Cable operator Altice USA agrees to acquire streaming-video network Cheddar for $200M; Cheddar founder Jon Steinberg to become president of the Altice News unit
Cheddar founder and CEO Jon Steinberg is set to become president of Altice News, overseeing Cheddar, News 12 and i24News
Context & Ripple Effects
Cheddar's arc runs from its 2016 launch by ex-Buzzfeed president Jon Steinberg through a $6.99/month premium tier and a $10M Series B backed by Lightspeed, Comcast Ventures and Ribbit, to a pivot away from subscriptions entirely — the Series D at a $160M valuation came alongside plans for UK expansion and a second news network, funded instead by free distribution deals like the no-fee carriage agreement with France's Molotov. The $200M sale is that ad-and-distribution model getting its exit.
For the buyer, this slots into an existing structure: Altice's $17.7B acquisition of Cablevision left it running News 12 and i24News, and the deal folds Cheddar into a formalized Altice News unit under Steinberg himself — a founder retained to run his acquirer's broader news portfolio.
First-order effects
- Jon Steinberg becomes president of Altice News, giving him authority over Cheddar alongside incumbents News 12 and i24News rather than just his own startup.
- Cheddar's venture backers — Lightspeed Venture Partners, Comcast Ventures and Ribbit Capital — exit at $200M, a markup on the $160M valuation from the 2018 Series D.
Second-order effects
- A cable operator paying $200M for a streaming-native news brand validates free-distribution models over the subscription approach Cheddar abandoned, pressuring rival millennial-news startups to treat carriage deals, not paywalls, as the growth engine.
- Cheddar's planned UK expansion and second network now proceed under Altice's balance sheet, extending Altice's news footprint beyond US hyperlocal (News 12) and international (i24News) into the markets Cheddar had targeted.
Third-order effects
- If pay-TV operators keep acquiring streaming-native brands instead of building them, digital news startups increasingly exit through consolidation into incumbent distributors rather than scaling independently — a structural shift away from standalone streaming-news companies.
- Founder-turned-unit-president deals like Steinberg's point to incumbent media operators relying on acquired entrepreneurial leadership to run their legacy news assets, blurring the line between cable news operations and streaming upstarts.
The trend: Pay-TV and telecom operators are acquiring streaming-native news brands to retrofit their distribution empires with digital reach, converting venture-funded experiments into units of consolidated incumbents.