While some of the larger MSOs have seen their basic subscriber numbers dwindle throughout the past year, Insight Communications announced today that its basic subscriber head count grew by 5.4 percent last year.

Insight announced the good news as part of its operating results for 2007. The 5.4 percent represents 5,000 basic customer net additions for Insight.

Insight also set new growth records for some of its other services, including the addition of 68,000 phone customers; 78,000 broadband subscribers; and 55,000 digital cable customers.

“Achieving over five percent basic customer growth and record-breaking growth for our phone and broadband services is an incredible accomplishment,” said Michael Willner, CEO and vice chairman of Insight. “I haven’t seen these levels of growth since the earliest days of cable.”

Dinni Jain, Insight’s president and COO, said the company’s goal four years ago was to reinvent itself.

“Our goal was not to just reverse a decline in basic video customers, but to build sustainable growth capability by putting equal emphasis on retention and acquisition,” Jain said. “Our basic customer growth rate of 5.4 percent follows growth rates of 4 percent and 2.2 percent in 2006 and 2005, respectively, and was particularly gratifying given the distraction to employees of splitting the Insight Midwest partnership with Comcast.”

On Jan. 2, Insight and Comcast officially completed the split of their cable partnership. The numbers released today were from Insight’s wholly-owned systems in Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio, and do not reflect the systems that are now with Comcast.

Insight now owns 100 percent of the cable systems serving Kentucky customers in Louisville, Lexington, Bowling Green and Covington; and serving customers in Evansville, Ind.,  and Columbus, Ohio. As of Sept. 30, these systems passed approximately 1.3 million homes and included approximately 665,800 basic video customers.

As of Dec. 31, Insight reported 721, 668 total customer relationships, an increase of 6 percent year-over-year.

“Their [Insight’s] good results probably mean that their introduction of new digital video, HD/DVR and phone services, and the bundled offering, are being successful against satellite and that they don’t have any really meaningful competition from either Verizon or AT&T in their footprint at this time,” Gartner analyst Pattie Reali said.

“But Verizon is winning hearts, minds and wallets in the market, and cable operators have to keep ahead of the curve with the quality of their phone service and the pricing of their services – individually and in a bundle,” Reali continued. “They especially need to keep innovating to deliver Internet-based content to the TV, provide better and more user-friendly EPGs that integrate search and navigation for all content types, and build networks that can support all [high-definition], all the time.”

Faced with increasing competition from telco and satellite providers, as well as a slowdown in the housing market, some of the larger cable operators have seen their basic subscriber numbers trickle downward. Last month, Comcast said it expects to lose more basic video subscribers this year, and that the company expects lower revenue targets and higher expenses.

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