Cable company drops Viacom, retains 99% of customers

What would happen if MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and the rest of the Viacom family of cable networks disappeared from your pay TV lineup?

Not much, one small, Southern cable company said Tuesday.

Suddenlink, which serves 1.14 million homes from Oklahoma and Texas east to North Carolina, said it retained 99.7 percent of its customers in the fourth quarter and even saw an uptick in minutes viewed per household after it dropped Sumner Redstone’s cable conglomerate on Oct. 1 after a carriage-fee dispute.

“The argument used to be ‘Content is king,’ now the consumer is king,” Jerry Kent, Suddenlink’s CEO, told The Post.

“We’re starting to see unbundling with some people going straight to online video,” he said. “They’re moving away from the linear TV model.”

Suddenlink added Hallmark Channel, Oprah’s OWN, Pivot, Sprout, the Blaze and Up! channels to replace Viacom’s offerings.

The channel lineup additions had “an amazing amount of viewership” for new offerings, Kent said.

“Our networks comprise up to 20 percent of a typical cable system’s viewership as a group,” said a Viacom spokesman, who noted Suddenlink’s video losses are four times what they were a year ago.

Kent admitted that Suddenlink did lose 34,800 subscribers in the December quarter — versus a loss of 8,000 the prior year — but calculated the 99.7 percent customer retention rate because many of those retained their broadband service from the company.

Suddenlink, which is privately held but reports its results because of publicly held debt, said fourth-quarter profits rose 41 percent to $7.4 million while revenue rose 5.6 percent to $592.1 million.