LAS VEGAS – The U.S. cable industry, while showing off their new bandwidth capabilities this week at their annual get-together, have been sending a message to their regulator and politicians in Washington.
The whole theme of this year’s Cable Show is “Competition Works. Consumers win” and the National Cable Telecommunications Association dug into its archives to try and prove it today.
During his presentation, NCTA president Kyle McSlarrow showed current Comcast CEO Brian Roberts on tape from the 1996 annual convention, where he demonstrated just how much more quickly a cable modem could download photos when compared to dialup. Given that at the time, Google didn’t exist and few North Americans had Internet access, much less broadband, the demo was pretty cool then.
Fast-forward to today and Roberts came out again for a few technical demos, this time using a wideband modem based on channel bonding technology – CableLabs’ DOCSIS 3.0 standard. This time, however, he didn’t compare the performance of the new technology to telco, but to plain old cable modem service.
The wideband modem delivered a 17 MB media file in less than a second, a 300 MB, 30-second commercial in less than 20 seconds and a 4 GB file containing the 55 million words in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Webster’s Dictionary in less than four minutes, with a live web conference running at the same time.
The whole point was to both toot cable’s horn and ongoing bandwidth lead – and to point out that without free market competition, such advancements might not have happened or at least not so soon.
“When government encourages growth and regulates with a light touch, competition works and consumers win,” said McSlarrow, sounding not unlike Canadian telecom and cable firms, come to think of it.
The day prior, however, FCC chairman Kevin Martin spoke to delegates and reiterated his support for unbundling big basic in favour of a la carte marketing of cable channels. “I don’t think customers should have to buy Spike TV in order to get Discovery,” he said.
McSlarrow responded today saying that the FCC can’t expect cable operators to be forced to add local digital simulcasts to their basic service (as they are being asked to do by American TV broadcasters) while at the same time taking apart the basic package in favour of a la carte.
“It’s strange that you would go to an ALC model where you are going to reduce consumer choice because it will not be economically feasible then to launch or maintain some channels,” added Viacom president and CEO Philippe Dauman in the same Tuesday morning session.
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After Comcast’s Roberts showed off the power of such new cable technology – and with Viacom’s Dauman, Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons and News Corp’s president and COO Peter Chernin on the same panel, I kept hoping that William Kennard, the former FCC chairman who’s now managing director of the Carlyle Group, to ask when Comcast might want to begin charging for providing such a fast, stable connection source for content producers. Of course, he did not ask and even in the quick press conference after the session that Parsons avoided, the mic never got around to me.
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The other hot issue down here is best reflected by a question often posed by Helen Lovejoy: “Won’t somebody please think of the children?” The panel this morning surmised that the push to a la carte is driven by interest groups who don’t like certain types of programming and couch their complaints by worrying about what children might see. The panel, quite rightly, noted that any legislation designed to limit free speech in this way violates "the fundamental principles of our democracy,” said Parsons.
He suggested those who would clamp laws down on television beyond what is already there should visit the Holocaust Museum in Washington “and see what happens when government controls the message.”
Their message for Washington? Let parents decide. “Parents are the appropriate people to decide what their children watch,” said Chernin, who pointed to PSAs, ratings and the parental control features on digital cable and satellite boxes as good tools to educate parents on how they can keep certain content away from young eyes.
“We’re enabling adults to make adult decisions on what their children see,” added Parsons.
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Dauman characterized his company as a “reluctant plaintiff” when it came to its lawsuit against Google/YouTube. Viacom filed a lawsuit over the many video clips from its properties (like MTV, CBS and Comedy Central) that end up on the video site. “Only reluctantly after a long period of time of trying to reach a deal that we found we could no longer tolerate having our content taken when we have Brian (Roberts) and Dick (Parsons) and others in the world compensating us for it.”
While Dauman and Chernin felt that the intellectual property issue will only get worse as more and more people figure out ways to use video and other content that doesn’t belong to them, Parsons disagreed saying that within months “It will get better in the U.S.
“You can’t violate my property rights and expect me to take it,” he cautioned, but also added he was confident the issue will be resolved soon. “They are the Custers of the modern world and we are the Sioux Nation,” he explained. “They will lose if they go to war and they know that.”
Outside the U.S., he acknowledged, is another story. “Ninety-five percent of what we do is pirated in China, said Parsons.
