The New York Times’ Ken Belson has this interview today with Time Warner Cable’s CEO Glenn Britt. It’s great to see Britt get some ink because he’s an intelligent, capable but low-key executive who doesn’t usually get major consumer press coverage.
Britt talks about Time Warner Cable’s outstanding Q1 06 results and the general revival of cable’s popularity on Wall Street. He explains that investors were wrong about the telco threat to the industry, and he’s on the mark there. But, he dismisses the Internet video threat, another bugaboo for the industry, and on that point Britt may be missing the mark.
Wall Street has two concerns about cable. They are both going to be proven wrong. The first is the phone companies are going to crush the cable companies. But the reality is that it will take them many, many years to build out the whole country. When they get to where we are today, we’ll be selling all these new things. The second thing is whether all television is going over the Internet. The answer to that is not anytime soon. The Internet as it exists today is not capable of delivering hundreds of channels to millions of homes. The second reason is we gather an audience and guarantee revenue back to the networks, and they use the money to make more programming. Networks aren’t going to put their content on the Internet unless there is a replacement.
Here’s where Britt misses the mark: the rise of Internet video isn’t about the delivery of 500 channels of cable-like programming. That’s the old-school of thinking. Web-delivered TV or video content is about something else…alternative content never made available via traditional media outlets, perhaps, or user-generated content that appeals to very small niches or something else altogether. (This whole world of web-based video is too new to peg.)
Britt even offers up the idea of user-generated content as something new and different from what cable offers.
Media companies are under pressure to experiment with putting a few shows on the Internet. It’s a valid experimentation and if something takes off, people will do it. What I don’t want to say is that there will not be a lot of video on the Internet. There’s a huge amount of consumer-generated video. But that’s a lot different than networks putting video on the Internet free.
He’s right that cable has nothing to fear in the short-term. But the rapidity with which the Internet is changing the video entertainment business would make me nervous if I were a traditional video distributor.
Cynthia Brumfield at 10:42 AM|Comments(0)
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