Brian Roberts, CEO of the nation’s top cable company Comcast, thinks the triple-play bundle of landline voice-video-data services will boost Comcast’s bottom-line in 2007 even more than it did in 2006. But, adding a cell phone option to the potent package of services, creating the veritable quadruple-play bundle, in other words, doesn’t strike Roberts as the world’s greatest idea.
Speaking at Citigroup’s Entertainment, Media and Telecommunications Conference in Las Vegas yesterday, (webcast here) Roberts said that he has a “bias” against the idea of offering cell phone service as a fourth component of the bundle even though Comcast is working with Sprint to experiment with mobile service and is a partner in a consortium that paid $2.4 billion for broadband wireless spectrum.
Consumers place a high value on purchasing landline voice, video and high-speed services with a single phone call, but cell phone service is somehow different. “As to the cell phone voice business today, that’s not something we see consumers lusting after in bundling,” Roberts said. Moreover, the operational efficiencies that Comcast experiences with the triple-play don’t obviously extend to cell phone service.
Still, Roberts is “interested to see the results” of the trials the company has underway with Sprint although he doesn’t believe must-have innovative advanced mobile applications will emerge from the cable industry’s Sprint-related experiments for years to come. “Within the next 15 years there is a chance that there wIll be applications that do do that [offer a compelling consumer experience via cable’s wireless efforts], but there won’t be in 2007.”
That’s OK because Comcast is going gangbusters as it is — the company hopes to add even more subscription units during 2007 than it did during 2006, which was a stellar year for Comcast. “If you liked 2006, you’ll really like 2007,” Roberts said.
Look for Comcast to continue developing non-traditional media businesses that leverage the boom in IP-based video delivery. “We think with our new Comcast Interactive Media division, we will be able to do things others can’t do in a cross-platform way,” he said. After all, Comcast has “more connections to PCs and TVs than anybody else.”
But Comcast’s big priority in 2007 will be pushing into the commercial services market, particularly swiping market share from the incumbent telcos in the small business sector. “We believe that [Comcast Digital Voice] is a credible replacement for the local exchange carrier and this is a business that has little or no competition today,” Roberts said. He thinks Comcast can capture a 20% market share in this space, and that the cash flow margins of small and medium-sized business telephony could be the highest of all Comcast products — 50% or more.
Cynthia Brumfield at 8:36 AM|Comments(0)
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