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In this photo illustration, the Charter Communications logo is displayed on a smartphone screen.

Rafael Henrique | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Charter Communications CEO Chris Winfrey wants the pay-TV bundle to live.

He also thinks the industry should get on board with a new model.

The CEO of one of the largest cable companies in the U.S. on Friday put media content companies on notice that negotiations would look different after Disney-owned networks went dark on Charter’s Spectrum service.

The so-called blackouts have gone on for decades and usually stem from a battle over rising fees — when programmers like Disney want higher rates and pay-TV distributors like Charter balk at paying up. Usually, the demand for sports events like the U.S. Open, which is in full swing, or the upcoming NFL season, help to prevent channels going dark for customers.

But this time it’s different, Winfrey said on a Friday call with investors.

The pay-TV model is broken, said Winfrey, the CEO of a company that has 14.7 million customers subscribed to its bundle but sees that number drop every year.

For Charter, a company that doesn’t produce content itself, the TV bundle is still a big part of its business, even as broadband grows. Charter is pushing to keep the bundle alive with new options — flexible packages and improved technology to tie streaming and traditional TV together — as high prices and streaming have driven customers to cut the cord.

Pay-TV bundle as we know it is dead

Streaming has upended the economics of television, as cheap memberships offer boatloads of content — a lot of which is already featured on pay-TV channels. Consumers are cutting pay-TV bundles and opting for streaming options at a rate that’s only intensified over the last five years.

And while companies like Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Global and Comcast‘s NBCUniversal are trying to make streaming businesses profitable, they still rely on their TV networks for not only the lucrative fees they reap from pay-TV providers, but also for the content produced for the channels themselves, which often carries over to streaming.

Media mogul Barry Diller said recently the legacy media companies should revert back to focusing on their broadcast and pay-TV networks, which are profitable, unlike streaming.

Winfrey, as well as his predecessor Tom Rutledge, have often spoken publicly of the high fees pay-TV providers have to send the networks, which get passed down to customers as price increases. Those in turn often accelerate cord-cutting.

The growth of streaming has made it less fruitful for Charter to pay those costs, even as the company loses fewer pay-TV customers than its peers each quarter.

Often, series and movies that air on cable channels run on streaming services shortly after — sometimes just a day. Meanwhile, more and more live sports are making their way onto streaming.

NBCUniversal airs Sunday Night Football, one of the top-rated programs on live TV, simultaneously on its streaming service Peacock. Paramount follows suit with its Sunday package of football games on Paramount+, while Disney offers some, but not all, Monday Night Football games on ESPN+.

Charter said Friday it was willing to pay the rate increase that Disney was asking for in exchange for a lower minimum penetration term — meaning Charter guarantees fewer customers to stem costs. Some of Disney’s networks fetch the highest prices in the bundle, such as ESPN, which receives $9.42 per subscriber a month, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.

The company is also pushing to offer Disney’s ad-supported streaming services — Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu — at no additional cost so its customers don’t have to pay twice for similar content.

On Friday, Disney said in a statement that it had proposed “creative ways” to make Disney streaming services available to Spectrum customers without giving it away for free. It did not provide further details.

Disney said on Friday its traditional TV channels and streaming services “are not one and the same, per Charter’s assertions, but rather complementary products.” It noted its investment in “original content that premieres exclusively” on traditional TV, such as live sports, news and other programming. Disney also noted its multi-billion dollar investments in exclusive content for Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu.

Charter also said it would be willing to market Disney streaming apps to its broadband-only customers, something it views as a way to help Disney move toward making ESPN’s live feed a direct-to-consumer streaming service. Disney has said it’s a matter of time before it offers ESPN outside of the pay-TV bundle. ESPN+ offers only limited content from the network.

On a Friday call with investors, Winfrey said the talks with Disney are what negotiations with content providers would look like moving forward — a stark change for the pay-TV provider.

Long live pay-TV

During Charter’s second-quarter earnings call in July, Winfrey said that the company was “committed to trying to find a path forward” for traditional TV bundles.

“And if we can have the flexibility to package and price it in the right way, we think it’s good for customers and it’s good for us. And ultimately, it’s much better for programmers over time as opposed to having the cord cutting continue to accelerate at the pace it’s going,” Winfrey said.

Charter’s recent negotiations aren’t the only example of the company trying to find a new path for pay-TV.

In July, the company announced it would soon offer a cheaper, sports-lite bundle option.

Live sports often carry the highest ratings but come with the most costs for pay-TV companies. The sports-lite offering will remove regional sports networks from the equation, giving customers who don’t watch their local teams a cheaper option rather than cutting the bundle altogether.

The pivotal move happened as the regional sports networks business has declined a faster speed. Diamond Sports Group, the largest owner of these channels, filed for bankruptcy protection this year. Other networks are offering streaming options, too.

Still, major national sports networks like ESPN remained in both bundles. While Winfrey said he would “love” to put ESPN in a sports-only bundle, he knew it was “a stretch too far” for Disney.

In another step to revamp the pay-TV model and stem losses, Charter entered into a joint venture with Comcast, the largest pay-TV provider in the U.S.

The venture launches later this year and will give customers the option to take the pay-TV bundle without a cable box. Winfrey noted in July that two-thirds of Charter’s pay-TV sales come without a clunky cable box, meaning customers are using the Spectrum TV app on their own devices, like Roku or Apple‘s Apple TV.

Branded with Comcast’s Xumo, the product will mean Charter can provide a smaller streaming device that integrates the traditional TV bundle with streaming apps in one place, making it a more seamless transition between the two for consumers.

The company is betting that service, plus cheaper and more flexible bundle rates, will keep pay-TV alive and kicking.

Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal, which owns CNBC.

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Navan, corporate travel and expense startup, files for initial public offering

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Navan, corporate travel and expense startup, files for initial public offering

By year-end there should be around 20 tech IPOS, says Barclays' Kristin DeClark

Navan, the business travel, payments, and expense management startup, filed on Friday afternoon to go public.

Its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicates that the company plans to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol “NAVN.”

Navan reported trailing 12-month revenue of $613 million (up 32%) across over 10,000 customers, and gross bookings of $7.6 billion (up 34%), according to the S-1 filing.

Goldman Sachs and Citigroup will act as lead book-running managers for the proposed offering.

Navan ranked No. 39 on this year’s CNBC Disruptor 50 list, and also made the 2024 list.

The IPO market has bounced back this year, with deal activity up 56% across 156 deals (roughly 200 IPO filings in all) and $30 billion in proceeds, up over 23% year over year, according to IPO tracker Renaissance Capital. It has been the best year for IPOs since 2021, though still far below the Covid offering boom years, when over $142 billion (2021) and $78 billion (2020) was raised by IPOs.

This year’s deal flow has been highlighted by hot AI names like Coreweave, as well as some of the startup world’s most highly valued firms from the past decade, such as fintech Klarna and design firm Figma, crypto companies Circle, Bullish and Gemini, and some long-awaited IPO candidates finally hitting the market, such as Stubhub this week, though its shares have slumped since the first day of trading. Top Amazon reseller Pattern went public on Friday.

Other startups are expected to pursue deals given the increased investor appetite.

The Renaissance IPO ETF is up 20% this year.

Launched by CEO Ariel Cohen and co-founder Ilan Twig in 2015, Navan set out to disrupt a business travel sector where incumbents relied on clunky legacy tools and fragmented workflows.

The Palo Alto-based company, formerly called TripActions, refers to itself as an “all-in-one super app” for corporate travel and expenses.

Customers include Unilever, Adobe, Christie’s, Blue Origin and Geico.

It has also been pushing further into AI, with a virtual assistant named Ava handling approximately 50% of user interactions during the six months ended July 31, according to the filing, and a proprietary AI framework called Navan Cognition supporting its platform, as well as proprietary cloud infrastructure.

“We built Navan for the road warriors, for CEOs and CFOs who understand travel’s critical importance to their strategy, the finance teams who demand precision and control, the executive assistants juggling itineraries, and the program admins ensuring seamless events,” the co-founders wrote in an IPO filing letter.

“We saw firsthand the frustration of clunky, outdated systems. Travelers were forced to cobble together solutions, wait for hours on hold to book or change travel, and negotiate with travel agents. They struggled to adhere to company policies, with little visibility into those policies, and after all that, they spent even more time on tedious expense reports after a trip. We felt the pain of finance teams struggling to gain visibility into fragmented travel spending and to enforce policies, and the frustration of suppliers unable to connect directly with the high-value business travelers they sought to serve,” they wrote in the filing.

Revenue grew 33% year-over-year from $402 million in fiscal 2024 to $537 million in fiscal 2025, according to the S-1 filing. The company reported a net loss that decreased 45% year-over-year from $332 million in fiscal 2024 to $181 million in fiscal 2025. Gross margin improved from 60% in fiscal 2024 to 68% in fiscal 2025.

The business travel and expense space is crowded, with fellow Disruptors Ramp and Brex, and TravelPerk, as well as incumbents like SAP Concur and American Express Global Business Travel.

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Microsoft raises Xbox prices in U.S. due to economic environment

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Microsoft raises Xbox prices in U.S. due to economic environment

A gamer plays soccer title Pro Evolution Soccer 2019 on an Xbox console.

Sezgin Pancar | Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Microsoft said on Friday that it will increase the recommended retail price of several Xbox consoles in the U.S. starting in October because of “changes in the macroeconomic environment.”

The company said it would not increase prices for accessories such as controllers and headsets, and that prices in other countries would stay the same.

While Microsoft didn’t explicitly attribute the increase to the Trump administration’s tariffs, many consumer companies have been warning for months that higher prices are on the way. President Donald Trump has issued tariffs this year on multiple countries with a stated goal to bring more manufacturing to the U.S.

“We understand that these changes are challenging, and they were made with careful consideration,” Microsoft said on its website.

It’s the second time Microsoft has raised prices on its consoles in the U.S. this year. Rivals Sony and Nintendo have also raised console prices in the U.S. as Trump’s tariffs went into effect.

Here are the changes, according to a PDF posted on Microsoft’s website:

  • Xbox Series S will start at $399, up from $379 previously. A version with 1TB of storage costs $449.
  • Xbox Series X Digital console now costs $599, a $50 increase. The Xbox Series X with a disc drive also got a $50 increase to $649.
  • The most expensive version, with 2TB of storage, costs $799, up from $729.

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StubHub’s stock plunges 10% in third day on NYSE as post-IPO slump deepens

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StubHub's stock plunges 10% in third day on NYSE as post-IPO slump deepens

Ticket reseller StubHub signage on display at the New York Stock Exchange for the company’s IPO on Sept. 17, 2025.

NYSE

After a long wait to get public, StubHub has had a rough start to life on the New York Stock Exchange.

Shares of the online ticket vendor dropped 10% on Friday, falling for a third straight day since debuting on Wednesday. At $18.46, the stock is now down 21% from its IPO price of $23.50.

StubHub, trading under ticker symbol “STUB,” has lagged behind fellow market newcomers like online lender Klarna, design software company Figma and stablecoin issuer Circle, which delivered early returns for investors following their recent IPOs. Shares of cybersecurity firm Netskope also rose 10% on Friday in their second trading day, after an initial pop on Thursday.

StubHub had been trying to go public for the past several years, but delayed its debut twice. The most recent stall came in April after President Donald Trump’s announcement of sweeping tariffs roiled markets. The company filed an updated prospectus in August, effectively restarting the process to go public, and has since seen its market cap slip to about $6.8 billion from $8.6 billion at its IPO.

Founded in 2000, StubHub primarily generates revenue from connecting buyers with ticket resellers. In the first quarter, revenue rose 10% from a year earlier to $397.6 million. The company’s net loss widened to $35.9 million from $29.7 million a year ago.

StubHub CEO Eric Baker told CNBC on Wednesday that the company expects recently introduced federal regulations around transparent ticket pricing to cause a “one-time” hit to its financial results.

Regulators are zeroing in on online ticket sellers over their pricing mechanisms and whether the companies are doing enough to keep automated purchasing bots in check. The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday sued StubHub rival Live Nation Entertainment, the parent company of Ticketmaster, accusing it of illegal resale tactics.

While StubHub has failed to excite Wall Street, its struggles haven’t seeped into other deals as the tech IPO market continues to show signs of a resurgence after an extended dry spell. Amazon reseller Pattern Group saw its stock rise 12% on Friday, though shares initially slipped 6%.

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