the success of our strategy. We are growing our customer base with an aggressive and targeted focus on being broadband-first. During the quarter, we added 4,900 HSD RGUs and for the year, we added 32,300, the highest number of net HSD additions in WOW's history, bringing our total HSD RGUs to nearly 814,000. And as we saw last quarter, 86% with the vast majority of our new customers are buying our HSD only service. A significant increase from the same period last year when 60% of new customers purchased our HSD only service. Providing the best customer service is something we believe that sets us apart. We understand that customers want choice, reliability, and higher speeds. In the fourth quarter, we increased our minimum speed for existing customers to 100 meg, while we are capable of providing one gig speeds to nearly 100% of our footprint. This is a testament to the strength and quality of our infrastructure, which is critical as customers continue to purchase higher speed tiers. In the fourth quarter of 2020, more than 86% of new customers purchased speeds of 200 meg or higher. This is a substantial improvement over the prior year when 54% of our new customers purchased 200 meg speeds or higher and 79% in the third quarter of 2020. Over the past two years, We have invested in our infrastructure, which has enabled us to provide an advanced fiber-rich network with the flexibility to increase capacity in line with rising consumer demand for the higher speeds that we experienced in 2020. The combination of customers purchasing higher speeds and the September 1st rate increase on modems resulted in an increase in HSV ARPU, which grew to $62 this quarter, up from $57 at the end of the fourth quarter a year ago. Our edge-out strategy is another element of growth and is continuing to evolve. We have refined our approach to edge out and we are increasingly focused on growing penetration across our footprint and reaching more multiple dwelling units, which represents an exciting opportunity and an efficient use of our capital. Our edge out strategy continues to show positive results as penetration rates of both the 2018 and 2019 edge out vintages increased again in the fourth quarter. The 2018 vintages increased to 20.3%, up from 19.6% last quarter. And penetration in the 2019 vintages increased to 16.3%, up from 14.8% last quarter. As we are now in the early part of 2021, we've included the penetration rates for our 2020 vintages. Although they represent a smaller number of homes passed due to the limitations imposed by the pandemic, our penetration rates for these homes are growing quickly. We ended 2020 with a penetration rate of 11.5%. 2020 was definitely a challenging year, but we maintained our focus and hit several key milestones. WOW TV+, our advanced IP video platform is a great product with intuitive, easy-to-navigate access to content and is now available to 95% of our homes past, up from 80% last quarter. WOW TV Plus helps facilitate our transition to our all-IP services in our network, migrating off of our legacy video product and unlocks significant broadband capacity. With a greater proportion of our customers buying higher speeds, this enables us to maintain our strong competitive position, continue to support future demand, and is a key step in the longer-term evolution of our network to 10G. Another milestone we recently hit is the steady increase in the number of HSD-only customers who are now using our self-install kits. In the fourth quarter, more than 80% of our HSD-only customers use these kits, up from 30% a year ago. The pandemic highlighted how essential our products are and how much our customers rely on WOW to keep them connected. We recently introduced our new FibroFlex data service across many of our markets to provide high speed internet access at a lower cost to support small and mid-sized businesses. The program is designed to help ensure these businesses have consistent access to the internet while they navigate the challenges they're currently facing as a result of the pandemic. This is a great example of how we are working with our communities and our customers to help them adapt and succeed amidst this challenging environment. Earlier this year, we mentioned that we were named one of the best and brightest companies to work for in Atlanta, Chicago, and Detroit. This quarter, I'm excited to share that we also won this award in Denver, And for the third consecutive time, nationwide. These awards mean so much to us, especially during this difficult time. As I've said before, our employees are one of our key differentiators that enable us to provide exceptional customer service, which is one of the reasons why we continue to maintain historically low levels of both employee turnover and customer churn. To conclude, I would like to reinforce how pleased I am with our results. The significant momentum that grew throughout the year affirms our strategy and shows the incredible commitment from all of our employees who consistently demonstrate their passion and adaptability to the challenges of our current operating environment. Now, I'll turn the call over to John, who will go over our financials in more detail.