IP Democracy: Brian Roberts Returns to Visionary Form

Brian Roberts, CEO of the nation’s top cable company Comcast, is one savvy, intelligent and capable media executive who almost always says smart things. Over the past year, however, with cable on the defensive and Wall Street dissing the industry, I had the impression, listening to him at investor events and trade shows, that he was a little off-message and uncertain.

Having just listened to his presentation at CableLabs’ Media Day, I think he’s back in fine form. Maybe it’s because Wall Street is taking a shine to cable again, or maybe it’s because of the CableLabs milieu, but Roberts demonstrated that he’s an in-tune steward of Comcast’s technological course.

Roberts laid out Comcast’s plan for reclaiming analog spectrum and boosting system capacity, adding that the future use of that bandwidth may represent a radical departure from the current concept of television, namely that the concept of a TV “channel” may be dying.

“Should you be architecting everything for channels or should you be planning for on-demand or bandwidth on-demand?” he asked. Clearly Comcast is putting its bets on VOD. “If you could say I have 100 high-def movies whenever you want it and five years that’s 1,000 or more…well cable can do that.”

As he has said in other venues, Roberts thinks that voice service is not simply talking on the telephone, a bit of a big-picture mysterious locution that cable operators use when describing their work with Sprint on mobile applications. “I think voice is an application off of a broadband world that is not yet clear to me what it is,” he said.

Roberts is also hepped up now on moving the industry’s OCAP (Open Cable Applications Platform) initiative forward — the prospect of building a common interactive TV platform will yield enormous innovation. There will be “one architecture across all the various boxes will allow us to have a ubiquitous language to have us develop on from this day forward,” he said. “We’ve been talking about this for too long and we don’t have it in place.”

One idea that seems to be a curve-ball for cable operators is place-shifting. They don’t know quite what to make of it, and Roberts is no exception among cable leaders in his hesitancy to embrace the new technology.

Comcast is studying place-shifting, but there are more important, more lucrative short-term priorities. “We’re not going to have millions of people pay us $40 per month to place-shift. At the conceptual level, I think you could make the case that place-shifting within the house is more important,” Roberts said.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on May 23, 2006 1:32 PM to IP Democracy