• by Wayne Friedman , April 27, 2018

Charter Communications witnessed stronger revenue growth in the first quarter, but suffered video subscriber declines versus a year ago.

That pushed down its stock in a big way in early Friday trading -- down 15% at one point -- before recovering somewhat, with a decline of 8% to $274.64.

The cable TV operator lost 122,000 customers -- a 2% decline -- to total 16.4 million. A year ago, it lost 100,000 subscribers in the same period. Overall residential customers -- video, internet and phone -- grew 3% (231,000) to 25.9 million.

Despite its loss of video subscribers, Charter posted a 5.3% gain in revenues to $4.3 billion. Internet revenue improved 9.1% to $3.7 billion, and phone customers sank 20% to $556 million.

Local cable advertising sales grew 5.6% to $356 million. Charter’s total marketing costs for the period were 2% lower to $751 million. Programming costs grew 5.7% to $2.8 billion.

The average monthly customer costs for video service grew to $85.60 from $81.00 the year before -- a 7.3% hike. Looking at total average monthly customers, it inched up 1.6% to $110.89.

Charter's first-quarter revenues added on 5% to $10.7 billion, with net income attributable to Charter shareholders increasing 8%, to $168 million.