So, Spectrum just threw a big, flashy party in New York City to announce… an app store. Yes, you read that right. While they’re losing internet and TV customers by the tens of thousands every quarter, their brilliant solution is to build a walled garden to manage all the streaming apps you already have.
They even trotted out comedian Tracy Morgan for a new ad where he can’t find his Knicks game. The irony is so thick you could cut it with a rusty coaxial cable. A cable company, whose entire business model for decades was built on creating confusing channel packages and impenetrable guides, is now patting itself on the back for partially solving the problem they helped create.
Give me a break.
While their execs were sipping champagne with the heads of ESPN and AMC, the company’s own quarterly report was telling the real story. In Q3 2025, Spectrum lost another 109,000 internet customers and 70,000 TV customers. But don't you worry, their CEO, Chris Winfrey, has it all figured out. He claims "consumer products and applications haven’t yet caught up with our uniquely differentiated network capabilities."
Let me translate that from corporate nonsense into English for you: "Our pipes are fine, it's your fault you're not using them for things that don't exist yet. Oh, and please ignore the fact that you're leaving us for competitors who offer better service or lower prices." This is a bad strategy. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—this is a five-alarm dumpster fire of corporate delusion.
The Shell Game of 'Seamless Entertainment'
Let's talk about this "Spectrum App Store." The big pitch is that it provides "real savings with consumer choice." It’s part of their new `spectrum tv packages` that bundle a bunch of ad-supported streaming services like Disney+, Max, and Peacock. Customers can then use the app store to manage them or upgrade to ad-free versions.
This isn't innovation; it's just bundling with a new coat of paint. It's like your landlord deciding he's going to "simplify" your life by collecting the money for your water, electric, and gas bills himself... while offcourse tacking on a mysterious "management fee." Spectrum isn’t giving you anything for free. They're just becoming the middleman for the same ad-supported tiers you could get on your own, hoping the perceived convenience will stop you from noticing your bill or the fact that their core `spectrum internet` service is bleeding subscribers.
Are we supposed to be impressed by this? The whole appeal of cord-cutting was to get away from the bloated, one-size-fits-none cable bundle. Now, Spectrum's grand idea is to recreate the bundle, just with streaming apps instead of channels. They’re selling you a solution to a problem that only exists because the media landscape is a fractured mess of exclusives and competing platforms—a mess they happily profited from. It ain't progress if you're just walking in a circle.
What happens when Disney inevitably raises the price of its bundle? Or when one of these services decides to pull out of the deal, like the classic Disney-YouTube TV blackout that left sports fans scrambling (prompting guides like How to watch ESPN amid Disney-YouTube TV blackout)? You're right back where you started, except now your internet provider is also your streaming broker. It just feels like another way to achieve lock-in.
Shiny Distractions and a Leaky Boat
To distract from the subscriber exodus, Spectrum is throwing every shiny object it can find at the wall. They announced a partnership with Apple to stream Lakers games in "Apple Immersive" on the Vision Pro. That sounds futuristic and cool, until you realize it’s a feature for the 0.1% of their customers who own a $3,500 face computer. How many of the nearly 1,500 new rural customers in Martin County, North Carolina (a project announced in Spectrum Launches Gigabit Broadband in Martin County, N.C.), are going to benefit from that? I’m guessing it’s a number you can count on one hand.
Then there's the new ad with Tracy Morgan. It's funny, sure. But it highlights the fundamental absurdity of their position. They are literally advertising that their own service is so confusing that you need a new feature just to find a basketball game. It’s like a car company running a commercial that says, "Tired of our cars randomly catching fire? We now include a fire extinguisher standard in every vehicle!"
The one genuinely good thing you can find in their press releases is the rural broadband expansion, part of a $7 billion initiative. Bringing high-speed internet to underserved communities is critical work. But let’s be real, it’s also a government-subsidized land grab for the last remaining untapped customers in the country. They aren't doing it purely out of the goodness of their hearts.
They’re losing customers in competitive markets, so the only place left to grow is where people have no other choice. And once they're the only game in town, what's to stop the prices from creeping up and the service from stagnating? We’ve all seen this movie before.
So, Who Are They Really Fooling?
At the end of the day, all the celebrity ads, VR partnerships, and app stores in the world can't hide the fundamental truth: Spectrum is a legacy company built for a world that is rapidly disappearing. They're losing the two things that defined them—cable TV and residential internet—and their response is to complicate the streaming world we all fled to. They are rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, except they’re calling it a "Seamless Entertainment Experience" and trying to sell you the chairs. I’m not buying it, and based on their numbers, neither are hundreds of thousands of other people.
