Glenn Britt to Retire as Time Warner Cable Chief

When Glenn Britt got started in the nascent cable television business in the 1970s, no one knew whether people would pay a monthly fee for something that was already available for free through an antenna. “I thought that it was either going to be a huge thing, maybe in every home, or that it was going to be a complete failure,” he recalled.

Nowadays, the vast majority of Americans do pay companies like Mr. Britt’s Time Warner Cable, not just for television, but for broadband Internet, too. Some even pay for a new home security product. “We keep finding new uses for the technology,” he said, calling this time “the early innings for broadband.”

Keeping Americans paying, in a complex marketplace with new competitors, will soon be someone else’s job. Time Warner Cable, the country’s second-biggest cable company after Comcast, said Thursday that Mr. Britt, its chief executive since 2001, will retire at the end of the year, capping several years of succession discussions and months of public talk about his expected departure.

Mr. Britt, 64, will be replaced by Rob Marcus, who at 48 represents generational change both for the company and the broader industry. Mr. Marcus has been in line for the top job since 2010, when he was named president and chief operating officer.

Mr. Marcus will take over a company that has been transformed in the 12 years Mr. Britt has been in charge. Once known just for piping cable television into homes, Time Warner Cable now considers its main product to be broadband, and it is trying hard to sign up businesses to offset the residences that have switched to DirecTV or Verizon FiOS.

Mr. Marcus said in an interview that his priorities would include residential subscriptions (“We can do better,” he said, after a first quarter of the year that showed a continued decline in television subscribers and a slowdown in growth in broadband subscribers), corporate culture and overall customer service.

“We’ve got to develop a level of emotional connection with our customers,” he said, so that the company isn’t competing on price alone.

While gaining TV subscribers will be challenge, as Mr. Marcus put it (the company had 12.2 million such subscribers at the end of last year, up from 9.2 million when Mr. Britt took over in 2001, and lately the number has been declining), there is more potential on the broadband side. Time Warner Cable had 11.4 million such subscribers at the end of last year, up from 1.4 million at the beginning of Mr. Britt’s tenure. The company had total revenues of $21 billion last year, up from $6 billion the year Mr. Britt took over.

Mr. Marcus’s words may reverberate on Wall Street, where investors approved of the distributor’s 2009 spinoff from the content-oriented Time Warner -- its stock is up more than threefold since -- but want to see its subscription figures improve. Mr. Marcus said the sentiment that the company’s performance has lagged behind other cable providers was based on “isolated metrics over short periods of time.”

Looming over all of this is John Malone, whose recent acquisition of a stake in Charter Communications and subsequent talks with Time Warner Cable about a possible merger have boosted the stocks of both. Time Warner Cable, which has about 12 million subscribers, rebuffed the approach by Mr. Malone, partly because Charter has barely four million subscribers. Given cable’s economies of scale, “smaller companies would benefit from being part of a bigger company,” Mr. Britt acknowledged in an interview. But the benefits for the bigger acquirer “are harder to figure out,” he said, “which is why you haven’t seen us be more aggressive.”

Mr. Britt did not bring up Mr. Malone’s name directly, and would not describe any conversations they have had. He said his retirement plan has had no bearing on the company’s reaction to Mr. Malone, who continues to pursue ways to consolidate the cable industry.