Comcast bucked the extremely poor trend toward shedding massive numbers of video subscribers other major pay TV operators had to reckon with in the first quarter of this year. According to Comcast’s Q1 2017 earnings, around 42,000 subs (residential and business) took up Comcast video offerings in Q1 2017. While that wasn’t as many video adds as in the same period the prior year (53,000 in Q1 2016), the fact that Comcast managed to pull in new video customers while other providers saw them drop in droves begs the obvious question of what exactly the largest cable operator is doing right.

For its part, The Diffusion Group suggests that unlike most incumbents, Comcast has been better at avoiding the “skinny-bundle trap,” which the firm defines as the race to the bottom in price and selection to save subscribers without understanding the long-term consequences of such a tactic.

“TDG observed long ago that incumbents were going to have to make a choice: either resign themselves to being a ‘dumb-pipe’ provider, or invest in using IP, change the TV experience, and become the go-to source for all things video,” TDG Co-Founder and Principal Michael Greeson says. “Comcast tuned into the latter, investing in the hardware and software required to bring the power of IP to the legacy TV experience, and the company is now gaining video subscribers when others are reporting losses.”

At this week’s JPMorgan Tech, Media, and Telecom Conference, Mike Cavanagh, CFO and senior executive VP at Comcast, was asked why he thinks his company’s video strategy played out better than others in Q1 2017 even in the face of ever-expanding over-the-top (OTT) video options.

“Well, you’ve heard us talk about it before. We think X1 in particular, the platform that drives video for us, keeps getting better and better as we penetrate it deeper and deeper into our base. That’s distinct vs. other folks,” Cavanagh commented. “There are new entrants in the OTT space coming in, but we like the tools and our toolkit to continue to compete effectively for the business.”

Cavanagh also noted that he believes a lot of OTT video products that are coming to market have no more than a break-even business model especially as programming costs rise over time, and that’s part of the reason Comcast hasn’t gone out in its footprint with a similar offering.

“The losses are going to get bigger, or the prices are going to have to go up and will that resonate with the folks that are trying out the products in the first instance?” he asks. “We like our own game in terms of segmenting customers, providing a great video experience through X1, integrating Netflix, integrating YouTube, making it better and better as time passes, bundling it with broadband, and providing a great value.”