Related Party Transactions (Notes)

3 Months Ended

Mar. 31, 2015

Related Party Transactions [Abstract]

Related Party Transactions

Related Party Transactions

The Company is aware that Dr. John Malone, one of Charter's board of directors, may be deemed to have a 36.0% voting interest in Liberty Interactive Corp. (“Liberty Interactive”) and is Chairman of the board of directors, an executive officer position, of Liberty Interactive. Liberty Interactive owns 38.0% of the common stock of HSN, Inc. (“HSN”) and has the right to elect 20% of the board members of HSN. Liberty Interactive wholly owns QVC, Inc (“QVC”). The Company has programming relationships with HSN and QVC which pre-date the Liberty Media ownership of Charter. For the three months ended March 31, 2015 and 2014, the Company received payments in aggregate of approximately $3 million from HSN and QVC as part of channel carriage fees and revenue sharing arrangements for home shopping sales made to customers in the Company's footprint.

Dr. Malone also serves on the board of directors of Discovery Communications, Inc., (“Discovery”) and the Company is aware that Dr. Malone owns 4.7% in the aggregate of the common stock of Discovery and has a 28.7% voting interest in Discovery for the election of directors. In addition, Dr. Malone owns approximately 10.8% in the aggregate of the common stock of Starz and has 47.2% of the voting power. Mr. Gregory Maffei, one of Charter's board of directors, is a non-executive Chairman of the board of Starz. The Company purchases programming from both Discovery and Starz pursuant to agreements entered into prior to Dr. Malone and Mr. Maffei joining Charter's board of directors. Based on publicly available information, the Company does not believe that either Discovery or Starz would currently be considered related parties. The amounts paid in aggregate to Discovery and Starz represent less than 3% of total operating costs and expenses for the three months ended March 31, 2015 and 2014.