TCI sheds subs, $1 bil in debt

By VARIETY STAFF

NEW YORK --- John Malone's Tele-Communications Inc., continuing its policy of reducing its overall subscriber count, has moved 445,000 subscribers in 29 of its cable systems into a new venture that will lop off about $1 billion in TCI's consolidated debt.

TCI's partners in the new venture will be Bresnan Communications, a New York-based company that started up in 1984 as a cable-operator partner of TCI, and Keystone Inc., an investment operation run by the Robert M. Bass Group.

The new partnership, still unnamed, will serve a total of 660,000 subscribers, most of them clustered in four contiguous states: Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Nebraska. The subscribers will come from TCI's 445,000, plus the 215,000 from the existing Bresnan/TCI partnership.

Bresnan ran the existing partnership, although it owned just 21.6% of it, with TCI owning the other 78.4%. In the new venture --- if it gets all of the regulatory approvals --- TCI's stake will drop to 50% and Bresnan's to 10.7%, with Keystone getting the remaining 39.3%. Bresnan will run the new venture.

A TCI spokeswoman says that in the last six months the company has reduced its subscriber base from 14.2 million to 11.5 million. That puts it behind time Time Warner Cable, which has is the largest cable operator in the U.S. with 12 million subscribers.