Navigating what he described as the most competitive broadband market he has ever seen, Dave Watson, chief executive for the cable side of Comcast’s business portfolio, believes investor focus should remain on Comcast's stable revenue picture, and not the currently volatile visage of customer additions. 

“Our No. 1 focus is growing revenue,” Comcast Cable president and CEO Watson said Tuesday, while appearing in Boston at the JP Morgan Media and Communications Conference. (A full audio playback is available here.)

Also read: U.S. Broadband Customer Growth Slows to Pre-Pandemic Levels in Q1, With Every Sector Losing Steam

It has been noted by equity analysts for some time that Comcast has the data to back up this narrative. 

Also read: Comcast Prices StreamSaver Bundle at $15 a Month

Amid a toxic milieu of increased competition from fiber and fixed wireless, combined with the slowing creation of new households, Comcast’s broadband customer growth — once so robust during the pandemic — has reached negative quarterly terrain. The company lost 65,000 high-speed internet users in the first quarter. 

For Comcast, however, there has been no significant corresponding decline in average revenue per broadband customer, which was 4.2% in Q1.

That represented a slight drop versus the 4.5% reported for the first three months of last year, but fits the “3-4%” range Watson referenced several times during Tuesday’s JP Morgan sitdown. 

“We've been focused on the value between volume and rate,” said Watson, who played up the importance of market segmentation. 

On the higher end of that spectrum, Watson said that by the end of 2024, 50% of his company's footprint will be covered with the labor- and cost-intensive process of conducting “mid splits” of optical nodes, a process necessary to integrate multi-gig symmetrical broadband service via Full Duplex DOCSIS 4.0 conducted over a virtualized network. 

Watson said this capital-intensive upgrade is the best response to fiber-to-the-home, which he believes poses Comcast's greatest long-term competitive threat. 

On the low end, he believes the company’s recently introduced Now Internet and Now Mobile prepaid services are a solid hedge amid the sunsetting of the Affordable Communications Act, which he also believes will further cut into broadband growth over the coming quarters as less well-off customers see their subsidies disappear. 

"We are competitive in every segment,” Watson said, reiterating that Comcast “feels confident“ it will be able to maintain its 3-4% quarterly ARPU, regardless of the market circumstance. 

Comcast reported flat first-quarter earnings as it reduced the red ink at Peacock but continued to lose video and broadband customers.

The company said it cut its losses at Peacock to $639 million from $704 million a year ago.

Peacock added 3 million paid subscribers in the quarter, increasing its total to 34 million, which is up 55% from a year ago.  Peacock got a boost from having an exclusive NFL playoff game during the quarter. 

"We added and then retained more subscribers than we expected,” Comcast president Michael Cavanagh said during the company’s earnings call with analysts.

Revenue for Peacock was $1.1 billion, up 54% from a year ago. 

Overall, Comcast said Q1 net income rose 0.6% to $3.9 billion, or 97 cents a share, from $3.8 billion, or 91 cents a share, a year ago.

The earnings exceeded Wall Street expectations.

Revenue grew 1.2% to $30.1 billion.

At NBCUniversal, which Comcast calls its content and experiences division,  earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, fell 7.1% to $1.5 billion.  

Revenues were up 1.1% to $10.4 billion.

EBITDA for the company’s media business was down 6.1% to $827 million as revenue rose 3.6%. The company said expenses were up because of higher programming costs at Peacock. 

Domestic advertising revenues were flat at $2 billion, while domestic distribution revenue increased 7.2% to $2.9 billion. 

The company’s studio business saw earnings fall 12.2% to $244 million as revenue slid 7.2% to $2.7 billion.

Comcast’s cable business — called connectivity and platforms — increased EBITDA by 1.5% to $8.2 billion. Revenue declined 0.1% to $20.3 billion. 

Comcast lost 65,000 domestic broadband customers, leaving it with 32.2 million residential and business customers.

Revenues from domestic residential broadband were up 3.9% from a year ago to $6.6 billion.

Domestic video customers were down by 487,000, leaving 13.6 million remaining for the former top U.S. cable operator. Residential video revenues dropped 7.7% to $6.9 billion.

Advertising revenue was up 3.5% to $951 million.

“Our team is continuing to execute exceptionally well in a dynamic and competitive marketplace,” chairman and CEO Brian Roberts said. “Overall, I am proud of our ability to consistently perform at the highest levels and continue to position the company for long-term growth.”

Comcast reported bigger-than-expected third-quarter earnings as broadband revenues rose, Peacock losses declined and the company’s theme-park business boomed.

Cord-cutting continued to affect Comcast’s cable TV business, as it lost another half-million video customers in the quarter. Concerns about broadband competition also drove the stock lower this morning as the company shed 18,000 subscribers when a small subscriber gain was forecasted.

Also Read: Shift of Sports to Streaming Will Test Broadband Networks: Comcast

Peacock’s losses dropped as the streaming service added 4 million paid subscribers in the quarter, giving it 28 million, up 80% from a year ago. Comcast stopped giving free Peacock subscriptions to its cable customers.

Peacock recorded a $565 million loss in the quarter, compared to a $614 million loss a year ago, as revenue rose 64% to $830 million.

Speaking on the company’s third-quarter earnings call, Comcast president Michael Cavanagh said that the company still expects losses for Peacock to peak in 2023, but said the company now believes 2023 losses for the streaming platform will be $2.8 billion versus the previous forecast of $3 billion. Losses should further improve in 2024, Cavanagh said. 

Overall, Comcast’s net income was $4.05 billion, or 98 cents a share, compared to a loss of $4.6 billion, or $1.05 a share a year ago, when the company took a big writeoff on its acquisition of Sky.

Revenues rose 0.9% to $30.1 billion.

Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization at Comcast’s content and experiences businesses rose 10.2% as revenues edged up 0.8% to $10.6 billion on the strength of the company’s theme parks unit.

Media (NBCUniversal) EBITDA rose 6.5% to $723 billion as revenues rose 0.4% to $6 billion.

Domestic advertising revenues fell 8.4% to $1.9 billion while domestic distribution revenue rose 38% to $2.6 billion.

Theme-park profit rose 20% to $983 million as revenue rose 17.2% to $2.4 billion

Earnings for Comcast’s connectivity and platforms (cable) business rose 2.6% to $8.2 billion as revenues edged up 0.2% to $20.3 billion.

Comcast lost 490,000 domestic video customers in the quarter, giving it a total of 14.5 million. 

The company also lost 18,000 domestic broadband customers, including 17,000  residential customers, giving it 29.8 million domestic broadband customers.

Wireless customers rose by 294,000 to 6.3 million.

Revenue from domestic broadband rose 3.8% to $6.4 billion, while revenue from video fell 3.5% to  $7.2 billion.

Advertising revenue fell 12.4% to $960 million in a non-election quarter.

Programming expenses fell 1.3% to $4.5 billion as rate increases were offset by a decline in video subscribers.

“We delivered strong financial results in the third quarter, while also investing in long-term growth, accelerating share-repurchase activity and maintaining our healthy balance sheet,” Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts. 

"Our strategic focus on innovation and financial discipline facilitated by consistent execution positions us competitively both now and into the future,” Roberts said. 

Comcast and Imagicomm reached a retransmission consent agreement Tuesday, ending a month-long blackout.

The deal restores WHBQ Memphis, and KAYU Spokane, to Xfinity cable subscribers.

“We’re pleased to be able to return KAYU and WHBQ to our customers through a new agreement with their owner, Imagicomm Communications, which reflects today’s evolving media marketplace and stabilizes the cost of programming for our customers,” a Comcast spokesperson said. 

Imagicomm, an affiliate of cable network INSP, acquired the stations from Cox Media Group last year.

“We are pleased that we were able to reach an agreement with Comcast / Xfinity that will enable our loyal viewers to resume watching compelling Fox programming and award winning local news on their Xfinity systems in the Memphis and Spokane markets,” an Imagicomm spokesperson said.

Comcast said it promoted Meena Soleiman to senior VP of technical operations and engineering for the cable operator’s Northeast Division.

Soleiman had been VP of technical operations for the Northeast Division, where she managed the expansion of the Xfinity 10G Network in underserved areas.

In her new post, she will oversee technical operations, engineering and the residential and commercial construction teams across the 14 states in Comcast’s Northeast Division.

“Meena assumes a pivotal leadership position at the intersection of innovation and customer experience,” Amy Lynch, president of Comcast Cable’s Northeast Division, said. “She brings an incredibly diverse and valuable skillset to the role, and I look forward to working with her to provide an exceptional experience for our residential and business customers.’’

Soleiman has been with Comcast for 20 years. Before that, she was with ExxonMobil, Cendant and DoubleClick.

Comcast Cable said it named Sarah Gitchell as senior VP of content acquisition, a new position at the company.

Gitchell had been senior VP and senior deputy general counsel for Comcast. 

In her new role, she will lead the company’s field operating and compliance teams and help develop the company’s overall content strategy. She will also conduct certain deal negotiations.

She reports to Greg Rigdon, president of content acquisition at Comcast Cable.

Gitchell joined Comcast in 2005 after being an associate at Philadelphia law firm Dechert LLP. ■

Steve White has had a storied career in the cable industry, including 11 years as president of Comcast’s West Division, where he managed 30,000 employees and drove annual revenue past $18 billion. But he cites helping his single mother clean hotel rooms as a young boy as the turning point in his life and business philosophy. White said his mom’s fierce determination to provide for her family (he has three brothers) drove him to excel in a business career that has spanned three decades. Currently president, special counsel to Comcast Cable CEO Dave Watson, White has written a book about that philosophy — Uncompromising — that was released on February 22. He spoke recently with B+C Multichannel News senior content producer — finance Mike Farrell. An edited transcript follows. 

Your book, Uncompromising: How an Unwavering Commitment to Your Why Leads to an Impactful Life and a Lasting Legacy, came out February 22. What made you decide to write it? I’m inspired by the quote often attributed to Mark Twain. ‘The two most important days in your life are the day you’re born, and the second is when you find out why.’ Through hardship, I was able to answer the second question. My why is to create a table of prosperity for as many people as possible. Sharing my life’s lessons — my successes and failures — is in service of my purpose.

You obviously had a great role model in your mother, but have there been other mentors that helped you realize your potential in other parts of your career? Certainly, my wife Barbita should be included. I have more mentors than most people, but my ‘trick’ is that most of these folks don’t know that they’re mentoring me. I identify leaders that I admire from afar and I study them. If I get an opportunity to meet them, I ask them all the questions time will allow. I believe you can learn from everyone, so don’t limit yourself. 

You also say that learning from mistakes is as important as learning from successes. What do you consider to be your biggest mistake and what did you learn from it? My biggest mistake was putting myself ahead of my team, and I was fired as a result early in my career. My why became clearer to me while I reflected on that life event. If I wanted to enjoy any level of success, I had to become a servant leader. When I’m faced with fear around a decision or direction, I always ask the question, ‘If I knew I couldn’t fail, what would I do?’ The decision becomes very clear, and I go with it.

One of the things under your purview as president, special counsel to the CEO at Comcast Cable is diversity, equality and inclusion. What do you think the industry’s top priorities should be on that front? We have a terrific team leading our efforts. From my perspective, the priorities around DE&I are as follows:

Engaged leadership: Commit to these initiatives from the highest levels of the organization.

Investment and empowerment: Provide a ‘hand up’ rather than a ‘hand out.’

Accountability: There should be rewards and consequences for creating an inclusive culture with increased representation of people of color.

Impatience: As an example, this industry created broadband. When we commit, there is nothing that will stop us.

Vulnerability: Recognize and admit we can do better. Ask for help and start with your employees. 

The pandemic has caused a lot of people, particularly younger people, to re-evaluate their career priorities. Is this good or bad?  It is good. And one correction: it isn’t just younger people. All leaders are re-evaluating their career priorities. The winning companies will have a clear purpose for existing. I go back to the earlier quote: ‘The two most important days in a company’s life is the day it is born, and the second is when they know why.’ If your company can answer that second question with clarity, then your chances of surviving for years to come increase dramatically. ■

AMC Networks and Comcast Cable said they have reached a new multiyear distribution agreement.

The new deal includes continued carriage of AMC’s linear networks and extends distribution of AMC Plus, the ad-free premium content offering. The agreement also will expand the availability of AMC’s targeted streaming services, such as Acorn TV, ALLBLK, Shudder and Sundance Now, to additional platforms and devices.

“We are excited to continue and also expand our longstanding partnership with Comcast through a new agreement that includes not only continued carriage of our cable networks, but also our fast-growing targeted streaming services including AMC Plus, which was made available first to Xfinity customers,” said Josh Reader, president of distribution and development for AMC Networks. “2022 will be the biggest year of original programming in our company’s history, and Comcast’s Xfinity customers will have a front-row seat for every second of it.”

Financial terms were not disclosed. With cord-cutting, cable network distribution revenue is growing slowly if at all. In the third quarter, AMC’s affiliate-fee revenue was $217 million, down 3.1% year over year.

“We’ve had a longstanding partnership with AMC Networks and are thrilled to continue it to provide our Xfinity customers with access to their content, including their growing library of original programming, across our industry-leading platforms,” said Rebecca Heap, senior VP, consumer products and propositions, Comcast Cable. 

AMC’s linear networks are AMC, BBC America, WE tv,  IFC and Sundance Channel. ■ 

Effectv, the Comcast Cable ad-sales division, is offering advertisers opportunities to reach advertisers on the Xfinity X1 platform.

Features available for sponsorship on X1 include a virtual auto showroom, a career center and a hometown hub. The company is also launching a Comcast Knowledge Center, a video library focused on opportunities for continuing education.

“Brands are always looking for ways to make their message stand out,” said Pooja Midha, chief growth officer at Comcast Advertising. “Through Xfinity X1, we are able to offer Effectv clients the opportunity to  reach their audience with rich, relevant brand content that goes beyond a simple TV commercial — an opportunity especially powerful for small businesses that may be struggling with the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, these brands’ media investment dollars can go further with greater  interactivity and impact.”  

Brands that want to sponsor those X1 features can work with Mnemonic, Effectv’s creative agency, to develop campaigns.

“This opportunity is about  expanding the power of TV even more,” Midha said. “Brands already invest resources to create short and long-form  content for social and their websites. When this content is offered on demand and coupled with an  audience driven media schedule, brands further extend their reach and the impact of their video investment.”

When advertisers ran campaigns with Comcast Cable’s Effectv ad sales unit, they were able to reach households without TV through streaming, according to Effectv’s TV Viewership Report.

Effectv found that traditional TV viewing remained strong, with Comcast cable subscribers watching 6 hours and 2 minutes per day, down from 6:34 a year ago in the peak of the pandemic and 6:20 in the first half of 2019. It’s the first drop in viewing since EffecTV began collecting data.

Cable networks got 70% of that viewing, more than in previous reports. During the first of last year, cable networks accumulated 67% of viewing. Viewing is more fragmented, with the top five networks accounting for just 31% of viewing.

Live programming--as opposed to shows on the DVR or VOD--accounted for 88% of viewing in the first half of 2021, up from 86% in the first half of both 2020 and 2019. And viewers preferred to watch news and sports on traditional TV, while young adult content was more often viewed via streaming.

Also Read: Shrinking Media Industry Scrambles for Tech Talent

Whether traditional TV or streaming, viewers were watching on TV screen. Effectv said 76% of streaming viewing occurred on a TV screen during the first half of 2021.

When it comes to ad exposures, Effectv measured both traditional TV and streaming content while analyzing more than 20,000 cross-platform campaigns and found that streaming complemented traditional TV.

In those cross-platform campaigns, 57% of the reach from streaming was incremental to traditional TV campaigns. Streaming impressions were more than three times as likely to be served in homes with little or no traditional TV.

"Our latest report continues to demonstrate the tremendous ability of linear TV to reach audiences, but it also reinforces how smart advertisers use streaming as a way to expand reach,” said John Brauer, VP, insights & analytics, Effectv. “Analysis of Effectv’s cross-platform audience solutions confirm what the industry has long suspected: streaming advertising consistently extends traditional TV campaign reach in meaningful ways.”

Every regulated industry wants just one thing from its regulators, a fair advantage over its competitors. This certainly seems to be playing out between industry titans Comcast Cable Communications, Inc. and Nexstar Media, Inc., and their fight over millions of dollars of retransmission fees in New York City. 

On July 1, 2021, Comcast hit first when it filed a Declaratory Ruling petition with the FCC. Comcast wants the FCC to rule that Nexstar, which has a local marketing agreement (LMA) with Mission Broadcasting, Inc., the owner of WPIX-TV New York, should be attributed with ownership of WPIX and thus its holdings exceed the 39% national audience cap of the FCC’s multiple ownership rules. Comcast argues this outcome is needed because Nexstar either has de facto control over WPIX or exercises excess “influence” over the station. 

Adding punch to its request, Comcast further asserts that Nexstar violated its promise to the FCC during the 2019 Nexstar-Tribune merger. During the merger, Nexstar represented that it would divest WPIX, owned by Tribune, to stay under the national ownership cap, and that it would not provide any LMA services for the station post-transaction. After the Nexstar-Tribune merger closed, however, Nexstar nevertheless retained an option to repurchase WPIX after divesting it to Scripps. Presumably this was done in case the national ownership cap was increased by the FCC or Nexstar divested other stations allowing it to acquire WPIX. When this didn’t happen, Nexstar assigned its option to Mission, which then exercised the option to buy WPIX, and then entered into an LMA with Nexstar. That assignment included copies of the Nexstar-Mission LMA and following public notice was approved by the FCC without any opposition by Comcast or any other cable company.

Things hit the fan when Nexstar, which does not own a television station in the NYC DMA and is thus otherwise allowed to negotiate retransmission carriage terms for third-party stations like WPIX, moved to increase the fees Comcast would have to pay to carry WPIX’s programming. Rather than claim WPIX-Nexstar violated the good faith negotiation requirements under the FCC’s rules, which obligates cable systems and television stations to properly negotiate the terms of carriage, Comcast instead went for the jugular and asserts Nexstar’s spinoff of WPIX was a sham and challenged Nexstar’s basic qualifications as a licensee.

For its part, on July 13, 2021, Nexstar sued Comcast in NY state court claiming breach of contract. The suit explains that cable operators sell television programming to subscribers in exchange for monthly subscription fees. Many of these programs are the retransmitted signals of local broadcast channels which cable operators carry pursuant to negotiated “retransmission consent agreements” (RCA). In early 2020, Nexstar and Comcast completed a RCA which set the fees that Comcast would pay for retransmitting the signals of approximately 171 different stations through Dec. 15, 2022.

A term of the Comcast-Nexstar RCA included an “Additional Stations” provision, which, according to Nexstar, delineated the circumstances under which additional stations would become governed by the Comcast-Nexstar RCA, including some stations with which Nexstar had, or may subsequently acquire, an LMA. The suit further asserts that language in the RCA confirms the inclusion of WPIX and the fees that would be paid for carriage if Nexstar entered into an LMA with the station. That happened at the end of 2020, when WPIX was sold to Mission, and Nexstar entered into its LMA with Mission to provide programming and other support services. The transaction was subsequently approved by the FCC without any objections from Comcast. 

The suit also maintains that rather than engaging in any meaningful negotiations or discussions with Nexstar to resolve their dispute, “Comcast instead filed a surprise petition with the FCC demanding that the agency overturn its prior approval of the WPIX LMA and rewrite well established retransmission consent rules [and] disseminated [its] petition to the press in a cynical attempt to cast Nexstar in a negative light.”

It will undoubtedly take the FCC and the NY court some months (or longer) to sort this all out. In the meantime, the atmosphere for retransmission negotiations will undoubtedly remain red hot. This should be no surprise, of course, considering that industry wide the retransmission negotiations stakes involve hundreds of millions of dollars. It may also explain why the FCC is being brought in to the equation, big players in the regulated industry are just seeking some “fair” advantage over their competitors. Time will tell.

Comcast Cable said it will be distributing CBS All Access, the ViacomCBS streaming service.

ViacomCBS will be rebranding CBS All Access next year and Comcast will continue to carry it under its new name, Paramount Plus.

Related: Paramount Plus is New Name for ViacomCBS 'Super Streamer'

Comcast said its Xfinity X1 is the first pay TV provider to offer CBS All Access to their users. Comcast’ Flex broadband platform launched All Access earlier this year. 

As the pay TV industry goes through cord cutting, Comcast has been integrating streaming service into its Xfinity X1 platform, making navigating programming choices easier and boosting its value to consumers.

X1 already carries services including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, Peacock, YouTube, Xumi, Tubi, Pluto TV and a host of others.

“X1 customers will be able to enjoy CBS All Access’ offering of more than 20,000 episodes and movies from BET, CBS, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount Pictures and more, as well as exclusive original series like Star Trek: Discovery, with new episodes dropping weekly on Thursdays; the upcoming limited event series The Stand, premiering Dec. 17th and based on Stephen King's best-selling novel; as well as the recently debuted docuseries Texas 6, and many more,” said Rebecca Heap, senior VP, video and entertainment, Comcast cable, in a blog post 

“To launch the app and access the streaming service over the Internet, X1 customers can say ‘CBS All Access’ into the Xfinity Voice Remote,” she said.

Strong is in charge of Comcast Cable’s main profit center and the backbone for which its content services flow — Xfinity video, mobile and broadband. So far, Strong, who joined Comcast in 2018 after nearly two decades with Liberty Global where she held senior executive leadership roles, has risen to the challenge. Comcast reported the strongest quarterly broadband subscriber growth in its history, 633,000, in the third quarter, and signs all point to that momentum continuing. 

Strong has been a big proponent of Comcast’s Internet Essentials program to bring low-cost  broadband to low-income households. Since 2011, Internet Essentials has connected more than 8 million people with high-speed service. 

“With learning looking very different this year across the country, we want to help give our educators the connectivity they need to support America’s youth during these unprecedented times,” Strong said in a statement. 

Adding to broadband’s allure is Xfinity Flex, which gives broadband-only customers access to streaming services like Peacock, Hulu, CBS All Access, Netflix and Amazon Prime. Flex crossed 1 million devices deployed in May and has been a big part of overall broadband growth.  

“Flex was designed to fit seamlessly into the lives of our internet-only customers,” she said in another statement. “We are thrilled our customers are quickly embracing this device on such a large scale.”

While broadband appears to have a lot of growth runway left, the mobile business also presents opportunity. Comcast launched Xfinity mobile in April 2017, and currently has about 2.6 million customers. In Q3, Comcast added about 187,000 Xfinity Mobile customers, but the company increasingly sees the service as a gateway to its other products. 

During its Q3 earnings call, Comcast Cable CEO Dave Watson said Comcast wireless growth has been “material” for several quarters, despite closing down retail stores because of the pandemic. With those stores now reopened, and by bundling wireless with all of its products, not just broadband, Watson sees accelerated growth ahead.

“We’re already seeing, as we put our shoulder to bringing things back, some real early-stage success in terms of what mobile can do,” Watson said on the call.

Growing up in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., Dave Watson thought his future would be in soccer. He played for the University of Richmond and even got a U.S. Soccer coaching license. Although he didn’t continue in sports, building and coaching strong teams has always been important to him.

The son of an attorney, Watson thought he might pursue law while studying political science. Instead, he got into the wireless phone business. It was 1984, and the recent breakup of AT&T had made new spectrum available. He opened a Washington, D.C., sales office for Bell Atlantic Mobile, and then moved two years later to Metrophone, a privately owned mobile company, where he handled marketing and sales. By 1991, Metrophone’s owners were entertaining a number of offers to buy the company. Comcast wasn’t among the likely suitors, but was interested in getting into the mobile business. Comcast even recruited Watson for a senior marketing job in Philadelphia, which he declined.

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A few weeks after Watson turned down the offer, Metrophone announced it would, in fact, be sold to Comcast. Assuming he was already out of favor with the new owner, Watson figured he’d soon be out of a job. When a group of Comcast executives arrived at the office, he was ready for the axe to fall and was surprised when CEO and founder Ralph Roberts asked to meet with him privately. “My stomach dropped,” he recalled. “Not only did I think I was about to be fired, but by the founder himself.”

However, he said, “Ralph sat me down and, instead of sending me packing, he laid out his vision and asked me to stay.” Watson remembers this pivotal moment in his career as a “remarkable gesture that, I learned, was very much in character for Ralph.”

Watson joined Comcast Cellular Communications and led the company until its sale in 1999, when he transitioned to Comcast Cable as executive VP of marketing and customer service. “It was an exciting time for the industry, and cable had incredible potential,” he remembered. “Our entire organization was thinking ahead and working to build a next-generation network that today, two decades later, continues to power our technologies and innovation.”

Following Comcast’s 2004 acquisition and integration of AT&T Broadband, Watson was elevated to executive VP of operations, becoming chief operating officer in 2010, and then CEO of Comcast Cable in 2017. He has been responsible for driving Comcast Cable’s operating strategy and execution, leading its emergence as the nation’s largest gigabit speed internet provider and pay TV service and creating a business services organization that is the company’s largest contributor to revenue growth.

Far removed from the soccer field, Watson remains focused on his team. “If you’re part of a team, your job is to make the team successful,” he said. “If you’re leading a team, make sure the members of the team are great. And when you find opportunities, do something about them.”

Keri Reisbeck has been named vice president, human resources, for Effectv, the sales division for Comcast Cable, effective immediately.

Reisbeck, who has been with Comcast for 21 years, most recently was head of HR for the sales market division of Effectv. She is taking a new position at the company, which until recently had been known as Comcast Spotlight.

She will be based in Colorado and reports to Sandy Gunn, senior vice president, HR, for Comcast Advertising.

“As we continue to pioneer and propel the industry forward, we’ll be looking to attract, retain and develop employees who aren’t afraid to embrace new technologies and enjoy the thrills and challenges of working across a diverse range of media, from digital to new and evolving forms of TV,” Gunn said. “Keri stood out in our search for Effectv’s first official HR leader. She has worked in many different divisions of our company and consistently brings a fresh, creative and fearless attitude to the role. She’s not afraid to try new things and most importantly, she understands the importance that people play in moving a company forward.”

Effectv said Reisbeck’s appointment was part of its commitment to hiring an promoting women. The company recently named Kelly Perone to VP of product strategy, Andrea Zapata to VP of data innovation and insights and Melanie Hamilton as leader of its national sales team.

Reisbeck started her Comcast career as a manager working on national recruitment programs.

“It’s an exciting time to be at Effectv and I’m honored to be leading the charge in making sure we hire, retain and nurture the industry’s best to lead us into this new chapter,” Reisbeck said. “People are a company’s biggest competitive advantage and my team and I will be on the lookout for top talent.” 

Video subscriber losses rose slightly in the first quarter for Comcast Cable, but that was offset by strong performance in its broadband segment during the period.

Comcast lost about 121,000 video customers in Q1, up slightly from the 96,000 customers the unit lost in the prior year. But the country’s largest cable operator added 375,000 high-speed data customers in the quarter -- about even with the 379,000 it added in Q1 2018 -- which helped drive revenue up 4.2% to $14.3 billion and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA, a measure of cash flow) up 9.8% to $5.7 billion. It was the highest quarterly EBITDA growth the cable unit has had in a decade.

At NBC Universal, revenue dipped 12.5% to $8.3 billion, reflecting tough comparisons to the prior year which included the PyeongChang Olympics and Super Bowl LII. Adjusted EBITDA rose 2.9% to $2.3 billion, mainly because of gains at its Filmed Entertainment units. At its cable networks, revenue fell 9.2% to $2.9 billion, reflecting decreases in distribution and advertising revenue. Excluding $378 million generated by the Olympics in Q1 2018, revenue would have increased 3.2% in the period. Advertising revenue was down 12.8% in the quarter, also reflecting tough comparisons to the 2018 Olympics. Adjusted EBITDA  increased 0.7% to $1.3 billion in the period.

At its broadcast TV unit, revenue fell 29.4% to $2.5 billion in Q1. Excluding revenue of $770 million from the Olympics and $423 million from Super Bowl LII in the prior year, overall revenue at the unit would have risen 7.1% in the period.

“Comcast is off to a terrific start in 2019, financially, operationally and strategically.In the first quarter, we delivered strong EBITDA and earnings per share growth, as well as robust free cash flow,” Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts said in a press release. “Comcast Cable had the best quarterly EBITDA growth in over a decade, while NBCUniversal again posted favorable results. We also continued to strengthen our leadership position in valuable customer relationships and premium content. ...Across all parts of the company, our teams are executing at a high level and collaborating to drive growth and innovation.I’m excited about this quarter’s results and the opportunities ahead."

At Comcast’s new Sky unit, revenue decreased 5% to $4.8 billion, mainly due to currency issues. Excluding the currency impact, revenue rose 1.9%, driven by increases in content sales -- up 38% to $370 million, mainly from wholesaling sports programming. Adjusted EBITDA dipped 17%, affected by increased costs for sports rights. Sky added about 112,000 customer relationships in the period, ending Q1 with 23.7 million subscribers.

Consolidated revenue increased 17.9% to $26.9 billion and adjusted EBITDA was up 18.1% to $8.6 billion, reflecting the addition of Sky.  

Video-on-demand programming continues to grow as an advertising medium, according to new figures from Canoe.

Ads served by Canoe in video-on-demand programming registered 6.995 billion impressions in the fourth quarter, up 37% from 5.111 billion a year ago.

Canoe ran 3,412 campaigns in the fourth quarter of 2017, up 46% from 2,341 a year ago. Campaigns for clients represented 82% of the campaigns while network tune in ads comprised 18% of the campaigns. A year ago, 79% of the campaigns were run for clients.

Related: Set-Top VOD Ads Must Evolve to Survive

For the full year, Canoe racked up 23.326 billion impressions in 2017, up 30% from 17.903 billion in 2016.

Canoe ran 7,822 campaigns in 2017, up 35% from 5,783.

On average, Canoe is putting more ads in each VOD program. During fourth-quarter breaks in the middle of programs, an average of 4.04 ads ran in the fourth quarter, up from 3.73 a year ago. During pre-roll, 1.17 ads appear, up from 1.1, with 1.41 appearing in post-roll, up from 1.02.

During the fourth quarter nearly all of the impressions came from mid-roll ads. There were 5.9 billion impressions in mid-roll, compared with 969 million in pre-roll and 102 million in post roll ads.

Related: Canoe Marks 100 Billion Spots Inserted in VOD Programming

Campaigns that employ frequency capping put that cap at two impressions, on average.

The ads are overwhelmingly run completely. In mid-roll, 99% of the ads run to completion. In pre-roll, it’s 90.2% and in post-roll its’s 93.4%.

VOD viewing and ad delivery peaks during the weekend. Canoe delivered 1.196 billion impression on Sundays and 1.185 billion on Saturdays, the two biggest days of the week during the fourth quarter.

Canoe inserts ads in programming in 36 million households service by Charter Spectrum, Comcast and Cox, up from 35 million households a year ago. Those operators own Canoe as a joint venture.

NAME: Sarah Gitchell
TITLE: SVP, Deputy General Counsel and Chief Counsel, Content Acquisition
COMPANY: Comcast Cable

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS: Has counseled Comcast on hundreds of programming deals since joining in 2005, from multibillion-dollar contracts with media giants and multiplatform agreements to retransmission consent pacts with single TV stations.

QUOTABLE: “We do a lot of things here that other companies in our industry aren’t even doing yet, and I get to do it living in Philadelphia, which to me is the best of all worlds.”

As lead attorney for Comcast’s Content Acquisition Group, Sarah Gitchell has played a key role in the company’s Xfinity TV cable operation being able to offer programming live on TV, on demand and on mobile apps.

On landmark deals like the 10-year pact struck with The Walt Disney Co. in 2012, which included out-of-home viewing on a variety of devices, and with Fox Networks the following year, she either helped lead negotiations or was right in the middle of things, company officials say.

Gitchell, who came to Comcast in 2005, mentions the renewal with CBS in 2013 that secured free on-demand access to big shows from the network’s primetime lineup when asked about memorable deals she’s worked on.

She also makes note of Comcast efforts like Streampix, the multiscreen subscription video-on-demand service launched to Xfinity TV subscribers in 2012, long before the launch of the X1 platform embraced rival streaming services such as Netflix and Sling TV. Pacts to offer movies and TV shows for sale via electronic sell-through, or EST, also broke new ground for the nation’s biggest cable operator, and the overall industry.

“That’s one of the things I love about working here,” she said in a recent chat in a conference room on the 45th floor of the Comcast Center in Philadelphia. “We’re always thinking about, ‘How do people want to consume this content? And if we have the technology to provide it other ways, why aren’t we doing that if that’s the direction people are going?’ ”

Finds Lots of Positives at Comcast
Gitchell said she finds a lot to love about the company she joined after working as an associate at local law firm Dechert LLP. One plus mark she cites is the encouragement to take on new responsibilities.

“If you can do what the company is asking you to do and do it in the right way, those are the people that get to succeed and continue on and get new responsibilities and more things to do,” she said. “It’s very much not what you look like, not who you are, we just need this done. And if you’re great at making that happen, we’ll give you more to do.”

Watch MCN: 12 Takeaways From MCN's Wonder Women Class of 2018

Also, her boss (Lynn Charytan, the 2015 Wonder Woman whose titles include Comcast Cable general counsel) and Comcast’s Content Acquisition team, led by executive VP Greg Rigdon and including Jen Gaiski, Justin Smith and Mike Nisenblatt. “They’re fantastic. I can’t say enough,” she said. “I think they’re the best at what they do in the industry and also just super nice, super fun people to work with.”

And guess who is a big fan of Philadelphia? Gitchell grew up in Ames, Iowa, and when she decided to come east and had the choice of Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania, she chose Penn and the big city.

“I loved Penn and I stayed here,” she said, obtaining her law doctorate at Temple University Beasley School of Law before joining Dechert in the Corporate and Securities group.

An art history major at Penn, Gitchell had worked at Freeman’s Auction House while attending law school at night (and finishing her studies in three and a half years).

She also taught aerobics for years, until suffering an ankle break after slipping on a patch of ice. While recovering, she met her future husband, Gary Dorfman, at the gym. “My dad always called it my lucky break,” she said.

Dorfman has his own business. He owns two sandwich shops in Philly: Jake’s Sandwich Board, on 12th and Samson, and Hatch & Coop, a chicken joint in University City. He used to be a health-care consultant before going into restaurants. “We eat very well at my house,” Gitchell said.

They have two young daughters, Rose, who is 13, and Lily, who is 10 and a half. They enjoy going back to Iowa for the Iowa State Fair, where the girls get to see “kids their age showing animals and being responsible for things, which is nice for them to see.” Depending on the year, they might see lots of politicians there, too. Gitchell has pictures of John McCain walking by with a pork chop on a stick.

Higher-Ups Call Her ‘A Hidden Jewel’
In nominating Gitchell to be a Wonder Woman, Rigdon and Comcast senior executive VP David Cohen called her a “hidden jewel” at the company and said “her influence in the industry, and within Comcast, is extensive and significant.”

Content providers she deals with respect her legal opinions, they said, and Comcast Cable leaders trust her advice, “not only for her legal expertise, but also for her knowledge about the television industry and the changing dynamics of the programming landscape.” They also praise her diverse and inclusive hiring, and her mentoring activities.

Asked what the next big thing Comcast wants to prepare for in terms of content distribution, Gitchell said essentially the aim is to be as ready as possible when the next unanticipated new thing comes along. She said, for example, Comcast was doing TV everywhere deals — to let subscribers view content on outside devices — back before iPad tablets existed and thus weren’t specifically mentioned in contracts.

“Just try to get a rights profile that’s broad, because you don’t actually know,” she said.

Cable techies are looking around "the fog."

At a Silicon Valley conference early this month, computer and communications experts delved into the IoT and "the fog," a derivative of cloud computing. CableLabs is evaluating the fog's role, especially in emerging wireless services, and Comcast awarded an "Innovation Fund" grant recently to a Princeton University "Cloud to Fog" research project. 

"Fog is 'distributed cloud,'" according to Don Clarke, principal architect at CableLabs, who noted that the concept emerged a couple years ago as a Cisco marketing term. Other experts acknowledged that "fog" and "edge" are often used interchangeably, but they are synergistic – not synonymous.

In a seminal academic paper on "The Fog Computing Paradigm" three years ago, Ivan Stojmenovic and Sheng Wen of Deakin University in Australia described scenarios in which fog services "can be hosted at end devices such as set-top boxes or access points."

By the researchers' reckoning the fog lies between the cloud and the edge. Fog computing is envisioned for use in wireless services, including mobile voice, Internet of Things and connectivity for autonomous vehicles and other new networks.

"Fog can be distinguished from cloud by its proximity to end users ... and its support for mobility," Stojmenovic and Wen wrote. "As fog computing is implemented at the edge of the network, it provides low latency, location awareness and improves quality-of-services for streaming and real-time applications."

Major developments have been taking place quietly since the paper's publication. The 400 attendees at the Fog World Congress in Santa Clara, Calif., Oct. 31-Nov. 1 examined evolving trends in fog computing, including increasing deployments of fog as an early-stage technology and as a solution to Internet of Things latency.

For example, at a session titled "Fog Over Denver," Traci Hiltonberry, director of innovation for the Denver South Economic Development Partnership, explained the creation of a "national model for fog computing and networking in a smart city ... [for] transportation and mobility, public safety, resilience and resource conservation, smart buildings and public health."

Another speaker forecast that fog computing will become an $18.2 billion market by 2022. Christian Renaud, research director-IoT at 451 Research, predicted that fog's primary uses will be in the utilities and energy sectors, followed by transportation, healthcare and industrial. He said he foresees revenue models growing by 37% from 2018 to 2022.

Meanwhile: Fog Forming in the Cable Industry
The potential for this "fog" capability at the network edge is on the minds of several cable operators, although they declined to provide status reports or timetables for implementing the architecture.

"The edge is the new piece of the cloud puzzle," CableLab's Clarke told Multichannel News. He said that identifying "latency and bandwidth efficiency between the cloud and the end user" is a critical issue in edge development.

"It's about relationships," he said, noting that there are "very different dynamics" as various sectors in the network operations business explore "how standards and open-source can become symbiotic."

Clarke said the "edge is where the connectivity provides the latency you need for the service experience," citing issues such as "where does that service terminate and where does the content get delivered?" He eschewed the word "fog," focusing instead on edge computing.

"These days you can put a lot of functionality [into] base station and other less complex, lower power consumption" devices, he said.

"Wireless is an important consideration as we architect these new networks at 5G [fifth generation] and beyond," Clarke said.

Meanwhile, Comcast said that with its grant -- of an unspecified sum -- to the Princeton University project, the company sought to support research into the "cloud-to-fog interface in the areas of storage, communications and management."

In announcing the grant, Jason Livingood, VP-technology policy & standards at Comcast Cable, called fog networking "an architectural approach that seeks to make networks more efficient by pushing network intelligence and processing capabilities closer to end users." Livingood said that fog computing processes would enable the "cloud and edge [to] form a mutually beneficial, interdependent continuum" that would eliminate or minimize the need to determine if a specific task should be handled in the cloud or at a customer's edge device.

"This project highlights the challenges and solution approaches in building a unified interface framework between edge and cloud under the fog-networking paradigm," Livingood said. A Comcast spokesman told Multichannel News that there is no specific timetable for a report on the Princeton research; he characterized the fog exploration as "pretty new."

At Princeton, the project is being supervised by Dr. Mung Chiang, an electrical engineering professor, founder of the Princeton EDGE Lab and a co-founder of the global Open Fog Consortium. Among the supporters of Princeton's EDGE Lab are ARM, Cisco, Dell, Intel and Microsoft.

Chiang has said he helped launch the consortium to address common problems with “edge networks” — the connections at the periphery of a more centralized network, close to the actual devices that use the network. In a Princeton profile of his work, Chiang said, “As we further develop the ‘Internet of Things’ — networked devices in smart cities or connected cars — we have a unique opportunity to bring the ‘cloud’ closer to the edge and users as ‘fog.’”

Photo by d3sign/Getty Images

The 2017 Tech Roundtable Panelists
Kevin Hart, executive vice president and chief product and technology officer, Cox Communications
Dan Hennessy, chief architecture architect, Liberty Global
Jay Rolls, chief technology officer and senior vice president, Charter Communications
JR Walden, senior vice president of technology and CTO, Mediacom Communications
Tony Werner, president of technology and product, Comcast Cable
Read More From the 2017 Tech Roundtable Agenda
Capacity|Mobile & Wireless|The Home of the Future

MCN:What matters beyond speed and throughput/range and reach for some of the services headed our way -- augmented reality, augmented discovery, VR, aging in place, automation, healthcare? Pick your favorite.
Jay Rolls: What matters is network latency, and overall visibility. Things like AR and health care and adjacent verticals -- it’s all about interactivity, and the rapid translation of photons to electrons.

Technologies like 802.11ax will help with the latency quest, which will be never-ending. And real-time, local visibility into how the network is running will help us to deliver a consistently high quality of experience, across devices.

Kevin Hart: We're very excited about home healthcare...around enabling the aging population. Just based on demographics, there's a huge need and a huge opportunity, but within the network some of the artificial intelligence and some of the connectivity speeds but also some of the privacy components around HIPAA-compliant information ...are also important.

The infrastructure we're putting into place, from a speed [perspective] is great, but privacy and security and latency, some of the real-time responses, I think will become even more important as you see more [need] for remote healthcare monitoring and more healthcare-centric solutions over time.

Dan Hennessy: Other network conditions start to come in to play here, like latency, jitter, and packet loss.
We have equipment distributed across our footprint and in our network that allows us to closely monitor these parameters – to ensure that we know if it changes, why it changed, and what it means to the customer. This will become increasingly important. New standards, such as DOCSIS 3.1, also have targeted changes to improve the quality of service.

Tech Roundtable 2016 | Cable Tech at a Crossroads

For sure, what we expect, and as discussed in context of IoT, is a continued growth in devices. Giving our customers visibility and control is key. Making sure their devices get the right priority, and remain secure, powered, live and connected on the network -- as more and more devices connect and need proper “care and feeding” -- becomes more critical to day-to-day life.

MCN: How has your reliance on the public cloud evolved over the last couple of years? Are you using more public or private cloud, and why does that matter?
KH: It's really a hybrid of all of the above, based on the use case. We're doing a lot of things internally and some our own cloud capabilities with infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service and some of the things we're doing around virtualization. We also use third-party clouds where it makes sense, based on their skillsets and capability. And from a managed service perspective, we have some product and service offerings leveraging cloud-based components. But now that you've adopted this hybrid cloud environment, it's now about how do you optimize it for performance and cost and security -- that's probably the next frontier.

JR: We rely on both -- private and public. Both are good at different things, and the crux of it is taking advantage of what they’re good at. For instance, the public cloud is good for things that need velocity -- prototyping, instantaneous scaling. The private cloud is more for things that are in production, which need to be highly secure. A good example is cloud DVR. Cloud DVR is obviously going to need a lot of cloud infrastructure, but it’s also well understood, with well-defined metrics. Because you know how it’s going to perform, it’s just going to be more cost effective to do on a private cloud.

MCN: What is the right balance of engineering talent you need these days, and how do you attract it?
Tony Werner: We do a lot of recruiting, especially when we’re speaking at non-traditional industry events. The right balance is a tricky task - we still need RF engineers, because we still operate a lot of RF. We still need infrastructure experts, because we operate a significant infrastructure. In general, though, it’s software, systems, and architectural engineering talent that we seek. We’ve made significant strides in how we attract that talent, primarily by making sure that Comcast is a great environment for developers and innovators to come work, but we can always do more.

JR Walden: We're finding less need for HFC talent every day, in part because you still have a lot in the organization, so demands are kind of in the decline. Five to ten years ago, it was hard finding network skills. The battle for high-speed data is over. Cable has won. And most people in professional areas see that, so people with networking skills who have interest in being in the internet business are finding us a lot more than ever before.

Tech Roundtable 2015 | Revving Up to ‘Web Speed’

The area of challenge is on the software side. That has been tougher. I guess the good news is that being near New York doesn’t make for the most inexpensive job market, but people with those skills in New York are definitely not working for .com companies. At least I'm not competing for that talent. We've been plucking millennials straight out of college and teaching them ourselves and hoping that they don't leave too quickly. But we seem to be doing okay keeping the folks we have sort of home-grown.

KH: Investing in our people and our talent is a top priority at Cox in both product and technology and training and skillsets. [In early October], my team worked on an operating model of the future for the team, but software-enabled everything is critical, virtualization is critical, cybersecurity skills are paramount.

We bring in talent through recruiting and through our third-party vendors and we also have a very robust co-op and intern programs, and interns from leading schools like George Tech right here in Atlanta. Tulsa is one of our markets, and they have one of the top cybersecurity schools in the country. We're bringing in interns and co-ops and recruits from these feeder schools and also brining in talent with a lot of experience, as well, from some of these new trending areas, like mobility, IP, cybersecurity, etc.

DH: Our move away from closed vendor ecosystems to open, embedded software development -- either directly ourselves or with partners – means we must ensure that we have the right talent onboard. It’s these engineers that drive our business forward.

Over the last 12 months we have brought our technology group together across Europe, which gives a truly global opportunity for our engineers and developers to build products and services -- all the way from the UK, Germany and Switzerland, through to Eastern Europe, and across to Latin American and the Caribbean. Whether it’s fixed or mobile access, Internet, TV and video, or a full suite of B2B services. That’s a pretty rare opportunity.

JR: The right balance is the technologist who has a degree of nimbleness between hardware and software, and tends to think about things from a systems perspective. We’ve been surprised to see talent coming to our Denver engineering groups from Silicon Valley. The recurring themes appear to be both quality of life, and cost of living. I think you’ll see more and more evidence that shows a talent shift in our collective direction, and that’s really gratifying.

The 2017 Tech Roundtable Panelists
Kevin Hart, executive vice president and chief product and technology officer, Cox Communications
Dan Hennessy, chief architecture architect, Liberty Global
Jay Rolls, chief technology officer and senior vice president, Charter Communications
JR Walden, senior vice president of technology and CTO, Mediacom Communications
Tony Werner, president of technology and product, Comcast Cable

Read More From the 2017 Tech Roundtable Agenda
Capacity|Mobile & Wireless| Beyond Speeds and Feeds and Attracting Talent


MCN: To what extent are you gearing up to automate people’s homes to make them more useful?
Dan Hennessy: Our automation focus is very much linked to our core products and services, and where we can bring clear value right now: Voice search and control of our video services. Ensuring that all our platforms work in harmony. Installing new hardware in the home, like WiFi APs, such that it happens seamlessly. Giving customers a way to easily onboard third party IoT devices in their home.

What’s as important here is the business logic we’re building in our back office for “connectivity services.” It’s similar to what we’ve done for our video products and services, in terms of having a flexible, microservices-based back end that is open to third party integration.

JR Walden: We're an Icontrol affiliate [Comcast and Alarm.com bought pieces of Icontrol earlier this year]. It hasn’t been a huge business for us. I think we have concerns that trying to compete with CE companies in that space...is going to be tough for Icontrol, let alone Mediacom.

We want to be a service provider. We think we're good at being a service provider, so what’s the service here? We imagine providing some services to help facilitate and manage the customer's smart home and IoT device future. I don't know if we'll manage the service as a whole...but we think there's a place to play there. Like maybe you could use your Amazon Echo to do things on your TiVo set-top box...rather than using the remote or using a voice remote.

Rather than trying to be the guy who does everything, let's work with what people want, even if Google Home is the device or it's an Amazon device. We’re going to come out with a voice remote, too, that works with Nuance [Communications].

Kevin Hart: We're making great advances in our connected home and smart home platforms. We’re leveraging the existing platform, but we've also got other future-state possibilities, and coupling the Cox HomeLife platform offering with our Panoramic WiFi [product]. We've been going market to market and connecting a home and making it a true smart home with over 50 or so connected devices in the home, and virtual reality and home care demos, robotic dogs, you name it. We're also doing a little bit some remote healthcare monitoring. There's a lot of possibilities here and I think we're just scratching the surface of the industry.

Tony Werner: With the combination of xFi and Xfinity Home we think we’re in an ideal position to give our customers a simple one-stop solution for controlling their connected homes. With xFi, we take the mystery and guesswork out of our customers’ home WiFi networks, providing a real-time dashboard of what devices are on the network and how they are performing. With Xfinity Home, we’ve combined a powerful home security solution, with an increasingly integrated IoT hub. Through our “Works With Xfinity” program, our customers can control their Nest thermostats, August locks, Chamberlin garage door openers, and many other popular IoT devices all from their Xfinity Home app. We are continuously bringing more partners onto the platform. On the backend, we’re leveraging machine learning and our own homegrown rules engine to give our customers more pinpoint control over how their connected homes work.

MCN: In what ways is AI and machine learning guiding your technology strategy?
DH: AI and ML already exist in our businesses in a number of different areas -- both embedded in our products and services, and also as part of a number of new avenues we’re investigating. Not just customer facing, but for operational and engineering analytics use cases, too.

We’re using machine learning, for instance, to help us fine tune our understanding of how WiFi performs in our customer’s homes. RF modeling, and knowing those behaviors, can get us so far. Adding in telemetry from our devices in the field, and ML in the backend infrastructure, takes our insights to the next level.

Additionally, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the associated AI is already deployed as part of our voice search and personalization services. We see much more applicability here in the front lines of our business, where interactions across 24 million customers can be tailored much more accurately.

The key with AI and ML is telemetry and data management. To leverage these techniques, we need to be able to collect and analyze data. From that, we can affect changes back into our services and infrastructure -- whether this is across the network, our service platforms, or our care and operational support systems.

A big step in the right direction is to understand the art of the possible. We’re starting to innovate with partners, internally. We’ve started with multiple trials, and some first deployments as well.

Jay Rolls: Both AI and ML will play an increasing role across our technology stacks, from network management to troubleshooting to connecting customers with the content they want. I think as our networks become denser and more complex, adding more intelligence will help us mine data that matters to the overall success of the businesses.

MCN: What does the Internet of Things mean to your company?
KH: From a product standpoint, some of the analytics that are built into the products, whether they’re visual analytics or voice analytics are making the products more intelligent and more personal. The voice remote stuff is cool on the front end, but having contacts and predicting your next couple moves in the connected home are a big part of what you'll see more and more of on the product roadmap.

From a technology operational network perspective, there's things we are doing with software-defined networking and some of the intelligence we’re building in through software and quality of service and latency. And from an operational perspective, doing more and more with some of the artificial intelligence around quality of service, call-in rates and truck roll reduction and customer experience. It's early days, but we've seen some very promising results.

JR: Whether it’s ensuring security and privacy, or connecting customers to specific capabilities, like health monitoring and wellness -- the IoT scene, which our customers are bringing onto our networks by the handfuls, enables us to take a customer-centric approach. The key to the IoT and our industry is that it’s based on the common denominator of connectivity.

TW: We are committed to AI and machine learning, because we’ve seen firsthand how those technologies can make our products better and improve the customer experience. We use AI and Machine Learning algorithms today to advance and refine our Natural Language Processing platform, detect and fix incidents in our network, and help our customers find content they love. We’ve got a first-rate team of PhDs working on these technologies day and night, and customers are already seeing that reflected in the products they use every day.

DH: Opportunity, more than anything. We’re seeing an explosion in connected devices, for sure, and the need for seamless onboarding, increased visibility, control, configuration and management. This is a key consideration as we think about how we develop our connectivity products and services.

Our customers rely on us to ensure their home network is secure, effective, and above all, is just there. Available. The key will be which devices and services our customers bring into their homes. The IoT market remains fragmented, from a service and technology standards point of view (Sigfox, LoRa, NB-IoT etc.) We’re experimenting with most of these.

We also see many new partnership possibilities opening up, with both established and new players. The IoT landscape brings in very diverse industries -- from lighting, to kitchen goods, home security and other utilities. How these will play out, and where the value and roles lie, is still a work in progress.

Beyond residential, we’re seeing plenty of interest in the B2B segment. We have a number of trials with home builders and commercial real estate firms, where mutual opportunities exist. Whether it’s environmental sensors and control, WiFi coverage and management, broader sensor and device onboarding, or management.

MCN: What matters when the task is securing the physical home, as well as the digital stuff in it?
TW: One of our over-arching product goals is to provide equipment and services that behave like a courteous guest in the home. Always there, always on, always connected, and pleasing to the eye, but also always on the lookout. Our Xfinity Home product started out as a physical home security offering, and quickly expanded into automation and smart home. A big part of that overall philosophy is to safeguard for both physical belongings, and digital identities.

JR: It’s a one-word answer: Trust. We’re in a unique position, because we are poised to protect between the physical, and the digital. As IP-connected devices proliferate, in the home and the business, we are becoming the trusted entity. Both for reliable service, as well as stewards of security.

DH: Trust is key here, of course – with an operational model that truly supports the offering. In both residential and B2B markets, local regulation and standards compliance will influence our interest and ability to enter this market. We also don’t see (for now) the same degree of demand as we see in other markets (notably North America) for these services.

The 2017 Tech Roundtable Panelists
Kevin Hart, executive vice president and chief product and technology officer, Cox Communications
Dan Hennessy, chief architecture architect, Liberty Global
Jay Rolls, chief technology officer and senior vice president, Charter Communications
JR Walden, senior vice president of technology and CTO, Mediacom Communications
Tony Werner, president of technology and product, Comcast Cable
Read More From the 2017 Tech Roundtable Agenda
Capacity|The Home of the Future|Beyond Speeds and Feeds and Attracting Talent

MCN: What are your wireless priorities?
Dan Hennessy: We believe that connectivity to the home, around the home, and on the go needs to be a high performance, reliable and seamless experience.  As such, we are focused on three areas.

For fixed broadband connectivity services in the home, we want to ensure that our customers are able to benefit from the power of our network -- both to and around the home. That’s regardless of where they live, what their home is like (how big and what it’s made of), or how many devices they want to connect to their in home WiFi. This is where a significant amount of engineering and innovation effort is spent.

From a mobile services perspective, it’s about making sure our customers get the best quad-play deal and experience out there. To do that, we will build on our MVNO capabilities across our markets. Where needed, we want to leverage VoWiFi technologies, to solve for in-home/business coverage issues. As well, we want to ensure that our customers are able to leverage our WiFi access points--roughly 10 million, across Europe. The goal is to bring the fixed and mobile connectivity experience together, seamlessly. To give our customers the best of both.

The third areas is specific to where we have a full MNO footprint, such as in Belgium. Telenet’s acquisition of the mobile operator, BASE, presented an opportunity to upgrade and deliver a world-class radio access network -- alongside the power of a cable access network.

Tech Roundtable 2016 | Cable Tech at a Crossroads

Jay Rolls: First is the launch of WiFi-first MVNO service with Verizon next year, which will serve us well for our short- and medium-term wireless goals.

Second is optimizing the WiFi experience for our residential and business customers. So many people equate “the internet” to “the WiFi signal”! That’s why it’s important that we continue to improve everyone’s WiFi.

Beyond that, we’re conducting both lab and field trials of CBRS (Citizens Broadband Radio Service), in the unlicensed 3.5 GHz spectrum, as well as 5G millimeter wave technologies for fixed use cases, like backhaul.

Kevin Hart: The in-home experience, the on-premises experience and the experience within common spaces in MDUs -- about a third of our residential footprint is multi-dwelling units, so having a having a best-in-class WiFi experience there is key. We've also done a ton with convention centers with hospitality networks and hotels. We made an investment in a company [Blueprint RF, acquired by Cox over the summer] that's going to be bring best in class WiFi for commercial businesses. 

We’ve done some 5G trials, in conjunction with CableLabs. From a technical standpoint, we’ve been one of the leaders in small cell deployments, because of what we’ve been doing with some of our key partners and customers. The 5G trial was a fixed point to point [test]...just to prove out some of the technology and the performance.

JR Walden: We've been focused on in-home WiFi for many years. Maybe 60% of our customers pay us for a managed home WiFi solution. About 90% of our new customers do take that product. We have also been rolling out community WiFi, or metro WiFi...in a number of our communities, but not as aggressively as some of the big guys as we tend to have more low-density markets. I’m not necessarily convinced there are any business models around that. The theory around that is it's a customer affinity [strategy]. But it's not super-expensive to do, so you don't have to gamble too much on that. 

In regards to getting into more of a mobile play, we certainly haven't announced any plans. We've certainly been looking at what options might be and things like 5G and CBRS or other kind of solutions might impact us, both as a B2B or wholesale kind of enabler, like we were with cell tower backhaul, but also potentially getting into the retail side. 

That's one of those areas we'd rather be a fast-follower, frankly, so I’ll root for Comcast or Charter or somebody to blaze a successful trail, and then maybe we'll be prepared to invest in that. 

MCN: What are you doing to make WiFi better or best in class?
Tony Werner: We’re committed to offering a fantastic Wi-Fi experience to our customers, and from our perspective, that means providing a combination of speed, coverage and control. When it comes to speed, our xFi Advanced Gateway is not just the fastest gateway we’ve ever built, we believe it is the best device available today anywhere in the world.

On coverage, we want our customers to have amazing online experiences wherever they go, in or out of the home. On the go, that means continuing to expand our network of more than 18 million Wi-Fi hot spots, and at home, it’s a combination of our world-class gateway, and our forthcoming pods, which will give customers who want it a powerful Wi-Fi mesh network that can blanket any size home with great Wi-Fi. Finally, on control, we really believe xFi is a game changer. We launched it in May to more than 10 million devices, and the response we’ve seen has been tremendous, both in terms of adoption, and customer satisfaction. Today with xFi, our customers can pause WiFi to their kids’ devices for bedtime or dinner (our most popular feature), track the activity of devices on their home networks, and troubleshoot when things go wrong.

In addition, as you know we’re big proponents of RDK-B, where the B stands for “broadband.” It’s similar intent to RDK-V, video, which is the core foundation of our X1 UI. RDK-B is piled with techniques and technologies to continuously improve WiFi experiences.

KH: On the residential side, our offering, called Panoramic WiFi with the tagline of "It's wall to wall fast," has had an excellent take rate from a customer perspective. NPS (net promoter score) is up significantly. It's a combination of having a better in-home device, a professional install and additional to make sure your signal strength, location, quality of service is what you want it to be inside your premises. 

DH: Our WiFi strategy focuses on both raw hardware capabilities, and the software we use to optimize for value and performance. Both solve for whole home connectivity. We are constantly evaluating hardware-related developments and standards to include in the equipment we deploy in customers’ homes.

Alongside that, we are focused on software developments (embedded and cloud-based) to optimize WiFi range, reliability and performance. That means channel optimization, air time fairness, band- and client-steering. We have a range of embedded software and cloud-based services going to market in 2017 and 2018.

We’re also looking at the best ways to give our customers the right equipment to ensure whole home coverage, from point-of-sale to care. This includes developing a mix of property profiling (size, fabrication etc.) and machine learning techniques.

Making WiFi better for our customers is very much about giving them visibility and control.

Tech Roundtable 2015 | Revving Up to ‘Web Speed’

Ensuring all the hardware and technology we’re using works in harmony, such that the customer can see it, configure, it, and personalize it. We’re doing this with our “Connect” app, which – in addition to allowing them to manage their mobile tariffs and access hotspots while on the go -- brings all of this to the customer. Whether it’s parental controls, guest WiFi access, speed tests, onboarding of powerline devices, resetting passwords. It’s all the things our customers would and should expect. Meaning WiFi that consistently works well, with control in the palm of their hand.

JR: We’re currently deploying 802.11ac Wave 2 in the home, which has impressively nerdy feature names, like beam-steering and multi-user operation. Bottom line, they make the signals behave better in a given (and often hostile) environment. We’re also actively testing the benefits of 802.11ax, which works in both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz spectral areas and enables multi-gigabit speeds.

On top of that, we’re planning a 2018 deployment of cloud-based radio resource management, which is all about optimizing the WiFi experience -- it takes some of what’s traditionally been processed locally, and pulls it back into the network. And, we’re testing some distributed WiFi solutions, to expand indoor coverage.

MCN: Is 5G an opportunity for small cell and backhaul, or a threat to the last mile? (A little bit of both?)
JW: The business model [for 5G] kind of confuses me some. For the markets that Mediacom operates in, which are much lower density than maybe the average -- we're well below 50 homes a mile. Although we don’t have as many line-of-sight issues with many tall buildings, the reach of these very high frequencies are really going to limit their use in lower density markets. 

I realize that Verizon and others are talking about 5G...but it's starting to feel a lot like 3D, in that there's a ton of talk about it, but when you go and look at the engineering, this is not going to be like LTE. When 4G came along, it was really about enabling a new frequency and new, more efficient protocols. This is fundamentally a different architecture. You're not going to enable with this with macro towers; you're going to have to build a whole new network to do this. And it's going to cost a lot of money. I think they have the performance to compete with landlines, but I don't think they have the capacity...at any cost-effective rate to really compete with landline. 

JR: It’s both, but probably more of an opportunity for backhaul. I mean, in rural areas, or very non-dense areas, having a wireless option, vs. wired, may make sense. We’re testing 5G for both, but to us it looks better for fixed use cases. That’s because millimeter wave comes with very large channel sizes, that can offer very high bandwidth -- but at those frequencies, propagation can be really challenging. Anything in the line of sight -- a tree, a building -- can mess things up.

DH: We don’t see 5G as a threat to the last mile. For starters, the economics aren’t there, at least in the foreseeable future. Plus, a 5G last mile will not offer the performance equivalent to fiber rich and deep access networks.

Spectrally, 5G performance will require larger bandwidths, which implies higher frequency spectrum and the use of advanced radio technologies, such as Massive MIMO or coordinated multi-site transmissions.

Higher spectral bands imply denser deployments of radio access nodes (smaller cells) with more backhaul locations, so for sure there are opportunities to scale backhaul revenues here.

When asked what a good coverage 5G access network might look like, I often point to one of our cable access maps showing our WiFi hotspots.

Ultimately, it’s not a question of 5G or cable access in the last mile. More, it’s a question of how will 5G radio access and fixed, fiber-rich cable access complement each other. Just like how unlicensed WiFi radio access compliments fixed cable access today.

KH: It is a little bit of both. From a technical perspective, we're taking advantage of some of the small cell opportunities.  

#NYCTVWK: ‘B&C’ Hall of Fame, VR 20/20 Kick Off Fifth Annual Event|Register Here

The focus of the cable industry used to be a lot simpler. Its lens was generally trained on how to deliver and wield a quality package of pay TV, broadband and voice service that could be used to thwart competition from the telcos and satellite-TV providers.

These days, those service and tech strategies also place a heavy emphasis on wireless (WiFi, in and out of the home, and mobile) and over-the-top video (as an emerging competitor and complementary offering). To support current services and those that are out on the horizon, cable operators are also moving ahead with strategies and architectures that help them use their existing bandwidth more efficiently, or by adding capacity through projects and initiatives such as DOCSIS 3.1 and Full Duplex DOCSIS.

To get a fix on these areas of importance ahead of this month’s SCTE-ISBE Cable-Tec Expo in Denver (Oct. 17-20), Multichannel News caught up with a handful of top technology and engineering executives.

Taking part in this year’s virtual tech roundtable — an aggregation of separate interviews with MCN technology editor Jeff Baumgartner and columnist Leslie Ellis of Ellis Edits — were:
Kevin Hart, executive vice president and chief product and technology officer, Cox Communications;
Dan Hennessy, chief architecture architect, Liberty Global;
Jay Rolls, chief technology officer and senior vice president, Charter Communications;
JR Walden, senior vice president of technology and CTO, Mediacom Communications; and
Tony Werner, president of technology and product, Comcast Cable.

The 2017 Agenda
Capacity|Mobile & Wireless|The Home of the Future| Beyond Speeds and Feeds and Attracting Talent

The 2017 Tech Roundtable Panelists
Kevin Hart, executive vice president and chief product and technology officer, Cox Communications
Dan Hennessy, chief architecture architect, Liberty Global
Jay Rolls, chief technology officer and senior vice president, Charter Communications
JR Walden, senior vice president of technology and CTO, Mediacom Communications
Tony Werner, president of technology and product, Comcast Cable
Read More From the 2017 Tech Roundtable Agenda
Mobile & Wireless|The Home of the Future| Beyond Speeds and Feeds and Attracting Talent

MCN: What are your priorities, as it relates to network capacity?
Jay Rolls: Our priority is to constantly balance capacity against demand. It’s a never-ending quest. We watch it very closely, and we’re very pragmatic about it -- the volume of tools, metrics and ways to see what’s really happening, and invest accordingly, is really deepening in ways that matter.

Tony Werner: We’ve been on a pretty steady path of doubling our network capacity every 18-24 months for several years, and I don’t see anything that makes me think that will change. We’re making better and faster products for our customers who expect and deserve world-class online experiences, and the network has to deliver on that promise. The key from my perspective is staying ahead of that curve in a way that’s smart and future-proof. We’ve been strategically extending fiber further into our network to meet customer demand, and that effort, combined with our commitment to deploying DOCSIS 3.1 has given us a network that’s powerful, flexible, and ready for what’s next.

JR Walden: We have completed the removal of all the analog channels. That was the big step one. Step two was to start transitioning high-speed data over to DOCSIS 3.1, so we're not adding any more 3.0 channels, and reuse spectrum for 3.1, which is a bit more efficient. The whole company is 3.1, all of the modems we're buying since June have been 3.1, so we've begun that next transition. 

We're in the process of migrating to MPEG-4, mostly the HDs. That's following along with some of our set-top refresh -- getting some of the old MPEG-2-only capable boxes out of the network and we can transition more of the channels to MPEG-4. 

Right on the heels of that, we're going to start moving some channels, the lower-viewed channels and some premiums, over to IP. We're also reducing node sizes. We average about 285 homes to 290 homes per node as an average. 

Kevin Hart: Ultimately, our goal is to continue to provide a great customer experience with a competitive broadband product and service. To do that, we are continuing to keep pace with downstream and upstream data rates, which is key to being competitive with our speed offerings, and quality of service. Reducing latency is also a top priority.

We’re investing in the network and in those growth rates, in terms of downstream and upstream speeds. Those are key drivers. Ultimately, providing that in-home or on-premises (business) experience, with our WiFi products — is equally important.

Tech Roundtable 2016 | Cable Tech at a Crossroads

Dan Hennessy: We see demand increasing by up to 45% across our markets and in recent years, we responded with a wide deployment of CCAP [converged cable access platform] equipment throughout our footprint. That investment, along with ongoing node size optimization, enabled us to increase capacity at a much faster rate. As a result, 70 – 80% of our plant will be DOCSIS 3.1 ready by the end of next year, giving us a path to even greater capacity expansion allowing us to continue to increase the available capacity across our access network, upstream and downstream 

MCN: What is your strategy with regard to fiber?
TW: Suffice it to say that fiber plays a key role on our network architecture. Our network today contains more than 150,000 route miles of fiber, and to meet customer demand, we extend fiber further into the neighborhoods we serve each year. When it comes to delivering gigabit speeds, our focus is obviously on DOCSIS 3.1, and our new xFi Advanced Gateway, which will bring Gig availability to more people, in more markets than ever before. But part of the reason we’re able to deliver that capacity is because we’ve systematically enhanced our network with fiber.

I feel pretty strongly that the best path ahead is to leverage the existing coaxial network and DOCSIS resources to the fullest, then inch towards FTTH, over time. Why? Because we can. We don’t have to build an entire network just to turn up one customer.

KH: Once you leverage the existing coax that we have, by taking fiber deep toward an N+0 architecture, we're future-proofing our investment , we're positioning ourselves to leverage DOCSIS 3.1, and also position ourselves for Full Duplex, because symmetrical speeds will be important. 

And we're also thinking about the fiber investment and fiber deep as it relates to our wireless strategy, enabling some of our customer with a small cell strategy but also positioning ourselves to take advantage of that in the future as well as thinking about fiber deep to benefit both residential and our commercial customers simultaneously. 

We've got a ten-year network 2.0 network transformation plan, and fiber deep, DOCSIS 3.1 and Full Duplex are at the core of what's driving the investment. 

DH: We’re aggressively future-proofing our network. Over 80% of our new build program is based on a combination of either fiber-deep, retaining the HFC final drop, or fiber-to-the-home.

The U.K. is a good example -- that’s where our “Project Lightning” network expansion initiative is happening (announced in early 2015). Cable network build had been very limited in parts of the U.K. since the ‘80s, and until a few years ago and is now benefiting from this fiber strategy.

JW: [Fiber deep] is a bit further out, at least as a large-scale type of project. I think fiber deep for MDUs, high-density areas and some planned communities, higher end communities doing deeper fiber or fiber-to-the-home [is happening]. But as a wholesale [change] and going to node+0 kind of architecture, I don't see that in the next two years. 

Tech Roundtable 2015 | Revving Up to ‘Web Speed’

JR: Fiber-deep is part of the overall capacity conversation. We’re constantly analyzing and monitoring our infrastructure, and matching those results against the technologies we have in our portfolio -- whether that’s DOCSIS 3.1, or taking fiber deeper, or Full Duplex DOCSIS. It’s a rational approach, where we’re trying to balance the needs, the available technologies, and the costs. DOCSIS 3.1 has some pretty remarkable capabilities, but it’s not necessarily a hard-and-fast reason to not take fiber deeper, for instance. Different situations drive different capacity decisions. There’s nothing universal about it -- you have to take it on a market-by-market basis.

MCN: To what extent will you use bridging techniques, like remote PHY & DOCSIS 3.1?
DH: We’re already trialing and testing both Remote PHY and DOCSIS 3.1 across our footprint. Our plan of record is to exploit virtualized and distributed access architectures.

Our strategy is fully focused on leveraging 3.1 and cost to upgrade is less than 20 Euro per home passed, so a very efficient way of getting to speeds of 1 Gbps-plus.

KH: We're making tremendous progress in calendar year 2017 on our DOCSIS 3.1 CCAP deployment. We started in earnest early in the year and by the end of this year, we'll have over one-third of our footprint 3.1-enabled with north of 90% of our footprint enabled with 3.1 by the end of 2018 and early 2019. We're definitely going to be leveraging a remote PHY architecture and some of the early stage testing around remote PHY currently. 

JR: They both play a role. Just like DOCSIS 3.0 and PON played a role in the evolution of the network over the past five years, DOCSIS 3.1 and remote PHY are going to play a major role in the coming years. Everyone will be using them, us included. Like everything else, it’s a matter of matching the right tool to the right task.

TW: I could tell you how committed we are to DOCSIS 3.1, but it may be easier just to lay out our progress to date. Since December 2015, when we provisioned the world’s first DOCSIS 3.1 modem on a customer-facing network, we have been aggressively expanding our D3.1-powered gigabit offering. Today, we have deployed D3.1 in 23 states and dozens of markets, with more coming online all the time. What I love about this technology is that it is a cost-effective way to make gigabit speeds a reality for a far broader cross-section of Americans, and not just to those lucky few who live in a few select neighborhoods. As for remote PHY and DAA [Distributed Access Architecture], both technologies are advancing at a breakneck clip, and I think you’ll hear more from us about them soon. 

MCN: What are the consumer factors pushing you toward the desire to provide symmetrical bandwidth, and eventually take advantage of technologies like Full Duplex DOCSIS (FDX)?
JR: The world of applications and services continues to evolve, obviously, but so far we’ve been able to meet those needs with an asymmetrical topology. That said, things like real-time gaming, augmented and virtual reality, and the Internet of Things -- some of those will likely drive more symmetry in the network. It remains to be seen. Whether it goes completely crazy, or just nudges the demand on the network, it’s good to have techniques like FDX on the drawing board.

KH: It’s a little but further out on the horizon. The upstream growth rate is ticking up a couple of notches, but not to the tune that we would need significant additional capacity and/or a complementary need for symmetrical bandwidth. We're still testing that, but the experiences, the gaming, the latency and interactive [applications] and additionally connected everything, I think, will be drivers of higher need for improved symmetrical speeds. But at this stage, the symmetrical is a nice-to-have for residential and definitely will be a good option for our commercial customers. 

DH: Presently, both our products and the consumption of those products are highly asymmetric. While we see some increase in upstream demand from cloud-based services, we don’t see the asymmetry changing any time soon.

Because of that, we are actively engaged with CableLabs and industry partners on the development of Full Duplex. We see it as part of our future access toolkit.

Comcast Cable CEO Dave Watson has been named chairman of the C-SPAN board's executive committee.

That came at C-SPAN's board meeting in New York.

Watson joined the board earlier this year, succeeding Comcast CEO Neil Smit after he stepped down.

Also joining the board of the public service networks funded by the cable industry were Dexter Goei, president of Altice N.V and chair/CEO of Altice USA, and Wide Open West CEO Steven Cochran.

Elected to additional two-year terms were board members Pat McAdaragh, president of Midco; and Alan Block, chair of Block Communications.

The executive committee can be empowered to set strategy and over see finances on behalf of the 15-member board.

There are no flukes in Cable.

Just ask Comcast, which was the first cable operator to report a full year of positive video subscriber growth in a decade, ending 2016 with 161,000 more customers than in the previous year. That Comcast managed to do that just as over-the-top and alternative video delivery systems were proliferating, gaining legitimacy and chipping away at traditional pay TV customer rolls was remarkable enough, but it was no fluke.

The Distributor of the Year Issue:Comcast's Makeover Yields Results|Five Ways Comcast Is Leading in Tech

That growth was a planned, concerted effort that not only yielded a video customer surplus, but was also profitable. Comcast finished the year with a 6.6% increase in cable-systems revenue and a 5.6% rise in cash flow. And it did it all the hard way, with no aggressive promotional pricing or special deals to attract customers that will drop the service in six months.

Instead, Comcast put its collective head down and focused on the fundamentals, rolling out new products like Xfinity Home and Xfinity Mobile at a steady pace and pumping hundreds of millions of dollars to beef up customer service.

The path to positive subscriber growth was a multiyear process, starting with the hiring of former Charter Communications CEO Neil Smit in 2010. It was Smit who initiated a multipronged plan to improve customer service, beef up the network and steer the company on a path toward product innovation and network superiority.

Smit stepped away from day-to-day operations in April — he is now vice chairman of Comcast Corp. — and handed the reins to 20-year Comcast veteran Dave Watson, who moves up to Comcast Cable CEO after serving as the cable unit’s chief operating officer for the past seven years, implementing the plans that he and Smit developed. Watson takes over just as subscriber growth is expected to decline in the wake of two massive storms that devastated homes in Houston and Western Florida. Comcast has said it expects the impact of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma to result in the loss of 100,000 to 150,000 subscribers in the third quarter.

MoffettNathanson principal and senior analyst Craig Moffett observed that the declines weren’t that surprising given that the video subscriber estimates, even at best-in-class Comcast, will have to come down.

Infrastructure Advantage
“We’ve spent 18 years repeating a simple mantra: Cable operators are not media companies, they are infrastructure providers,” Moffett wrote in a research note. “Their infrastructure is still advantaged. Comcast will be just fine.”

But the company is confident that it will continue to hit its financial targets, as well as continue its pace of innovation. For those reasons and more, Comcast is the 2017 Multichannel News Distributor of the Year.

For Watson, Comcast’s success has been the result of the company’s decision to stick to three basic tenets.

“The key for us is that we’re very focused on our core set of operating principles,” Watson said. “Staying focused on sustainable, profitable growth, driving innovation, that’s a big part; and third is to continue to improve the customer experience.”

While that may sound oversimplistic, Comcast has managed to make it work. In the past five years (2012-2016), overall revenue has grown at a 6.2% annual clip while cash flow has risen 7.2% per year. This year, the growth is even more dramatic — in the last 12 months between the first half of 2016 and the first half of 2017, revenue has grown 9.4% to $41.6 billion and cash flow is up 10.2% to $14.1 billion. This in a year that has seen competitive pressures increase as Hulu (25% owned by NBCUniversal) launched its Hulu Live offering, AT&T unveiled its over-the-top product DirecTV Now and networks are queuing up to release direct-to-consumer versions of their channels.

Comcast has used the X1 platform expertly in driving forward what Watson said is its newest mantra — becoming an “aggregator of aggregators.” That means not only offering access to subscription video on demand and over-the-top competitors, but embracing them.

Xfinity subscribers can access Netflix directly from their set-top boxes and over the years Hulu, YouTube and music service Pandora have been added to the lineup. Earlier this year, Comcast reached a deal where Sling TV — the over-the-top MVPD service from Dish Network — received a coveted spot on the set-top (mainly for international and multicultural programming). Just last week the cable operator expanded its relationship with YouTube, allowing customers to launch the online video app merely by speaking “YouTube” into their X1 voice remote.

Including those products is all part of the overall strategy of offering customers best-in-class products in almost every category, Watson said.

‘Aggregator of Aggregators’
“We look at each part of our business, every major product area, and we look at innovation opportunities at each one,” Watson said. “With X1, I think we are delivering in its early stages the promise of being an aggregator of aggregators — the best in linear, the best of on-demand, a terrific DVR, a great app, data and applications integrated. Netflix is a good example and soon-to-come will be You Tube. … To me this is constant improvement of our major product areas.”

That’s a far cry from the past, when a Netflix app embedded in any cable operator’s set-top box would have signaled the end of the world. But the evidence continues to mount that SVOD services like Netflix, Hulu and YouTube aren’t replacements for cable, but can complement the service. And making it easier for an X1 customer to access their SVOD subscriptions only enhances the cable operator’s stature in the customer’s mind.

That shift, along with a continued focus on innovation — Comcast still has a mandate to roll out a new product or product enhancement at least once per quarter — has been a key part of Comcast’s success. In the past five months, Comcast has rolled out a new wireless service, Xfinity Mobile, part of its mobile virtual network operator agreement with Verizon Communications; xFi, a cloud-based home WiFi management platform; and enhancements to XFinity Home that allow consumers to remotely control home functions like heating, cooling, lighting and security cameras through their voice remote.

The voice remote, launched in 2015, is one of those product enhancements that has fared even better than its staunchest proponents had hoped. Comcast has deployed about 17 million voice-remote devices and customers now make about 1 billion voice commands per quarter.

“It’s just remarkable,” Watson said of the product.

Comcast has also embraced products from programmers such as AMC Premier from AMC Networks and 21st Century Fox’s FX+, ad-free versions of the AMC and FX pay TV networks available for an additional fee. In an interview, Comcast executive vice president of Xfinity Services Matt Strauss said the offerings are part of an overall evolution of the video product, and of the strategy to entice customers to buy into the entire Xfinity family of offerings, not just one or two things.

Strauss said the strategy could be traced back to Comcast’s initial investments in infrastructure that laid the foundation for the product suite that is available today.

“We’re now at a point where it’s really about scale, and how do we continue to deliver innovative products and services and accelerate how we get deeper and deeper into our base,” Strauss said.

The answer, Strauss said, is to provide elegant, easy solutions to customer problems even before subscribers know they are problems. For example, as the TV audience became more and more fragmented and finding shows grew more difficult, X1 provided a user interface that made it easier to navigate through the thousands of linear and on-demand content choices. Later, X1 added a voice remote, which made navigation even easier.

For high-speed data, the solution was faster speeds. Comcast has increased data speeds 17 times in the past 16 years and by the end of 2017 will have fully deployed DOCSIS 3.1, which will enable speeds of 1 Gigabit per second.

“Speed is important, but access is equally important,” Strauss said. “Most people now connect devices via WiFi. Ensuring we have the best WiFi in the home, as well as the best WiFi out of the home is also very core to the strategy and that’s where you’re seeing us deploy our newest wireless gateway, the XB6 (xFi) which can deliver the fastest in-home WiFi speeds.”

From there, xFi customers would naturally migrate to Comcast’s XFinity Home product, which again incorporates the aspects of other company products, like the voice remote, to control household functions. Comcast is truly selling a bundle, and that bundle is interconnected.

“When we look at the future, today we typically sell on price,” Strauss said. “And the more products you take, the better the price. The challenge there is when you sell on price, essentially you’re making yourself a commodity.

“What we really want to transition to is selling an experience,” Strauss added. “The more products you take from us, you will of course get a better price, but you will also get a better experience. Starting to weave together the portfolio and reinforcing that, I think, is a big opportunity. A lot of that you’re going to see solidly around the home. There is a big opportunity around the digital home.”

The company is obsessed with giving more choice in the video-on-demand side of the business. “We’re breathing new life into what it means to get video,” Strauss said. “Now we have 130,000 choices, the top 100 Nielsen-rated shows, 900 series fully stacked. We added Netflix, not just as an app, but integrating Netflix contextually.”

As a result, on-demand is growing again — this year, Comcast customers are spending an average of 32 hours a month watching on-demand shows, up 20%.

“When people have said video is in a decline, ratings are in a decline, we see something different,” Strauss said. “We see more and more video consumption moving to time-shifting, we see while live ratings may be declining, the total video consumption is increasing, instead that more is happening outside of traditional measurement. It’s like dark matter, people aren’t seeing it, but we think the total video pie is increasing. And we’re continuing to build the platforms and the capabilities to all people to watch TV smarter and on their terms.”

The emergence of over-the-top players has added to that shift and is continuing to challenge the model, Strauss said, but Comcast doesn’t see any compelling reason to join the OTT fray.

“Part of what is happening in the market, especially on the video side, is you are seeing a lot of increased competition, you’re seeing a lot of competitive offers — in some cases you’re even seeing some of these OTT players offer video at negative gross margins. We’re not going to chase that.”

But the evidence is mounting that younger consumers are increasingly looking outside the traditional pay TV ecosystem for their content needs. Pay TV subscribers fell by more than 900,000 in the second quarter, the worst Q2 performance in history. That’s after a record first-quarter loss of more than 750,000 video customers.

Moffett, who raised his rating on Comcast to “buy” earlier this month after downgrading the stock to “neutral” in June, said he sees the company as the standard for the pay TV business. But he also estimated that the MSO will lose almost 1 million video customers in the next five years, ending 2021 with 21.7 million subscribers, down from 22.5 million in 2016. The analyst does see Comcast adding about 5 million broadband customers in that same time frame, finishing 2021 with 31.1 million high-speed data customers compared to 26 million in 2016.

Competition is also heating up. Google’s YouTube TV expanded to eight additional markets earlier this month, growing its total markets to about 48 cities. In addition, AT&T began pricing its DirecTV Now service even more aggressively in the quarter, at $10 per month for any unlimited wireless subscriber, and returned to offering free Apple TV devices with a three-month commitment.

While weakening subscriber metrics shouldn’t come as a surprise, Moffett said, they aren’t a calamity, either. Pay TV companies, he said, still have broadband pricing power, which should help them in reaching financial targets. That’s just what Comcast said when it predicted the Q3 subscriber loss.

Strauss noted that all the panic over OTT and cord-cutting could be unwarranted. There is no doubt, he said that viewing habits are changing, but life stages and household economics also need to be considered.

As an example, Strauss pointed to Xfinity on Campus, Comcast’s multiscreen managed IPTV service for college students. When the product was in development, Strauss said Comcast realized that the last thing college students wanted was to be tied to a set-top box. So the MSO had to rethink the idea, creating a product that allowed students to download the Xfinity Stream app, offered a cloud-based DVR and would let them watch live TV anywhere on campus. The product has been highly successful and, as students returned for the most recent fall semester, it is deployed in more than 100 schools.

“Millennials do watch TV as much as any other segment,” Strauss said. “They just have different needs and how they want to consume and access it.”

That, Strauss said, has led to Xfinity Instant TV — an in-home, in-footprint, managed IPTV service slated for a Q3 launch — as well as ad-free versions of networks that consumers can buy for a fee. Comcast reached a deal with AMC Networks in August for AMC Premiere, an ad-free version of the popular AMC network for an additional $4.99 per month. A month later, FX Networks announced a deal to offer an ad-free version of its flagship FX channel — called FX+ — to Comcast customers for $5.99 per month.

Strauss said those channels and other services like it are just an example of how Comcast’s foresight in investing in content, infrastructure and innovation have translated into meeting needs even customers didn’t know they had.

“The future we’ve always talked about has finally come, at least for us,” Strauss said. “I think that is because of decisions that we made, not six, 12 or 24 months ago, but years ago, based on where we saw the puck going and ensuring that we would have the technology capabilities and the infrastructure in order to deliver upon the innovation that we believed we were going to need to stay competitive. As a result you’re seeing us deliver on a lot of these products and services. But this didn’t happen by accident. It really happened because of very important strategic decisions we made years ago.”

Comcast last week signed a deal creating a premium commercial-free on-demand service with FX Networks.

The deal comes at a time when, according to Matt Strauss, executive vice president and general manager, video and entertainment services at Comcast Cable, there’s probably more high-quality original programming available than in the history of television.

Comcast will see more than 4 billion hours of on-demand usage this year and Strauss said the cable operator will continue to invest to provide instant gratification and to blur the lines between what’s live, what’s on-demand, what’s on your DVR and what’s over-the-top. Strauss talked to Multichannel News contributor Jon Lafayette about what Comcast is thinking as it launches premium services. Here’s an edited excerpt of their conversation.

MCN:Based on the AMC Premiere and the FX+ announcements, have you found a segment of your customers who don’t like watching commercials?
Matt Strauss: We think of ourselves as the aggregator of aggregators. We want to have all of the choices and the best choices available in one place. In many ways, that is why we put Netflix on X1 and we’re putting YouTube on X1 later this year.

At the same time, DVRs are now at 50% penetration of the market and in many ways, it gives you control, it gives you the ability to fast-forward through ads or, if you have cloud DVR, we give our customers the ability to stream their DVR recordings or download their DVR recordings, so in many ways this is just another choice.

There is a segment of viewers who would be willing to pay an incremental fee for a more premium experience. They do that today with premium channels. They do that today with [subscription video-on-demand] services.

Commercial-free is one piece of it. If somebody really wanted that premium experience — had the ability to, in one place, catch up from the beginning and have the most comprehensive catalogue of FX programming — it really didn’t exist. And now, with our technology and through our partnership with FX, we have the ability to offer FX subscribers the option to a more premium experience.

MCN:Did you do consumer research on the demand for commercial-free options?
MS: We have done research on this. There’s absolutely a segment of the population that would be willing to pay an incremental fee for a commercial-free experience. We’ve been offering electronic sell-through now for years and in a relatively short amount of time we’ve actually become one of the largest digital retailers in the country. So we’ve even seen it first-hand where people are willing to pay $3 an episode. So there’s both research and there been some actual transactional data that has led us to believe that there is a segment — it’s not everybody — who is willing to pay extra.

MCN:How big is that segment?
MS: It’s hard to say only because it depends on the network and the passion index of the network.

But there’s something even bigger at work here, which is it’s providing the networks a sandbox to experiment with different models and to potentially provide also a mechanism for them to reclaim rights or to aggregate more rights or to experiment with more original programming, and to do it in a way that we think is going to really benefit our customers.

MCN:What have you learned since adding Netflix to X1?
MS: Since we’ve added Netflix, I think we’ve seen all boats rise. We’ve seen an increase in total on-demand consumption. We’ve seen an increase in total viewership on our platform and as a result we’ve also seen many networks see an increase in their viewership because we have even more eyeballs using on-demand.

So I think as we continue to offer more and more choices — but also do it in a way that it is contextually integrated — I think that the key on the X1 platform, whether it’s the voice remote, whether it’s our recommendations and the personalization, it’s how do we snap this all together in one place.

It also gives us the ability to contextually offer somebody a subscription, so if you’re watching American Horror Story, you’re going to be able to go to X1, it’s live, you’ll be able to now watch it on-demand for free with ads and there will be another choice that says would you like to subscribe to FX+ and watch it ad-free or watch all the prior episodes and the prior seasons?

You’re seeing those elements all come together in a way that’s redefining what you should expect to get when you subscribe to pay TV and certainly kind of surprising; it’s delighting our customers when they have a platform like X1.

MCN:Did your ad sales folks object to the commercial-free services?
MS: I can’t comment on that. I think though that it ultimately has to start with the customer and the viewer giving them the choices.

And if you look at our technology, technology has continued to evolve and that means that we have to challenge the status quo, even if that means in some cases disrupting ourselves. … We’ve always been very bullish on giving customers more choice and creating the technology to add more value to pay TV and we’re not going to stop that.

The MCN 2017 Gatekeepers: Dish’s Andrew LeCuyer: Starting the ‘Hard Conversation’|Mediacom’s Italia Commisso Weinand: ‘Do the Right Thing’|WOW’s Roger Seiken: ‘It Has to Be a Win-Win’|A Veteran Gatekeeper For a New Distributor

Summing up the current state of programming in a simple sentence, the sometimes controversial but always erudite Sanford Bernstein media analyst Todd Juenger last month told a crowd of small and midsized cable operators, “Maybe content is king, but television networks are not content.”

Networks, Juenger argued during a talk at last month’s The Independent Show in Indianapolis, are aggregators of content. And aggregators are increasingly losing their once-tight grip on the pay TV landscape, as subscriber losses increase and advertising revenue dwindles.

It looks as if, finally, the pendulum is starting to swing in favor of distribution.

That, too, is another maybe. Traditional multichannel video programming distributors are gaining leverage, but nobody buys cable service to stare at the fiber network. Content is still key to the overall package. It’s just that the packages are changing.

Younger consumers, weaned on ad-free subscription video-on-demand services like Netflix, are increasingly expecting the same functionality from pay TV. That has led to a new flexibility in carriage talks.

LOOSENING THE BUNDLE
Programmers, which just a few years ago vehemently opposed skinny bundles when they were first introduced, now embrace the concept. Distributors, which in the past have chafed over having to buy a full suite of networks or nothing at all, are finding more and more programmers willing to loosen that bundle and even develop new content to help differentiate against competitive, lower priced offerings from over-the-top players.

In some cases, programmers have been more flexible about their networks, Mediacom Communications executive vice president of programming and human resources Italia Commisso Weinand said. She noted NBCUniversal’s willingness to shut down some less profitable networks, including Cloo, Esquire Network and Universal HD. But she warned distributors not to be complacent. “The wars are not over,” she said, adding that consolidation and subscriber losses are forcing content companies to reset rates more often. “You can work through consolidation; you can’t work through customers not coming back.

“If you look at the video universe, we had 100 million homes once upon a time,” she said. “There aren’t 100 million homes anymore; on a good day there’s maybe 85 million. Truly, cord-cutting has had an impact. That’s lost revenue for the networks; how do [they] get it back? Charge the same customers more money.”

Though the conflict between content providers and distribution methods may rage on, the battlefields are changing. In April, Charter Communications landed a deal with AMC Networks for exclusive content developed just for the two partners’ use. The first content installment from that partnership is expected in 2018.

As part of the agreement, Charter will have an exclusive initial U.S. window to the co-produced content for use on its own platform, while AMC Studios will retain subsequent rights, including the right to distribute the programming internationally. In June, Charter also began beta-testing Spectrum Stream, a sports-free skinny bundle that offers 25 channels for $19.95 per month. Comcast also struck a unique, exclusive deal with AMC Networks, which is providing the MSO with AMC Premiere, an ad-free version of its AMC cable channel available to Xfinity TV subscribers for $4.99 per month.

Smaller operators are encouraged by those developments, but see them as experiments more than anything else. Those operators also have some physical constraints — AMC Premiere would require bandwidth many small operators don’t possess.

Perhaps that attitude is helped along by the fact there aren’t many major deals up for negotiation. Charter’s deal with The Walt Disney Co. is expected to expire by the end of this year, but for the most part operators are focusing on retrans deals.

RETRANS RELIEF FOR SMALLER OPS
For smaller operators, some retrans relief may be coming from their buying co-op, the National Cable Television Cooperative. It has said it expects to begin negotiations soon for its members, 850 companies and nearly 10 million subscribers.

NCTC member WideOpenWest is still working through whether to participate in the group’s retrans negotiations, but believes the representation could be beneficial to small operators, senior vice president of programming Roger Seiken said.

“This is a huge service to their members,” Seiken said. “Those deals are tough if you don’t have a lot of subscribers; it’s tough to do the best job you can. Having an advocate like [NCTC CEO] Rich Fickle and [NCTC senior vice president of programming] Judy [Meyka] by your side negotiating those deals — it’s a great honor. I’m very excited about that.”

With the media landscape changing faster than the polar icecap, Multichannel News takes its annual look at the decision-makers for top pay TV distributors across the country, listed by number of video subscribers: The 2017 Gatekeepers.

AT&T
DANIEL YORK
EVP and Chief Content Officer

If its $108.7 billion deal to acquire Time Warner Inc. passes regulatory muster, AT&T won’t just be the largest content licensor in the world, it will be one of the largest content owners.

Once the deal is approved, AT&T will control more than 25 million video customers through satellite provider DirecTV, telco TV platform U-verse TV and virtual MVPD DirecTV Now, and will own iconic content brands like HBO, TBS, CNN and Cartoon Network.

As executive vice president and chief content officer for AT&T Entertainment Group, Daniel York and his team will oversee content acquisition for the distribution properties.

York, who was named to his current role in 2012, is a veteran of the business who oversees AT&T’s content and programming activities across all platforms, including satellite, mobile, online and IPTV.

He leads strategy, investments, negotiations, acquisitions, operations, development and original content, as well as NFL Sunday Ticket, Red Zone and Fantasy Zone content. York also manages the company’s four regional sports networks and the Audience Network, all Emmy award winners. Previously, York was chief content officer for DirecTV, where he oversaw similar functions.

Prior to joining DirecTV, he was president of AT&T content and advertising sales, where he developed the telco’s original content strategy, oversaw multiplatform content and ad sales activities, and helped build U-verse TV into the fastest-growing video provider in the U.S., going from zero to more than 5 million customers and $10 billion in annual revenue in under six years.

Before AT&T, York was head of programming and development for In Demand Networks, the leading video-on-demand, out-of-market sports package and pay-per-view provider. He began his career with HBO, where he worked for more than 12 years; in his last position there, he was responsible for distribution, marketing, sponsorship, content acquisitions and operations for HBO Sports’s pay-per-view business.

York is based at AT&T Entertainment Group headquarters in Los Angeles.

COMCAST
GREG RIGDON
EVP, Content Acquisition

Since coming from Charter Communications in 2010, Comcast Cable executive vice president of content acquisition Greg Rigdon has been part of some of the industry’s landmark deals — including Comcast’s 2012 renewal with The Walt Disney Co., which helped set the tone and template for years to come.

Rigdon oversees the strategic direction of the company’s content portfolio, including the negotiation of programming agreements for cable systems.

Among his recent accomplishments, in January Comcast ended a years-long dispute with 21st Century Fox’s YES Network, returning the regional sports network to Comcast’s New York-area customers. It had been dark since November 2015.

That deal also included continued carriage of Fox News Channel. Terms were not disclosed, but reports put the four-year pact for Fox News at about $1.50 per subscriber per month initially, with annual increases.

Also in January, the cable operator completed a comprehensive carriage deal with Spanish-language broadcaster Univision that also included broadcast network UniMás and cable network Galavisión, as well as its owned-and-operated stations.

The rest of the year is expected to be a bit more quiet; no major network renewals are expected.

Before joining Comcast, Rigdon was Charter’s executive vice president, programming, business development and strategy. He also previously held senior roles in programming strategy, business affairs and commerce at AOL.

Rigdon has a bachelor’s degree with high honors from Oberlin College and a master’s degree in Russian studies from Princeton University.

KEY LIEUTENANTS: Jennifer Gaiski, senior vice president, content acquisition; Sarah Gitchell, senior vice president/deputy general counsel; Justin Smith, senior vice president, content acquisition

CHARTER COMMUNICATIONS
DAVID ELLEN
Senior EVP

David Ellen joined Charter as senior executive vice president in 2016, but he has already been involved in some major deals.

Earlier this year, Charter settled a months-long legal dispute with 21st Century Fox over how its programming contracts are interpreted. Court documents in July indicated the suit had been “discontinued with prejudice,” and though neither side would comment, it appeared the suit had been settled.

In addition, Fox Networks Group channels, including the Fox broadcast network, FX, National Geographic and the Fox Sports-owned RSNs, apparently reached a deal at the same time. Those networks’ deals expired in April, but they had remained on the air through several extensions. While no formal announcement of a deal has come, Charter systems are still carrying the channels.

Ellen was also instrumental in a less-contentious deal, the AMC Networks content partnership announced in April that calls for Charter and AMC to co-produce, co-develop and co-fund original programming that will initially run exclusively on Charter systems. The first content from that agreement is expected to debut next year.

Ellen oversees several Charter business and corporate functions, including programming, Spectrum Networks, human resources, communications, diversity, security, regulatory policy support and compliance, and legal support for several of those areas.

He joined Charter from Cablevision Systems (now part of Altice USA), where he served as executive vice president and general counsel. Before Cablevision, Ellen served as deputy general counsel at IAC, the multi-brand media and internet company.

Earlier in his career, Ellen worked at the Federal Communications Commission and before that was a law clerk for now-retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor at the U.S. Supreme Court. He also clerked for Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg when they were each on the U.S. Court of Appeals.

He received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard College; a law degree from Harvard Law School, where he was president of the Harvard Law Review; and a master’s degree from Cambridge University, where he was a Marshall Scholar.

TOM MONTEMAGNO
EVP, Programming Acquisition

Tom Montemagno joined Charter Communications as executive vice president, programming acquisition, in 2016 and leads its negotiations with a full range of content providers, from major multichannel media companies and sports networks to local broadcasters. He negotiates all facets of Charter’s programming offerings, including on-demand and home-streaming rights on multiple platforms.

Montemagno joined Charter from Cablevision, where he most recently served as executive vice president of programming. During his 27-year tenure, he held such leadership positions as senior vice president of programming acquisition. He was Cablevision’s lead negotiator with content companies.

Montemagno has a bachelor’s degree in marketing from St. John’s University in New York.

KEY LIEUTENANTS: David Lange, group vice president, programming acquisition; Andrew Rosenberg, senior vice president, programming acquisition; Adam Weinstein, senior vice president, programming acquisition

DISH NETWORK
WARREN SCHLICHTING
EVP, Marketing, Programming and Media Sales

A veteran advertising and media executive, Warren Schlichting oversees the acquisition and renewal of all programming content for Dish Network, including national networks and cable channels, Latino content, local broadcast stations, and premium services such as HBO, Showtime and Starz. Schlichting also oversees Dish’s national marketing efforts and Dish Media Sales, the company’s advertising-sales division.

Prior to joining Dish in 2011, Schlichting led Comcast’s advanced advertising efforts on multiple media and ad delivery platforms, including broadband, interactive television and video-on-demand. Before arriving at Comcast, he was CEO of Hiwire, a Los Angeles-based technology company that provided online ad replacement software for Clear Channel and other radio station groups. He also served in executive positions for Morgan Stanley and the William E. Simon private-equity group.

Schlichting graduated with honors with a degree in Economics from Harvard University, where he was a four-year member of the varsity football team.

KEY LIEUTENANTS: Josh Clark, vice president of programming; Izabela Slowikowska, vice president of international programming; Melisa Ordonez, director of programming acquisition; Ankit Bishnoi, content acquisition for Sling TV

ANDREW LECUYER
SVP, Programming

As Dish’s senior vice president of programming, Andy LeCuyer leads the acquisition and renewal of programming content for Dish and Sling TV. In this role, he leads general entertainment, local broadcast, sports, movie studio and Latino content acquisition, including securing satellite and digital rights (encompassing traditional linear, video-on-demand, TV everywhere and OTT), as well as programming operations.

LeCuyer joined Dish in 2011 as director of programming, overseeing local retransmission relationships nationwide. Soon after, he assumed responsibility for premium, pay-per-view and international programming.

Most recently, LeCuyer led multiple negotiations to secure landmark programming agreements for the launch of Sling TV, the U.S. pay TV industry’s first live over-the-top television service.

Prior to joining Dish, LeCuyer served as vice president of strategic planning for a consumer electronics retailer. Additionally, he spent more than four years as a management consultant for McKinsey, covering a wide range of industries including retail and IT services.

LeCuyer earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Princeton University and a master’s in business administration from Yale School of Management. Following ROTC training during his undergraduate studies, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, where he served four years in progressive leadership roles and achieved the rank of captain.

NATIONAL CABLE TELEVISION COOPERATIVE
JUDY MEYKA
EVP, Programming

Judy Meyka, executive vice president of programming for the National Cable Television Cooperative, has spent more than 24 years in the cable television industry. In her current role with the NCTC, she leads the negotiation of video content acquisition agreements across multiple formats and platforms on behalf of more than 800 independent video distributors.

Meyka has been a central part of several key programming negotiations for NCTC members. Last year, the co-op successfully negotiated a deal with AMC Networks that didn’t force members to carry  all six of the programmer’s networks on their most popular tiers, a key development.

Later this year, the NCTC plans to take an even bigger bull by the horns: negotiating its members’ retransmission-consent deals with broadcast groups. Previously, Meyka served in several executive leadership positions, most recently as senior vice president, programming, for Adelphia Communications.

Prior to joining Adelphia, she was senior vice president, distribution, for In Demand and also worked as vice president, programming, for cable distributors AT&T Broadband and MediaOne Group.

Meyka is a graduate of the University of Michigan and received her law degree from the University of Denver College of Law.

KEY LIEUTENANTS: Stewart Myers, vice president, programming; Shelley Thompson, vice president, programming

VERIZON COMMUNICATIONS
ERIN McPHERSON
Head of Content Acquisition and Programming

Erin McPherson joined Verizon last December from short-form video pioneer Maker Studios. As head of the telco’s content activities, she oversees programming, strategic partnerships and original content across distribution platforms including Fios, OTT initiatives, IPTV, Oath, Go90, wireless and 5G.

McPherson replaced long-time Verizon content chief Terry Denson. She reports directly to Brian Angiolet, senior vice president of consumer products and new business development.

Prior to Maker, McPherson was vice president/head of video programming and originals at Yahoo, where she grew the company’s original video roster to more than 80 ongoing series.

McPherson graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and received her bachelor’s degree, magna cum laude, from Middlebury College.

COX COMMUNICATIONS
ANDREW ALBERT
SVP, Programming

Cox Communications senior vice president of programming Andrew Albert oversees all video provider relationships and content acquisition, and has led the MSO’s carriage negotiations with such content producers as The Walt Disney Co., Turner, NBCUniversal, Viacom and 21st Century Fox.

Albert is actively involved in setting Cox’s video product strategy, including the deployment of TV everywhere, video-on-demand and high-definition services, as well as the company’s multicultural programming strategy.

Albert joined Cox in 1995 as director of programming and was promoted to executive director of programming in 2002. The following year he was promoted to vice president. He has served in his current role since 2013.

Prior to joining Cox, Albert was director of programming and director of budgets and financial analysis for TeleCable in Norfolk, Va. Before that he was in the financial management program with General Electric, where he served as a sales and marketing analyst.

KEY LIEUTENANTS: Suzanne Fenwick, vice president, content acquisition; Mark Gathen, vice president, content acquisition; Chris Tygh, vice president, content acquisition

ALTICE USA
MICHAEL SCHREIBER
EVP and Chief Content Officer

About one year after European telecom company Altice N.V. purchased Cablevision Systems, making it the fourth-largest U.S. cable operator, Altice USA debuted as a separate, publicly traded stock. With its new currency, executive vice president and chief content officer Michael Schreiber, who joined the company from Comcast in 2016, could have even more clout with programmers as the potential for additional industry consolidation increases.

Schreiber is up to the task. Shortly after Altice announced a corporate-wide rebranding, Schreiber and his team cut a new programming deal with Viacom that not only returned more than a dozen of its youth-oriented channels to Altice USA’s Suddenlink Communications unit after a two-year hiatus, but brought new advanced advertising capabilities to the U.S. operations.

Schreiber is responsible for all programming-related developments, negotiations and agreements covering all content platforms company-wide. In addition to the Viacom partnership, he has forged deals with major programmers and broadcasters across the Optimum and Suddenlink footprints.

Prior to joining Altice USA, Schreiber was senior vice president of content acquisition for Comcast, where he led the execution of new media and digital content deals. He was one of the lead negotiators of key programming agreements and renewals, and oversaw acquisition for platforms including VOD, TV everywhere, Streampix, Watchable and advanced advertising.

Before joining Comcast, Schreiber worked at NBCUniversal, most recently as vice president, business development, digital distribution. He also assisted in the founding, development and launch of Hulu.

KEY LIEUTENANTS: Alan Dannenbaum, senior vice president, programming (a Comcast veteran); Bradley Fleisher, senior vice president, programming (a Time Warner Cable and NBCU veteran)

MEDIACOM COMMUNICATIONS
ITALIA COMMISSO WEINAND
EVP, Programming and Human Resources

Since joining Mediacom Communications as its third employee, Italia Commisso Weinand has worked alongside Rocco Commisso, her brother and fellow cable hall of famer, to build Mediacom into the nation’s fifth-largest cable operator, serving almost 1.4 million customers.

As the company embarked on a series of major acquisitions, Italia’s insight and experience allowed the company’s early operations, human resources, marketing and programming policies. Understanding that Mediacom needed to attract and retain an employee workforce of dedicated and proficient individuals, she developed a family-oriented corporate culture based on fairness, diversity and career growth.

It is a policy that has paid off, as Mediacom has grown from fewer than 20 employees in 1996 to more than 4,700 today.

Commisso Weinand began her 40-year cable career at Time Warner Cable in New York, and worked for Comcast immediately prior to becoming a founding member of Mediacom. Throughout her professional life, she has committed to numerous charitable causes, including Habitat for Humanity, Hope Through Care, Lake Drive School of the Deaf and the Knights of Columbus.

A Cable TV Pioneer, Commisso Weinand was named to the 2004 Wonder Women class by Multichannel News and Women in Cable Telecommunications. In addition to serving on Mediacom’s board, she is a board member for The Cable Center and The Emma L. Bowen Foundation and a past board member of Cable Positive and WICT.

KEY LIEUTENANTS: Barry Paden, group vice president, programming; Joseph Appio, vice president, programming; John Woods, vice president, advanced consumer services; Glenn Goldsmith, consultant

WOW
ROGER SEIKEN
SVP, Programming Roger Seiken joined WOW in March following long-time programming chief Peter Smith’s retirement a few months earlier. Based in Denver, Seiken will manage content provider relationships and oversee all programming negotiations with cable networks and broadcasters.

Prior to joining WOW, Seiken spent more than 12 years at Verizon, where he led the business and legal affairs effort for content acquisition for Verizon’s Fios TV, mobile and digital video platforms. As an original member of the Fios TV team, he helped that business grow from a start-up video service to a top MVPD with more than 5 million subscribers.

Prior to Verizon, Seiken worked for Discovery Communications in both affiliate sales and legal affairs roles. Before that he practiced corporate and securities law at Hogan Lovells and at Fried, Frank in Washington, D.C.

KEY LIEUTENANTS: Robin Feller, director of programming; Jim Waechter, programming financial analyst

NBCUniversal posted a big increase in profits in the second quarter, as distribution revenue increased at its cable and broadcast TV networks.

Parent company Comcast said NBCU’s adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization rose 22.6% to $2.071 billion. Revenue increased by 17.3% to $8.331 billion.

At the NBCU cable networks, earnings rose 11.7% to $1.055 billion as revenue rose $5.1% to $2.7 billion. An 8% gain in distribution revenue offset lower ad revenue, which was down 0.9% because of lower ratings.

NBC’s broadcast operations increased profit by 5.5% to $416 million. Revenue was up 5.3% to $2.241 billion. Distribution and other revenue was up 36.1% because of higher retransmission-consent fees. Advertising revenue was down 1.2%.

Overall, Comcast’s second-quarter net income rose 24% to $2.513 billion, or 52 cents a share, from $2.028 billion, or 41 cents per share, a year ago. Revenue rose 9.8% to $21.165 billion.

At Comcast’s cable business, earnings rose 5.4% to $1.956 billion in the quarter as revenue rose 5.5% to $13.12 billion.

The MSO’s total number of video subscribers fell by 34,000. The company added 175,000 high-speed internet customers. Phone customers were down by 22,000.

Total customer relationships rose by 114,000, the company said.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.

Comcast Cable CEO Dave Watson still doesn’t believe an out-of-footprint, over-the-top video offering makes economic sense for the largest cable operator in the country, but said if a model emerges, its X1 operating platform would be ideal.

Related > Out of Bounds: Mapping Out Cable's Prospects for Going OTT [subscription required]

Comcast has said repeatedly that it didn’t see a model that works for an out-of-footprint service. Watson’s predecessor, current vice chairman Neil Smit, reiterated that position a year later, saying last year that the operator hadn’t found an OTT model that “really hunts.” A few weeks later at the INTX show in Boston, Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts reiterated that position.

Related: New CEO Watson Won’t Disrupt Comcast Cable Momentum

At the MoffettNathanson Media & Communications Summit in New York Thursday (May 18), Watson said programming rights issues still make an outside OTT product unfeasible.

“We have some rights, but they’re not complete,” Watson said. “If you want to go out and get all of the rights connected to it, it is very little to no margin. We’re not questoning others and their approach. We’ll compete, when they come into our footprint, aggressively with X1 or broadband. When we look at taking that similar approach and that same model, we haven’t seen one that works.”

But Watson said if a feasible model emerges, its X1 platform would be ideal for a nationwide OTT offering.

“X1 would be a great technology solution for outside the footprint as well as inside,” Watson said. “We just haven’t found something that works.”

For Comcast Cable CEO Neil Smit, it’s always been about the team.

In each of the past jobs he’s held — as a cable company CEO, a marketing team leader at AOL and on a Navy SEAL team (he retired from the elite military unit as a lieutenant commander) — the most important aspect of the job has been the people that surround him.

That’s never been more true now as head of the Comcast Cable division for the past six years, Smith said. It was even obvious back when he first met with Comcast’s top brass — chairman and CEO Brian Roberts and then-chief operating officer Steve Burke, now the CEO of NBCUniversal — about possibly running the cable unit.

“My wife and I came out to meet Brian and his wife and Steve and [his wife] Gretchen Burke and the rest of the team and their spouses,” Smit said. “I asked her on the way home, ‘What do you think?’ She said, ‘I think they are good people with good values and you prefer working in a team environment.’ I felt the same way. That’s been the best part about being here, being able to work with that team day in and day out.”

Teams have been a big part of Smit’s career through stints at Nabisco, where he was a regional president, a five-and-a-half-year tour with the SEALs and at AOL, where he oversaw that company’s Internet access business. Smit also spent five years as CEO of Charter Communications, building up that midsized cable operator and steering it through a bankruptcy that freed up its crushing debt load and allowed it to invest in the business, a move that many believe laid the foundation for Charter’s success today.

He joined Comcast in 2010 as president of its cable unit (he was named CEO in 2011) and began setting the stage for what could be the first full year of positive video customer growth in a decade for the nation’s largest MSO. For that performance, Smit has been named Multichannel News’s 2016 Executive of the Year.

Related: X1: The Rocket Fueling Comcast Growth [subscription required]

‘LASER-FOCUSED’ EXEC

“Neil is one of the best and most thoughtful leaders I know,” Roberts said in an email message. “He’s smart, strategic and laser-focused on execution. He’s critical to our growth and evolution — driving our product innovation and transforming the customer experience.

“His passion, focus and optimism these past few years make him truly worthy of this wonderful and, in my opinion, very well-deserved recognition,” Roberts said.

Smit, in typical modest fashion, defers most of the credit for Comcast’s success to the cable company’s employees. But that sense of collaboration has been with him throughout his career, whether it be in the military, where the people that surround you make literal life-and-death decisions, to the business world, where the right team can mean the difference between success or failure.

“For me it’s less about the work and more about the people I get to work with,” Smit said.

But make no mistake about it, the work is important. Roberts crowed days after Smit was hired back in 2010 that the new cable division president came into the office on the weekend before he was officially supposed to start just to listen in on customerservice calls. It was a habit that Smit picked up when he was at AOL and brought with him when he took over Charter in 2005.

He still does that today, he said, adding that he makes all of his senior managers — including himself — follow up personally on service calls. When a customer gets a callback from Neil from Comcast, it could very well be Smit on the line.

Smit said he makes about three customer callbacks a week. “I think it’s important to stay in touch with the customer,” he said.

Keeping a sharp focus on the customer experience has been Smit’s mantra since he came on board, and it has paid off in spades for Comcast and its investors.

In the six years that Smit has been head of the cable unit — which accounts for more than 60% of Comcast’s total revenue and more than 75% of its cash flow — Smit has consistently improved the video and high-speed data businesses. In those six years, Comcast has improved video customer losses in 25 of 27 quarters, a pace that Smit picked up from Burke when he ran the cable unit, and high-speed data customers have increased nearly 30% in the same period.

At the same time, cable unit revenue has risen 33% since Smit joined in January 2010 and cash flow has improved by 35%.

That customer focus and the power of its state-of-the-art operating platform, X1, has led to six consecutive years of improved video subscriber losses. This year, Comcast is expected to report its first full year of video customer gains in a decade, with most analysts predicting the cable operator will add at least 100,000 basic video customers for 2016. It would be the cherry on top of a six-year period in which basic video-subscriber losses have been reduced 21-fold, from 756,000 in 2010 to just 36,000 in 2015.

Smit will give most of the credit to his team, a seasoned cadre of executives that includes executive vice president and chief operating officer Dave Watson; and president, technology and product Tony Werner, as well as the thousands of frontline employees under them who have served as the foundation for Comcast’s success.

“From an operations standpoint, he has a great appreciation for detail, but he lets his team go ahead and get the job done,” Watson said in an interview. “He has a tremendous focus, but he lets you get the job done.”

MoffettNathanson principal and senior analyst Craig Moffett agreed.

“His real success comes not just from the fact that he’s a smart guy, but because he’s an exceptionally good leader,” Moffett said. “Comcast over the last five years has really upgraded its talent immensely. It’s a double-edged sword — an organization with lots of talent can easily become unwieldy unless you have a good orchestra leader who’s able to make everybody play together. That’s really where I think he has distinguished himself.”

GOAL-SETTING FOR INNOVATION

Straight out of the box in 2010, Smit challenged Comcast employees by setting a goal of at least one new product or service enhancement per quarter. Nearly 24 quarters later, the company has released dozens of new offerings, including Xfinity on Campus, a service that lets college students watch live TV and on-demand content on IP-enabled devices while at college; various “skinny bundle” offerings; multiscreen streaming video-on-demand offerings such as Stream TV; and others.

While Comcast has excelled on all product fronts — it added about 8.4 million broadband customers since 2010 and its X1 operating platform is considered by many to be the gold standard for the industry — video has been at the heart of the company’s cable success, dating back to Roberts’ efforts years earlier to bolster its on demand libraries and rights.

“At a time when everybody else in the industry was starting to coalesce around the vision of broadband first, Comcast kept their eyes on the prize of video,” Moffett said. “They never lost their enthusiasm for video as the core product. That’s not to say they didn’t invest in broadband, but they always saw themselves first and foremost as an entertainment company.”

Smit said he knew from the start that he and Roberts were on the same page.

“What’s great about working for Brian is he’s in it for the long haul,” Smit said. “He invests in the future, he believes in growth, he’s entrepreneurial and he’s up for new opportunities and new challenges. I’m a big believer in continuously looking for growth opportunities, whether it’s in people or platforms or technologies. We have a really good relationship.”

Video is just as important today, fueling new entrants in the SVOD and OTT space, as well as providing added fodder for mobile products from a wide range of competitors.

But programming alone won’t keep customers loyal, especially in today’s environment. Smit said that Comcast realized at the outset that it was the overall customer experience which fostered that loyalty. Early on Smit, Roberts and the rest of the Comcast team moved to drastically improve customer service, he said.

The efforts started out small. Comcast first guaranteed one-hour appointment windows for service calls and allowed customers to track technicians via an Uber-like app, for example. In 2015, Roberts unveiled an ambitious three-year, $300 million plan to build three new call centers, hire 5,500 customer-service representatives and revamp Xfinity retail stores across the country.

Smit said that the idea is to get staffing to the proper level — he defined that as having the right people taking the right service calls — which allows customer issues to be resolved more efficiently. That includes putting the right tools in the hands of both customers and service reps, including a knowledge-based system that prompts the best agent response to customer problems, overlaid with artificial intelligence that should improve the quality of responses even more. On the technician side, Comcast gives its workers better diagnostic tools to identify problems.

Even the network is getting in on the act. Comcast’s network is smarter, Smit said, allowing the company to restart a customer set-top box remotely to solve problems before they occur.

“We’re getting smarter — we’re getting more information from the set-tops and modems that we can leverage to make a self-healing system,” Smit said.

Comcast has also built call centers in Albuquerque, N.M., Spokane, Wash., and Tucson, Ariz., and has plans for additional call centers in Charlotte, S.C. and Fort Collins, Colo. Comcast also has hired many of the targeted 5,500 workers and has added additional enhancements to its service including access to Netflix service on its X1 set-tops.

“We can turn pretty quickly when we all get aligned around a product or a major initiative like this, the customer experience,” Smit said. “We do big things well.”

The numbers also speak loudly. In the third quarter, customer-service calls were down about 14% and Comcast’s on-time arrival rate for technicians improved to more than 97%. First call resolution of service issues improved by 7% and the company’s response time on social media channels has improved by 95% during the same period.

The Netflix addition to X1 was a milestone, as the SVOD pioneer has largely been considered to be a direct competitor to cable and a key contributor to the pay TV industry’s woes over the past few years. But Smit said the decision to incorporate the Netflix app on X1 boxes was easy: It was all about ease of use.

“I spoke with [Netflix CEO] Reed [Hastings] about six months before we got the product out and we got a deal done and released the product in that period of time,” Smit said. “The speed at which new content or new features or functions come out, you need to have the platforms in place to do that. In order for the cable industry to compete longer-term, it needs to have great content as well as a great user interface.”

NEXT UP: WIRELESS

Comcast’s next big investment likely will be tied to its next big product, a wireless offering slated for mid-2017 that will be created through an existing mobile virtual network operator agreement (MVNO) with Verizon Communications. Comcast created a wireless business unit earlier this year — Comcast Mobile, headed by former executive vice president of sales and marketing Greg Butz — to address the new product.

Comcast hasn’t given any details on the new product, and Smit wasn’t about to buck that trend. But he did say that mobile continues to be an important area for the company.

“We think leveraging our 28.5 million customer relationships, our 15 million WiFi hotspots and our Verizon MVNO is a good value and will continue to reduce churn,” Smit said. “[Customers] want more value and we think we can add value with the launch.”

Comcast has been less optimistic about over-the-top pay TV services. It has said it can’t see a viable business model there, even as services proliferate like Sling TV, DirecTV Now and Hulu’s planned OTT service slated for next year. Comcast is a part owner of Hulu through NBCUniversal.

Smit echoed Roberts’s sentiments on the issue, adding that for Comcast the economics of OTT are simply not as clear as in other products.

But the operator does see potential and value in one key component of OTT — the broadband network. Comcast has increased data speeds 17 times in the past 15 years as broadband consumption has increased 40% to 50% each year. Comcast has invested in new capacity, routers and DOCSIS 3.1, which promises Internet speeds of 10 Gigabits per second. On the programming side, NBCUniversal spent $3.8 billion to purchase DreamWorks Animation, a move that will add significantly to its content capabilities.

For Smit, those moves are merely another opportunity for collaboration and another chance for the team to prove its mettle.

“Brian and the team of us feel we can invest in the future of the company,” Smit said. “It’s a belief that the team can execute on those investments.”

Related > 'MCN' Exec of the Year Neil Smit: No Team, No Dream [subscription required]

With the prospect of its first full year of positive video subscriber growth staring it in the face, Comcast can point to many factors that have helped push the operator over the hump, but none perhaps with as much impact as its state-of-the art operating platform, X1.

Comcast introduced X1 in 2012 and to date it is available in about 45% of the cable company’s footprint, reaching 50% by the end of the year. With X1, Comcast customers get a state-of-the-art user interface, cloud digital video recording, home-streaming capabilities and other features, like an interactive voice remote. Those features have proven to be popular with customers.

For the cable company, the X1 architecture allows it to more easily overlay new services and products, essentially via software downloads from the cloud.

X1 also is having a big impact on customer retention and the uptake of new services. Customers of the platform are less likely to churn, DVR take rates for X1 users are about 3 times that of non X1 customers and X1 users are twice as likely to buy pay-per-view products.

FROM PLANS TO REALITY

Comcast Cable CEO Neil Smit said that X1 was still in the planning stages when he joined the company in 2010, adding that the platform dovetailed nicely with Comcast’s emphasis on video and the renewed focus on the customer experience.

In its final iteration, X1 had all the bells and whistles associated with new technology rollouts. But Smit said that at its core, X1’s message is simple.

“We invested in X1 and the on-demand content and the different platforms at a time when there was not a lot of significant investment going on,” Smit said. “Video is about great content but also about ease of discovery of that content — if you have great content and make it easy to find and you bring up new recommendations of things. We believed from the beginning we could achieve that.”

X1 was a collaborative effort from the beginning, Comcast executive vice president and chief operating officer Dave Watson said.

“One of the first things he did was prioritize the list,” Watson said in an interview. “We had so many things going on, a lot of promising things that were emerging post the early stages of DOCSIS — more VOD, all the standards we had invested in. The infrastructure stuff was for the most part coming to an end, but the product stuff was not. That’s where Neil came in and helped prioritize. X1 was at the top of the list.”

Watson added that in addition to X1’s chief architect — technology president Tony Werner and his team — Smit brought in other disciplines and executives to help shape the product.

“One of the things Neil did, he included [Comcast chairman and CEO] Brian [Roberts] in a lot of the early iterations of feature design,” Watson said. “A lot of others that were engaged — the marketing team, the rest of Tony Werner’s engineering team, there were a lot of people that were very focused.”

That sense of collaboration has been part of Comcast’s DNA for years, Watson said, but it was especially evident in the formation of X1.

INCLUSIVE PROCESS

“It goes back to that belief that an effective team gets better results,” Watson said. “You don’t roll out things at scale of this magnitude without having great teams on it.”

That kind of collaboration also led to one of the X1’s most popular features, the voice remote. The remote, which allows customers to search for shows and launch apps with voice commands, is one of the most popular features of X1. To date, about 10 million voice remotes have been deployed to Comcast customers.

Watson said Roberts championed the voice remote. “The engineering team had developed the capability, but Brian was focused on [the idea] that this could be special,” he said. “Neil then brought it to a whole other level. Neil got with his team and said, ‘Let’s scale this.’ And that’s what happened.”

Comcast recently incorporated the Netflix app into the X1, allowing for subscribers to the SVOD service to more easily access it. While that may have been unheard of several years ago — Netflix is considered a cable competitor by some — Smit said it fits in with Comcast’s overall philosophy.

“We’re all about saving the customers’ time,” Smit said. “Their time is precious and we have to respect that. The Netflix integration was saving the customer’s time; it was making it more convenient for them. They didn’t have to switch over to input B, they could just speak into their voice remote and say ‘Find Orange is the New Black.’ It was grounded in making the customer’s life more convenient and saving them time.”

The X1 has received rave reviews: Geekwire called it an “Escalade,” referring to the high-end Cadillac SUV. And Comcast doesn’t plan to keep the operating system to itself. It has already licensed X1 to two cable operators, Cox Communications in the U.S. and Shaw Communications in Canada, and hopes to add more licensees in the future.

WORKS FOR COX, TOO

At Cox, which markets X1 as New Contour, the platform has lived up to and exceeded expectations, executive vice president of product development and management Steve Necessary said.

Cox began rolling out New Contour in one market with 3,000 customers at the beginning of the year; by April, it was deployed in all 21 of the cable operator’s territories. By the end of the year, Necessary said Cox expects to have nearly 600,000 New Contour customers.

Because Cox has had the product less than a year, the operator hasn’t seen the full impact of the platform yet. But he said the company has seen a reduction in early life churn and customer satisfaction has risen. Necessary said New Contour has resulted in higher Net Promoter Scores — a more than 20-point lift for X1 users. And VOD usage has roughly doubled for X1 customers.

“The metrics we have to date are very positive and support or exceed our business expectations,” Necessary said. He expects the growth trajectory in 2016 to continue into next year.

Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts didn’t offer any new news regarding the cable operator’s plans to launch a new wireless product next year, but added he thinks it will be a money-maker.

Comcast said last month that it expected to launch a wireless offering by mid-2017, building on its mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) agreement with Verizon Communications.  Comcast has been tight-lipped about what that product will be, but has formed a Mobile division, tapping former EVP of sales and marketing operations Greg Butz to spearhead the effort.

On a conference call with analysts Wednesday (Oct. 26) to discuss third quarter results, Roberts said there was no new news to offer on the product. 

“We fundamentally believe we can make money for the shareholders through a wireless offering with the unique relationship we have with the Verizon MVNO,” Roberts said. “We have the ability to do things that we believe make that statement come true and can create real value for shareholders along the way.”

Related:NBCU’s Burke: ‘Healthy Skepticism’ That OTT-TV Will Draw Subs by the Millions

Comcast Cable CEO Neil Smit added that other operators – particularly Rogers Communications, Telenet and Virgin Media – have used wireless to reduce churn and increase the customer’s lifetime value.

“In a way we’re already in the wireless business,” Smit said. “We deployed millions of wireless gateways and the WiFi service in the household is the fastest in the market. I think by leveraging [Comcast’s] 28 million customer relationships, the 15 million hotspots and the MVNO we can offer a really excellent service.”

As you’ll soon learn, mathematics and technology were a perfect pairing for Kalpa Subramanian, who has been key in injecting culture and collaboration for an organization of more than 300 people at Comcast’s California operations.

In addition to earlier work focused on voice, data and video traffic for residential and commercial customers in that region, she has also been a primary leader and contributor in several other key tech and product areas, including the operator’s implementation of IP Multimedia Subsystems, DOCSIS 3.0/3.1, Xfinity Home, and Xfinity WiFi, to name but a few.

And in addition to giving her all to Comcast’s big efforts, she also invests valuable time and guidance as a mentor to others in the organization looking to learn and continue to grow.

Subramanian’s leadership throughout the organization and her focus on the customer are among the reasons why she is our choice for Tech Woman of the Year in the MSO/Regional category.

More WoT: Subramanian is one of five execs selected for MCN's 2016 Women of Tech list; read about the others in Setting the Pace for Innovation [subscription required] and watch for a daily profile of each Sept. 26-30 at multichannel.com/WomenOfTech.

Multichannel News: What spawned your interest in technology? 

Kalpa Subramanian: My mom is a math teacher, so at dinnertime, our favorite thing to talk about around the table would be solving math problems. As an end result, I was always good at math and science. It was in my destiny to go down the engineering route. But when I did my undergrad, in India, the first few days were a little bit of a reality check with the few number of women who go into engineering school and graduate with an engineering degree.

Coming out of it, I was focused on the field of computing and field of technology and the field of instrumentation and networking. It was kind of organic to go into the technology space, which, in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, was the start of the boom period for technology.

By the time I was 25, I had already lived and worked in five different countries, so it gave me an understanding that languages might be different and cultures might be different, but humanity is the same and technology is the same. That kind of became a uniting factor. 

MCN: How did you break into the cable industry? 

KS: Out of college, one of my first jobs was at a networking-type of a company, Microtech-Tel. I'm dating myself here, but back then voice-over-IP was the newest, coolest thing. As I started getting more into the professional-type world, I found that I had a knack for leading people and organizing them toward a commonly shared goal. Comcast had this huge opportunity when we were migrating our telephone system back in Colorado. That was when I came on board.

Back in the day, Charlotte Field [formerly of Comcast and now with Charter Communications], who was a senior vice president in that organization, was one of the early folks who had taken me under her wing. I have had countless other folks who have supported and guided me along the way, one of the most prominent being Shane Portfolio, who leads Comcast’s West Division Engineering.

MCN: What's your focus now? 

KS: The highest priority is our customers — getting our customers the most reliable service that they can depend on and rely on. At the end of the day, that holistic experience is what we want to deliver. And happy customers are possible by happy employees. Employee well-being is a top-priority. I spend a lot of my [time] working on strategies for employee growth and morale.

In Colorado, we started a mentoring committee and group called QCII to Success [QCII is a reference to a Comcast facility in Greenwood Village]. The primary goal was to take engineers, front-line folks, who are really good at their job but need a little bit of advice and mentoring … We paired them up with mentors. The results were amazing. Folks in the program were blossoming and it was very fulfilling to see that progress.

Here [in California] mentoring is still important to me … so I joined the [Women In Cable & Telecommunications] board and helped with their programs to help the newer women coming in or those who have entered the workforce that are looking for options and paths to climb up the career ladder. 

For women, there’s a lot of competition and there’s a voice in our heads — and this happens to me as well — that questions and digs at their confidence a little bit. I help women talk through quelling that voice and getting their inner confidence out. 

MCN: What tech term or jargon drives you nuts? 

KS: Having been a coder before, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, RAD [Rapid Application Development] used to be a term that referred to the programming language. Now, when people say something is “rad,” it takes me back to the coding days, but that's not where that acronym came from! 

MCN: Favorite book? 

KS: I love Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. There are portions of the book that she touches on that are so real and replicatable to so many different components of day-to-day life. Another that I’m thumbing through right now is Rising Strong by Brené Brown. She had done a TED Talk on vulnerability … so I started to look into what Brené Brown does; she’s a huge, very successful professor. When I looked into her books, Rising Strong was one that could absolutely pull anybody up through thick and thin … and leveraging strengths and focusing on the opportunities. I loved the messages she had behind it. 

MCN: Favorite movie? 

KS: I do have a guilty pleasure, and those are rom-coms. A movie that I’ve watched a few dozen times is The Notebook. That’s a movie we need a lot of tissues and bonbons for!

MCN: What’s your favorite gadget or app? 

KS: My favorite app for the past few years is called the SBT — the Stop, Breathe & Think app.

In the San Francisco area, one of the well-being movements is being self-aware and searching inside oneself. After having been through some classes and lectures, the concept of focus by reflection and meditation has really sunk in. My way of reflection is putting on some headphones and walking around the block, and the Stop, Breathe and Think app is just a cool, fun app to make you mindful … and get your brain wired to take on the day with this newfound energy and focus. 

As the SCTE/ISBE Cable-Tec Expo gets rolling in Philadelphia this week, it’s apropos for Multichannel News to shine a spotlight on its annual group of women in technology-oriented roles at companies that are helping to define the industry’s next generation of products and services. This year, we recognize individuals in five categories for leading the technology charge for cable operators, programmers and key industry suppliers.

Get more Women of Tech coverage.

MVPD, National

Kim Keever

Vice President, Chief Information Security Officer, Cox Communications

From Beverages to Broadband

Kim Keever loved her job as chief information security officer at The Coca-Cola Co.’s bottling operation. She loved it so much that when Cox came calling in the summer of 2014, she was friendly, but insistent: It just wasn’t going to happen.

Now, as vice president and chief information security officer for the Atlanta-based service provider, she cringes at the memory, commending Cox as the “best employer I’ve ever had.”

In her role overseeing companywide security and all “cross-technology” functions (which she defines as “anything everyone has to do”), Keever deals with a much higher and more complex threat profile than with the famous beverage. There, it was more about protecting the brand from “hacktivists”; at Cox, it’s about protecting much more sensitive information, across multiple (and often shifting) platforms.

— Leslie Ellis

Read a longer version of this Q&A here.

Multichannel News:What did you want to be when you grew up?

Kim Keever: I didn’t know exactly, but I knew that scientific things interested me. I was one of those kids — I drove my mother crazy; I drive my husband and my kids crazy — I want to know how and why things work. This summer, my son was in a baseball tournament, and we’re driving by these big, smokestack reactors, and I say, “Let’s go look!” My kids were like, “OMG, Mom. Stop it.”

MCN:First job?

KK: My first real job was at Accenture. I had studied chemical engineering and industrial management (at Georgia Tech), but I wasn’t sure exactly what industry was right. There, I could experiment with different things. My very first job was at an ice cream store. I got fired because I wouldn’t serve hollow ice cream balls just to save money. I think of it as kind of a prelude.

MCN:What’s on top of your to-do list these days?

KK: At work, it’s driving the cybersecurity agenda, as well as the governance process of our cross-technology functions. At home, my to-do list is to manage all of my kids — I have a son, 16, a daughter, 15, and another daughter, 12. So, getting one to baseball, one to volleyball, one to the horse stables.

MCN:When and where are you happiest?

KK: This is a hard one, because as corny as it sounds, I believe that it’s everyone’s choice to be happy or not. I tell my kids this all the time: It’s your decision, whether you’re negative, or positive. I tell them: Figure out what makes you happy, and do whatever that is.

MCN:Most important quality for women to possess?

KK: Self-confidence. In this kind of job, I see it all — the dirty stuff, the bad stuff — and I’m often the only woman in the room. It doesn’t faze me. Also, I’m not sure if this characteristic has a name, but I realized early on that if you find something nobody else wants to do, and you do it well and you like doing it? That works regardless of gender.

MCN:What technology word drives you batty?

KK: “Hackathon.” It doesn’t say what it is. To me, a hack means you’re a bad person who wants to break things. What we call “hackathons” are really more like fun things for people to do. They’re not about breaking anything.

MCN:Best or worst advice you’ve ever received?

KK: Worst was, a woman once told me that if I wanted people to take me seriously, I had to cut my hair!

MCN:Favorite gadget or app?

KK: I love Waze. I’m not directionally challenged, but it gets you around all the traffic. That’s important here in Atlanta!

MVPD, Regional

Kalpa Subramanian

Vice President, Engineering, Comcast Cable, California

Born to Be an Engineer

Mathematics and technology were a perfect pairing for Kalpa Subramanian, who has been key in injecting culture and collaboration for an organization of more than 300 people at Comcast’s California operations. In addition to earlier work focused on voice, data and video traffic for residential and commercial customers in that region, she has been a primary leader and contributor in several other key tech and product areas, including the operator’s implementation of IP Multimedia Subsystems, DOCSIS 3.0/3.1, Xfinity Home, and Xfinity WiFi, to name but a few. She also invests valuable time and guidance as a mentor to others in the organization looking to learn and continue to grow.

— Jeff Baumgartner

Read a longer version of this Q&A here.

MCN:What spawned your interest in technology?

Kalpa Subramanian: My mom is a math teacher, so at dinnertime, our favorite thing to talk about around the table would be solving math problems. As an end result, I was always good at math and science. It was in my destiny to go down the engineering route. But when I did my undergrad, in India, the first few days were a little bit of a reality check with the few number of women who go into engineering school and graduate with an engineering degree.

Coming out of it, I was focused on the field of computing and field of technology and the field of instrumentation and networking. It was kind of organic to go into the technology space, which, in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, was the start of the boom period for technology.

By the time I was 25, I had already lived and worked in five different countries, so it gave me an understanding that languages might be different and cultures might be different, but humanity is the same and technology is the same. That kind of became a uniting factor.

MCN:How did you break into the cable industry?

KS: Out of college, one of my first jobs was at a networking-type of a company, Microtech-Tel. I’m dating myself here, but back then voice-over-IP was the newest, coolest thing. As I started getting more into the professional-type world, I found that I had a knack for leading people and organizing them toward a commonly shared goal. Comcast had this huge opportunity when we were migrating our telephone system back in Colorado. That was when I came on board.

Back in the day, Charlotte Field [formerly of Comcast and now with Charter Communications], who was a senior vice president in that organization, was one of the early folks who had taken me under her wing. I have had countless other folks who have supported and guided me along the way, one of the most prominent being Shane Portfolio, who leads Comcast’s West Division Engineering.

MCN:What’s your focus now?

KS: The highest priority is our customers — getting our customers the most reliable service that they can depend on and rely on. At the end of the day, that holistic experience is what we want to deliver. And happy customers are possible by happy employees. Employee well-being is a top-priority. I spend a lot of my [time] working on strategies for employee growth and morale.

In Colorado, we started a mentoring committee and group called QCII to Success [QCII is a reference to a Comcast facility in Greenwood Village]. The primary goal was to take engineers, front-line folks, who are really good at their job but need a little bit of advice and mentoring …

Here [in California] mentoring is still important to me … so I joined the [Women In Cable & Telecommunications] board and helped with their programs to help the newer women coming in or those who have entered the workforce that are looking for options and paths to climb up the career ladder.

For women, there’s a lot of competition and there’s a voice in our heads — and this happens to me as well — that questions and digs at their confidence a little bit. I help women talk through quelling that voice and getting their inner confidence out.

MCN:What tech term or jargon drives you nuts?

KS: Having been a coder before, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, RAD [Rapid Application Development] used to be a term that referred to the programming language. Now, when people say something is “rad,” it takes me back to the coding days, but that’s not where that acronym came from!

MCN:What’s your favorite gadget or app?

KS: My favorite app for the past few years is called the SBT — the Stop, Breathe & Think app. In the San Francisco area, one of the well-being movements is being self-aware and searching inside oneself. After having been through some classes and lectures, the concept of focus by reflection and meditation has really sunk in. My way of reflection is putting on some headphones and walking around the block, and the Stop, Breathe and Think app is just a cool, fun app to make you mindful … and get your brain wired to take on the day with this newfound energy and focus.

Programmer

Sherry Brennan

Senior Vice President, Distribution, Fox Networks Group

Fox’s Technology Bridge

Sherry Brennan is the first to tell you about how many women at Fox Networks are “far more technical” than she is. But as Multichannel News’s choice for Woman of Tech in the Programmer category, it’s her rare and appreciable blend of industrial memory and technology communication that sets her apart.

It’s perhaps not surprising that she counts the venerable and notoriously straight-to-the-point Wilt Hildenbrand (former CTO of Cablevision Systems) as the teacher who showed her how to navigate the seas of tech-talk. Along a 27-year (and counting) career, Brennan invented a way to automate royalty fees using then-new database techniques; helped launch Cablevision’s video-on-demand service; and today, negotiates beyond the “known” waters of linear licensing on deals far more technical in reach and in scope. As a frequent speaker at industry events, Brennan is consistently direct, clever, and accurate — whether the topic is headend IRD authorization, proposed FCC set-top box rules, advanced advertising or the over-the-top video scene.

— Leslie Ellis

MCN:What did you want to be when you grew up?

Sherry Brennan: The first female president of the United States, a surgeon, a physicist and a writer. We didn’t have a TV, so I had no idea about careers in television until after grad school.

MCN:First job? First job in cable?

SB: My very first job was collecting tickets and turning on and off the “kiddie rides” at my grandparents’ amusement park in Iowa City. I was 10. The liability issues make me shudder, looking back on it now … but nothing bad happened on my watch!

First job in cable was with Falcon Cable TV in 1989, working for the COO, Frank Intiso. I went from budget data entry to creating their first licensee-fee payment and channel-lineup databases. Somewhere in there, I helped figure out how to restructure our tiering so we didn’t take a financial hit with the Cable Act regulations in ’92 and ’93.

Frank set me up with a private tutor to learn how to write macros so I could try running various scenarios, and ultimately automate how the required forms were populated. We had nearly 1,000 different systems in about 40 states, and each scenario used half a box of continuous-roll paper — sometimes I’d come in at 8 a.m. to find it unspooled and out the printer room door (yes, we had whole rooms for printing back then). I dreamed in numbers and rate change structures for months!

MCN:What’s on top of your to-do list these days?

SB: The opportunities for taking our content, and new forms of our content, to a variety of traditional and emerging platforms. It’s so interesting to see how different companies view the business — from small startups to huge companies, there are dozens of people wanting to get into our business. When I hear people say, “TV is dead,” I just laugh. Who knew a “dead” business could generate so much activity?

MCN:Most important quality for women to possess?

SB: Confidence married to competence, as my friend Grace Killelea would say it (in her fabulous book, The Confidence Effect). You’ve simply got to be able to speak up, in a cheerfully confident — and accurate — way, or you’ll be relegated to the back row forever.

MCN:What technology word drives you batty?

SB: “Skinny bundles.” Don’t people realize that “broadcast basic” is the original “skinny bundle,” and it’s been around forever?

MCN:Best or worst advice you’ve ever received?

SB: My dad told me that if I worked hard, I could achieve anything. He encouraged me to be smart, to strive for my goals, and to go to college, which he hadn’t had the opportunity to do. Without that formative vote of confidence, I’m not sure any other advice would’ve mattered. Thanks, Dad!

MCN:Favorite gadget or app?

SB: Instacart. No more “bad mommy” moments, when I get home late and realize there’s no milk, no toilet paper, and nothing to put in my son’s lunch for the next day. Yes, I’ve been known to order milk and bread for delivery at 9 p.m.

Vendor/Supplier

Kathy Weidman

Senior Vice President/General Manager, Metadata, TiVo

Metadata Maven

Kathy Weidman loves metadata. She’s loved metadata for as long as she can remember, in fact, and almost fastidiously planned her 30-plus year career around it — including her move to Rovi (now TiVo) two years ago. It all started in the post-production landscape, working for Avid, where she saw how inextricably data is wound into production workflows. It struck her as the pipeline for content discovery.

These days, Weidman is mapping out TiVo’s development of what she calls “super-powered metadata,” which blends its “knowledge graph” with machine learning, to make metadata more searchable, semantic, and relevant. She’s a frequent speaker at industry events — she opened a “Metadata Madness” conference earlier this year — and says that a goal is to spend more time as an industry spokesperson on the topic of … you guessed it … metadata.

— Leslie Ellis

MCN:What did you want to be when you grew up?

Kathy Weidman: A psychologist, at first, and then an economist. I studied both in college, as well as English. It turned out to be great training for the world of media, which is somewhere in between.

MCN:First job?

KW: First jobs were babysitting and waitressing, starting when I was 15. First job in cable was RedBee (now Ericsson), in Europe. I was managing director for content discovery — I managed the content discovery business including metadata and search and recommendations.

MCN:What’s on top of your to-do list these days?

KW: Right now, I’m working on a five-year plan about the future of metadata. It’s not what people think it is. The world will change. We have to change, to grow. Metadata will be virtual, with machine learning concepts. That’s really high on my list.

MCN:Most important quality for women in tech to possess?

KW: I do think you have to be tough. By that I mean fortitude and determination and passion. I think it’s also important to understand people and what motivates them. If you have a team of people who are happy doing what they’re doing, and love coming to work, you get 120% from them. So, develop a team that’s really passionate.

MCN:What do you like to do when you’re not at work?

KW: You’ll laugh, but I watch TV guides. I’m always looking for new ideas and thoughts. My husband complains, “Are we ever going to actually watch anything, or just look at the guide?” I also love to read, write, walk, and spend time with family [two sons and a daughter] doing high-energy things … we are passionate about life in general, and like to be active.

MCN:Best or worst advice you’ve ever received?

KW: Worst was, very early on, someone told me that I should use my “womanhood” to get ahead. I ignored it. Best was from my dad, who was a big believer in having fun at work. I take it to heart. We work super-hard here, but we play, too. Someday remind me to tell you about the April Fools’ joke we pulled off this year.

MCN:Favorite gadget or app?

KW: Uber, hands down. It’s changed the world in so many ways.

Rising Star

April Smith

Technology Project Manager, Cox Communications

A Passion for Learning

As a participant in Cox’s LEAD program, April Smith gets an opportunity to rotate within the company to learn and contribute to a variety of initiatives in the role of project manager. That’s a great fit for an industry up-and-comer with an insatiable passion for learning and for the technologies that are driving cable forward, including TV Everywhere to the new multi-Gigabit DOCSIS 3.1 platform. She is also active with industry organizations, including the National Association of Multi-Ethnicity in Communications and Women in Cable & Telecommunications chapters in Atlanta. Smith’s ability to learn and excel in a job that requires discipline and desire and a go-get-’em attitude, while engaging with the larger industry and still living a dynamic life outside of work make her Multichannel News’s pick for Tech Woman of the Year in the Rising Star category.

— Jeff Baumgartner

MCN:What sparked your interest in the cable industry?

April Smith: I knew I wanted to be in the TV industry in some shape or form, I just didn’t know in what capacity. Prior to starting college, I felt there was a lack of representation of African-Americans on TV, and I wanted to be part of the conversation to encourage more diversity on screen.

I majored in Arts, Entertainment and Media Management with a minor in Television. My goal was to become a leader who influences key business decisions. I knew revenue would be a key driver, so I started working in advertising sales for HGTV and DIY networks.

MCN:What are your current priorities at Cox?

AS: I just wrapped up one of my first project rotations, working on TV Everywhere for Cox video customers. I recently launched a major enhancement to the company’s new Contour app. For the first time, Cox’s customers have the opportunity to watch linear programs outside of the home directly via the Contour app, available across Cox’s entire video subscriber base [estimated at 4 million].

I’ve just started a new rotation as a project manager in customer operations. I am serving on two Cox initiatives. The first is the Cox telephony initiative, which requires migrating 400,000 Cox voice customers from CS [circuit-switched] to PS [packet-switched] technology by the end of 2018; the goal is to ultimately migrate customers to an enhanced digital offering and provide a better service to our customers.

The second project is a network-transformation initiative, DOCSIS 3.1. I’m looking at this project from the customer operations perspective. [I’m focused] on how this transformation will impact our sales, field services, customer care and marketing divisions and how we ensure all of these groups are aligned as we move forward with this initiative.

MCN:Do you have any advice for women who are trying to break into this industry?

AS: Be comfortable being uncomfortable. There are so many complexities to technology. Everyone is learning at the same time. If you’re in a business or an area you know really well — say, if you’re in marketing — you know marketing in and out. But when it comes to technology, there are new devices that are coming out, new offerings, new regulations and laws. You have to continually learn and be up to speed … and be able to share [those learnings] with executives or someone on your team to help them understand it from a simplistic point of view.

MCN:What’s your favorite app or gizmo these days?

AS: My favorite app has to be the new Contour app … since I helped launch it. [Laughs.] There’s no other app to think about right now.

This isn’t your father’s “cable” industry anymore. In fact, the word cable is no longer spelled out in the name of the NCTA, which last week rebranded as NCTA-The Internet & Television Association.

But that also means that what used to be true about “cable” operators is no longer true today. Rather than focusing on one new product or service at a time, these new-class service operators have to juggle twelve balls at once in order to keep up with consumer demands and the competition.

To get a fix on what’s important as many people in the tech- and engineering-facing part of the industry converge on Philadelphia for this week’s SCTE/ISBE Cable-Tec Expo, Multichannel News technology editor Jeff Baumgartner and Leslie Ellis, independent analyst and regular MCN contributor, caught up with some of the top engineering minds in the industry to discuss their priorities and to drill down into hot areas such as DOCSIS 3.1, wireless and mobile broadband, next-generation video, network virtualization and the shift to DevOps models.

What follows is an edited, transcript compiled from separate conversations with Kevin Hart, executive vice president and chief technology officer of Cox Communications; Balan Nair, EVP and CTO of Liberty Global; and Sree Kotay, who was recently promoted to CTO and EVP of Comcast Cable.

Related: The Long Goodbye

TECHNOLOGY PRIORITIES

MCN:Let’s level-set the conversation with your technological priorities. What are the top one or two things on your to-do list for Q4 and the rest of the year?

Sree Kotay: Really? Only one or two? One is, we want to continue to lean in to building elegant, differentiated products. We’ve been focused on building better products and services, and that focus has had a profound positive effect. We’ve done a lot of that for TV, and want to do it for other services, across the board. So you’ll see us putting in foundations and building blocks this year, for some big things we’ll do next year.

Two is the customer experience, with a real focus on simplification and self-service. It’s an intense focus on how we engage with our customers — starting from the acquisition funnel, throughout the engagement — whether it’s self-installs or enabling people to resolve issues themselves. It’s an effort we’re internally calling “All Digital.” It’s about giving our customers a powerful blend of self-service, transparency and visibility.

Balan Nair: Right now, it’s mostly operational. If you really want to be a few steps ahead — and all trends indicate this — you have to change. Change is hard, but it’s mandatory. Mark Twain said that the only person who likes change is a wet baby. He’s right.

We’re in the middle of a company-wide transformation that we call “Liberty Go.” It’s about putting the customer front-of-mind, completely. Customer first, front of mind, sides of mind, back of mind. For real — to the point of making the Net Promoter Score (NPS) metric part of performance bonuses.

Kevin Hart: First and foremost is our network transformation plan. We’re putting together a 10-year network transformation plan with the hallmarks being around DOCSIS 3.1, Node+0 architectures — taking fiber deep — and then eventually leveraging Full Duplex [DOCSIS].

No. 2 is our strategy around trying to own the home, better enable the home, better enable the customer experience. Things like our new WiFi offering that we’re launching called Panoramic WiFi. It’s also the work that we’re doing on new Contour, our new video experience, and we’re continuing to make great progress with Cox Homelife, our home security/automation platform.

MCN:Can you elaborate on the foundations and building blocks in the works?

Kotay: On the technology side, it’s obviously all the DOCSIS 3.1 work, looking at broadband and our XB6 [Gigabit gateway], which comes out of a lot of work on RDK-B, where the “B” stands for “broadband.” It’s radically improving visibility as a functionality to move up the value chain. As we think about connected services, that’s one big element. In particular, we’re focused on digital relationships, and evolving to serve the people in the house, not only the household address.

HOT TOPICS IN TECH

MCN:WiFi: The hype machine around “smarter WiFi” and “intelligent WiFi” is pretty loud. What factors go into building a competitively superior WiFi service offering?

Kotay: If you look up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, with self-actualization at the top, and air, water, food and shelter at the bottom — there seems to be a new element in that bottom slice, and it’s WiFi. And the thing is, when people say “WiFi,” they usually mean “end-to-end connectivity:” My device is online, it’s working and I can get to the services I want.

A lot of previous approaches have been focused on slivers of that problem. We fell into that category — well, you’re connected with the CMTS, so you should be good! But the reality is, you have to look at the whole chain. It’s not just the access layer, or the in-home things like speed and reach. It’s the data centers, the back-end services, the care and the end-to-end-ness of it.

For instance, if you have a gaming console connected over WiFi to my gateway, I should know it’s a gaming console, what kind of console it is and whether there are any issues impacting its connectivity, whether on our end or somewhere else in the chain. The Internet is inherently a best-effort service. So we have to think about how to make it more than that — more carrier-grade, in a sense. Like broadcast video quality, in that it really, really works, all the time. It’s not just about any sliver of that chain. It’s the whole end to end. Our industry is uniquely positioned to tackle that challenge, but it takes a significant amount of focus and attention.

So the lesson to us was, let’s stop thinking about it as just WiFi. “WiFi” has to mean all of it.

Nair: People say content is king. My boss likes to say that connectivity is king, and content is Kong. WiFi is obviously a big part of “connectivity.” The world is moving away from single-point WiFi access. We’ll have to look at a mesh network in the home, to achieve a very high quality of service. Step 1, we improve quality at the chip level; 2, improve the antenna(s). Next, embed the software that enables us to optimize things like beam-forming. All of that enables us to do a whole-home, holistic WiFi view.

MCN:Kevin, tell us a bit more about this PanoramicWiFi offering.

Hart: Eighty percent to 90% of the devices connected in the home are enabled by WiFi by our customer base. Enabling a better in-home WiFi experience is top of our list. Panoramic WiFi will have a tagline of, “It’s wall-to-wall fast.”

We’ll be implementing some of the best-in-class WiFi gateway routers and will be leveraging over time the RDK-B component within those routers. We’ll be installing extenders, depending on the size of the room and the [performance] of the signal quality, and focus on ease-of-use.

We’re also going to be accompanying that with some additional focus from our techs in terms of the setup, giving them more set-up time to ensure quality of service and signal strength

We’re launching that in the fourth quarter, in our California market, and then we’ll be taking it more broadly in 2017.

WIRELESS AND GIGABITS

MCN:Multiple choice, with LTE-U and its impact on Wi-Fi capacity: 1.) Battle stations!; 2.) If only that were my biggest wireless concern! 3.) Don’t worry, MuLTEFire will fix everything.

Nair: We have to look at this from two sides — as a WiFi provider, and as a mobile business operator. Which means my answer is a little bit of all three. It’s “battle stations,” because if connectivity is king and it goes away, that’s a real problem. It’s certainly not our only wireless concern. That said, I’m confident that our collective work with MuLTEFire and other standards bodies will help. [Liberty Global and CableLabs announced last week they have joined the MuLTEFire Alliance.]

Hart: I think it’s No. 2. I think there has been a lot of good work with the different organizations, including CableLabs and the Wi-Fi Alliance, to sort out some of the interoperability and co-existing requirements of LTE-U. I’m pretty sure that’s going to work itself out over time.

I think trying to drive that in-home WiFi experience and also continue to build out our WiFi footprint where it makes sense are some of the things that are at the top of our list. And we’re also keeping an eye on some of the advances of 5G from a wireless standpoint. It’s both an opportunity for us and also a potential threat.

MCN:Gigs and competition: Two years ago, we asked (some of you, anyway) about Google Fiber’s threat to expand to a bunch more metros. Now, Google Fiber is being dragged through the mud by the Silicon Valley press, suggesting trouble in Google Fiber-ville. How does (or doesn’t) that impact your Gigabit deployment and/or “fiber deeper” strategies?

Hart: We launched our G1GABLAST product a couple of years ago and have had some really great success with that. Obviously, Google’s not the only one building out fiber. There’s AT&T and many, many others. That specifically hasn’t had that big of an impact. We’ve always been committed to investing in our network, building out ubiquitous speeds and making sure we can deliver at peak hours with minimal congestion.

I mentioned the 10-year network transformation plan: Starting right now and into next year, DOCSIS 3.1 is high on our radar, so we’re making great strides with the testing, deployment and trials of 3.1.

We definitely have a fiber-deep strategy and an N+0 architecture that we’re working towards. We’ll be doing that both to keep up with speed and contention and just to deliver a better quality of service. And taking fiber deep is also key to enable Full Duplex, ultimately, which will come after 3.1 to enable more symmetrical Gig speeds.

Yes, we’ll definitely keep our eyes open on the competitive landscape, but we’re going to keep doing what we’ve been doing for a couple of decades and keep investing in our network.

Nair: We’re big on Gigs. Our bull’s-eye product right now is about 200 Mbps. At a traffic engineering level, though, our peak downstream usage is in the 900 Megabit-per-second range in some markets. 920 Mbps is pretty close to 1 Gig. If you consider a serving area with 2,000 homes, at 50% penetration, times 1 Mbps, guess what? That’s a Gig. Which is pretty much 25 DOCSIS channels. If that goes to 2 Gigs, that’s 50 DOCSIS channels. We have 100. That’s why we spend a lot of time on this.

DEEP DIVE ON DOCSIS

MCN:DOCSIS 3.1: Status report please, for DOCSIS 3.1-based deployments — CPE [customer premises equipment] and CMTS [cable modem termination systems]? Anything notably different from prior DOCSIS upgrades?

Kotay: We’ve launched D3.1 service in Atlanta, Nashville and Chicago, with more coming this year and next. We think our XB6 is the next big vision of connectivity, with DOCSIS 3.1 at the heart of it.

Nair: Short version is, we’re in market and nearly done with CMTS. CPE begins next year.

Hart: We’ve got the 3.1 CMTS platforms up and running. We’ve got probably 50 different types of CPE that are working beautifully with the CMTS. Most of those are 3.0, so we’re testing out the backwards compatibility.

It will be similar in many respects to DOCSIS upgrades in the past, but with the introduction of OFDM [Orthogonal Frequency Division Modulation], there will be a little bit of navigation in terms of the complexity. But we’re feeling pretty good about it and the early results are very solid.

MCN:Advanced Class question: Full-Duplex DOCSIS, or fiber-deeper? Or both?

Hart: It’s both, and from our perspective it’s fiber-deeper first. To enable concurrency on 3.1, we’ll continue to take fiber deeper and then get the full benefit of Full Duplex, depending on the service group size in any given market.

The other component is the remote PHY [initiative] as part of the fiber-deeper strategy and moving those electronics closer to the customer. That provides additional optionality to upgrade to Full Duplex and it also provides more optionality in the future potentially for some wireless [technology] in the remote cabinet if need be.

Kotay: We don’t look at these sorts of technologies as competing with one another as much as we see them as increasingly powerful tools in an increasingly large toolbox. Today, we’re offering Gigabit Pro, a 2-Gig symmetrical fiber-to-the-home service across our footprint, as well as D3.1-powered gigabit service in several markets, with more to come. For green-field development and MDUs [multiple dwelling units], fiber is often the best tool, but DOCSIS 3.1 and the forthcoming Full Duplex provide great flexibility to deliver gigabit speeds using our HFC network.

Nair: It’s not an either-or situation. We like them both. We’ll do fiber — we’re doing fiber — where it makes sense and, as it turns out, it makes sense in lots of places for us. Full Duplex DOCSIS means building for symmetrical bandwidth. Symmetrical DOCSIS is more a question of “when” than “if.” That’s because right now, we’re still delivering much more traffic to homes than from them — it’s asymmetrical. Going to node+0 (amplifiers) aligns us all for Full Duplex DOCSIS. So, whether it’s customer-generated content or the next OTT-like thing, it means we don’t have to swap out that last bit of coax.

MCN:4K, UltraHD, High Dynamic Range/HDR, wide-color gamut, 10-bit interleaving: What of all of this matters to you? How is it best harnessed to improve the life of people watching TV?

Nair: Of that list, HDR is more impactful than just “plain” 4K. However, only 4K televisions have HDR, so they’re kind of inter-linked in that way. We’re launching HDR as something that comes with our 4K service. It came out in an earnings call as “EOS,” but that’s more of an internal project name — it’s cloud-based and will roll out in the U.K. first.

Kotay: We’ve done a lot of testing. You can see our view reflected in our product strategy. Short version is, all those things you listed are good things. There’s just nothing bad about increasing resolution and so on. But the ones we’re most focused on right now from a technical standpoint are HDR and wide color gamut.

We can show you some 1080p HDR video that looks better than 4K non-HDR. Do you remember when you first saw HD, next to a standard definition TV? It was, whoa, that’s much better. HDR is the same. You don’t realize you haven’t seen a blue sky on your TV until you’ve seen it in HDR.

Hart: To me, HEVC [High Efficiency Video Coding], the new video compression, that’s equally important. It’s really being able to move that content around no matter what flavor it is from an efficiency perspective to preserve some of the bandwidth. I think all of those — 4K, HDR, etc. — are going to be important. What the consumers want and what the manufacturers can provide will work itself out based on the content that’s produced. To me, the concern is how to transport all that information in the most efficient way.

BANDWIDTH TRENDS

MCN: It wouldn’t be a CTO conversation without talking bandwidth. What’s the latest in broadband usage trend lines? (E.g., is the growth of the growth still in decline? Are there patterns worth noting?)

Hart: CAGR [compound annual growth rate] on the downstream, in terms of utilization, is about 49% to 50%, and that’s what we continue to model in our investment plan. From an upstream standpoint, we’re probably in the 27%-28% range. We’ll probably see that move into 30% or so. With all of the cloud-hosted solutions and cloud-managed solutions, it puts a lot more pressure on the upstream.

Nair: We’re seeing peak speeds growing — and they’re growing logarithmically. That keeps our attention. The main driver now is still video. With video, we used to have very large bundles, with smaller content libraries. The world is going to smaller bundles, with larger libraries of content.

Kotay: We double our network capacity every 18 to 24 months on average, and that has remained relatively constant. We can realize some efficiencies by doing less over the backbone and driving more regionalization, but as long as consumers’ demand for rich, powerful online and video experiences continues to grow, and the quality of those experiences continues to improve, we know we need to stay one step ahead of what’s next.

MCN:At what point is entertainment video not the bulkiest passenger on broadband? What other bandwidth-insatiable things on the horizon have your full attention?

Hart: We’ve always been a leader with business services; Cox Business is going to hit the $2 billion revenue mark this year. I think there will be some additional applications and managed services, hosted solutions that will start to eat a lot of bandwidth but deliver a lot of value.

Maybe perhaps longer-term, there’s virtual and augmented reality — those could be a huge driver if they take off.

Kotay: I think the Internet is experiencing a lot more social video as a form of communication. This includes things like Facebook Live, Periscope, Vine, quick clips. I think we’re still pretty far from video not being the bulkiest thing we carry, but we are seeing a rise in other forms. The good news is that compression improvements can help offset that.

Other things we’re seeing, with the preponderance of smartphones and devices, are more firmware updates. They’re bursty, but they can be materially significant. When a new game launches, that can be a big, bursty thing. Video is more consistent. It’s bulkier, yes, but more consistent and predictable.

So if you look at downloads, entertainment video will be a huge chunk for the next few years. However, as far as peak demand, we’ll likely see a continued rise in firmware updates and games — things happening in the background.

MCN:What’s the situation around the possibility of widening the spectrum above 1.2 GHz? Is it time to raise the roof around here?

Hart: I think in the near-term we’re in good shape without having to widen. It’s something we’re always evaluating and reviewing. If you’re going to be making some enhancements to the network, it makes good sense to try to future-proof it, but probably not here in the near term on that particular component.

MCN:Widening the upstream path: How do you think through when it’s time to do so? What’s the situation now?

Hart: The good news is that a fiber deep strategy helps to address some of the upstream bandwidth by decreasing the service group size. That’s going to buy us a little more runway than we had thought when considering mid-splits and high-splits options.

For now, we’re in pretty good shape with our strategy. With the mid-split maneuver, you’ve got a massive CPE implication; that’s where a ton of costs could be. I think we’re in pretty good shape today with our N+O strategy.

IN THE HOME

MCN:RDK, the Reference Design Kit, has a new profile: Broadband. What should people know about it?

Nair: The RDK started with video. The RDK is expanding, so it got segmented to “RDK-V.” The next one is focused on broadband, which is why you hear about “RDKB.” It’s a little tricky because the letters “V” and “B” sound very similar when spoken!

Regardless, RDK-V is how we got to a user experience that satisfies, on many levels. Comcast started it with X1. We’re onboard, so is Cox, Shaw [Communications] and a growing global footprint. RDK, no matter the letter behind it, is the for-real open source platform behind the platform.

RDK-B reinforces connectivity being king. Everything we deploy will be RDK.

Hart: I think RDK-B has a lot of the same promise [as RDK’s video profile] in terms of speed to market, good economics in terms of the open source and keeping it open to multiple vendors.

The other piece is the functionality and capability to do remote installation and monitoring and repairs, and some of the tools … will be a differentiator. And with the new tools coming out, ease of use is another big benefit of RDK-B.

Kotay: It’s this — broadband is a two-way network, but as an industry we’ve been relatively blind to the connectivity in the home. The feature sets for routers and broadband devices have been relatively static for 10, 15 years.

It’s analogous to video services, in a way: It used to be all about channels. Channels are still important, but there’s a lot more to it. Same thing for broadband: It used to be all about speed. Speed will continue to be important, but it becomes more than just that.

Things like RDK-B will be central to be able to understanding what’s going on, and responding to that understanding. Whole-home WiFi is a good example: It’s about putting a lot more visibility and tools into the hands of our customers.

MCN:Kevin, give us an update on where Cox is with the RDK video profile [Cox’s new Contour platform uses the RDK and syndicates Comcast’s X1 platform]. Any shareable Net Promoter Score or other metrics or anecdotes? In NPS parlance: Would you recommend it to a friend?

Hart: It’s been a huge success for us. We’re, of course, partnered with Tony [Werner, president, technology and product at Comcast] and his team. But it’s also what we’ve done to enable it for ourselves. We probably did two to three times the amount of integration work on this.

It’s definitely been a home run. In the first couple of months, we’ve already [surpassed] 400,000 subscribers. We’re moving quite rapidly in terms of our deployment relevant to our initial plans and expectations. And the customer feedback has been off the charts. The NPS is multiples in terms of some of the other legacy platforms that we have.

The ease-of-use has had a nice halo effect, much like G1GABLAST had for our Internet service. Within just a few months, we’ve been able to achieve the same overall level of performance of the platform around tuning, etc., that it took Comcast and many others many years to achieve. We get some of the benefits of their learnings, but we’ve been able to do that within our ecosystem.

MCN:What’s your approach to devices — those you provide and those customers bring and attach to you?

Kotay: If you went back four, five years — that’s when we started looking at having to build software and apps as more of an opportunity than a burden. Over the past two or three years, we’ve had the same shift with hardware. In our industry it used to be, oh, we have to provide a box, to do conditional access and some navigation, and we have to provide a cable modem, to do HSD [high-speed data].

It reminds me of [astronaut] Alan Shepard, when he was sitting in the spaceship, ready to take off, and was asked what he was thinking. He said he was thinking about “the fact that every part of this ship was built by the lowest bidder.”

The funny part was, while we were thinking that way, a lot of innovative companies were devoting a lot of effort to getting devices into the living room where we already had a foothold. I think it made all of us sit up and say: What if it’s not just about having product for an ISP or a cable provider? What if it’s about making the best product, period?

In the last couple of years, we’ve gotten a lot of religion about that and we’re seeing the rewards, in terms of customer satisfaction and retention with products like X1 and our X1 voice remote. Over the next year, you’ll see us continuing along that path with products like our Xi5 wireless set-top box and XB6 home gateway. The goal is simple: make products people love.

OUTSIDE OF THE HOME

MCN:How do you answer this question when your bosses ask it: What does 5G mean to us?

Nair: It means highly distributed, small cells with a mix of licensed and unlicensed spectrum. In some ways, it’s a credible threat. In other ways, it’s an opportunity. It’s an opportunity because it’s coming out of mobile and all those small cells will need backhaul. We do backhaul. Ultimately, it’s a hype bubble at the moment — we think it’s more of a 2020 thing.

Hart: As you know, the majority of wireless traffic is facilitated by wireline, so there’s a lot of backhaul opportunities for us to partner with our carrier customers. As that becomes more prevalent and that becomes more pervasive, they’re going to need to leverage networks like ours and others in the MSO community.

As it related to leveraging it as a last couple of hundred of feet fixed wireless methodology, we’ll have the same opportunity to take advantage of that, particularly with some of the remote PHY components. We could potentially leverage some of that infrastructure with strand-mounted small cells as well.

There’s definitely a place for 5G and we think it’s both an opportunity that can help with the backhaul but also even potentially leverage ourselves. And we feel that the product that we already deliver is very competitive and will continue to stay ahead of the performance from a throughput and speed and connectivity standpoint.

MCN:Enterprise services: What’s the hot seller to commercial businesses right now? What does it take to go after the large enterprise crowd — to roll up the sleeves against Verizon and AT&T and the like?

Hart: We still have plenty of opportunity within the small-to-medium businesses within our footprint, so we’re continuing to stay focused there. Our IP Centrex hosted voice solutions are selling great right now. We’ve also got great opportunity with schools, government, our hospitality network and convention centers, and we’re looking to go a bit further upmarket over time. In many cases, there are probably opportunities to partner with other MSOs, because many of those larger enterprises span multiple geographies, sometimes not always directly within our footprint.

Kotay: Business services is a major and growing segment for us, and a focus for a lot of really cool innovation on the product side. As just one example that I’m excited about, we’ve been putting a lot of effort behind cloud enablement. Mid-market and enterprise customers, in particular, need bandwidth and solutions engineered to enable their move to cloud services.

Earlier this year, Comcast Business announced that it is providing businesses with direct connectivity to Amazon Web Services, which, as we all know, is one of the leading providers of cloud services in the world. As that group continues to move upstream and serve large, national enterprises with dispersed office locations and data centers, you’ll continue to see them make more news with major cloud providers.

Nair: It depends on the size of the business. In general, small and medium businesses are really interested in a high-quality, dedicated IP interface, in the range of 500 Megabits per second to a Gig. It goes on from there to hosted voice, layer 3 VPN, and eventually to an SDN-type solution.

IN THE CLOUD

MCN:What are the important elements in building a video cloud — dos and don’ts? Where is each of your respective companies, with respect to a cloud-based video offering?

Nair: I’ll go with “do” rather than ”don’t.” Do pick the right vendor. Two, make sure the vendor isn’t bullshitting you. Third, do make sure the vendor delivers.

Our path to cloud-DVR started with putting the navigation in the cloud. Then we put VOD in the cloud. Third is putting DVR in the cloud. That’s the progression that’s worked for us.

MCN:Kevin, you have options for the new Contour. Any plans underway to enable a cloud DVR service?

Hart: It’s on our product roadmap for next year. That being said, there’s been some mixed results in terms of customer uptake on the platform. Some of the things we’re working our way through are the content and the copyright components with some of the content providers. We’re still trying to work some of those models out.

The other piece is the economics. Setting up our own specific cloud DVR solution, the economics would be a little steep. We’re looking at a couple of different partners to provide some flexibility there. Some of the economic models from Cisco [Systems] and some other providers are becoming a little bit more nimble, agile and affordable and more “by the drink,” if you will. I think there will be some advances … that will allow us to make more progress on it. We’re evaluating it.

MCN:Where are you with virtualization, generally or specifically?

Kotay: I think virtualization has gotten fetishized. It’s not an answer to all problems. It’s a critical tool in the toolbox, yes. But, for example, some of the stuff we’re doing around containers isn’t virtualized, because they don’t need to be. There’s no elasticity in that workload, so, the less layers and complexity, the better.

Virtualization is important, and we need it in some areas, but it’s not the only tool. Of course, in some areas, virtualization technologies can deliver powerful benefits in terms of network performance and reliability. We’ve been pushing more programmability into the network for years, and have seen the benefit of that approach.

Hart: We are making a lot of progress on our virtualization plan, virtualizing from a hardware and software perspective and software-as-a-service and becoming much more nimble in terms of the things we do on a cloud-based way in which we leverage technology and leverage our products and services.

Nair: At a core level, we’re looking at SDN [software-defined networking] and NFV [network functions virtualization]. Both have significant and practical benefits. Benefits like providing dynamic bandwidth: clearly important. What comes with that tends to be economic and efficiency gains. That said, we do understand the challenges virtualization poses to our key vendors.

MCN:DevOps — What is it, why does it matter, and to what extent are your companies pursuing it?

Hart: We were working some DevOps opportunities last year, but we kind of went all-in earlier this year. We did a bit of an organizational realignment to create a true DevOps team that combined all of the development and IT operations team, and co-located a lot of our business stakeholders.

The speed-to-market, the learning, the quality, the feedback we’re getting from our stakeholders has exceeded my expectations in terms of the way our teams have embraced it and what they’ve learned from their counterparts that are now part of their same team members, and just the pace and scale and quality of what we’re delivering around multiple platforms. I actually thought there would be a bit more of a resistance, culturally, from the teams, but it’s been embraced.

We’re extending it not just to our traditional technology DevOps model, but we’ve had some major data center moves, so we’re applying DevOps methodologies to physical moves as opposed to just some of the virtual and technology development and making it more of a mindset in how we do business.

Kotay: We’re huge on it. There are two or three reasons why it matters. The biggest is, it creates the right culture of autonomy and accountability. Put another way, the people who cause the pain have to deal with the pain!

The rate of change is only increasing, so the whole idea of sequential handoffs — formally document your requirements, formally hand them off to the design group, which hands off to the engineering group, which does the test cases and hands it off to QA, then to integration and test, then to deployment, then to support — there was a time and a place when that made sense. There are still cases where it makes sense, actually — hardware work is still very much a “waterfall.”

But being there on the DevOps side, supporting the triage elements that come with RDK-B, and being deeply involved all the way through product and process … DevOps still blows my mind. It changes everything, with everything that means. We wouldn’t be where we are without it.

Nair: DevOps matters if you’ve adopted an agile software methodology, and you’re building a lot of your own code. In other words, if you’ve decided to own your stuff. If you choose to do your own build framework and you’re writing code — because you want transparency and control of whatever your situation is — then the model works.

CLOSING QUESTION

MCN:What disruptors or potential disruptors are on your radar right now?

Hart: For the disruptor component, it’s about keeping our eye around 5G in the fixed wireless space and how do we capitalize on that emerging technology, particularly around MDUs and commercial businesses?

It’s not very glamorous, but regarding special projects, it’s about working on process excellence and customer experience and putting the right set of tools and customer self-care and navigational flows within our call center and field services. It’s a lot of process work, but we’ve got to codify that within some of our technology tools. It can help to distinguish ourselves and continue to separate from some competitors.

Kotay: I’ll take “potential disruptors,” in the context of the Internet of Things. I find it interesting that at this point in 2016, IoT [the Internet of things] still has so much headroom to grow. And that growth, when it accelerates, will create interesting dynamics.

If you think about the connectivity axis and look at power consumption, bandwidth and range, there’s an interesting gap. For lack of a better term, call it the narrowband space, for instance. It creates an environment for things with aren’t hard on batteries and very long range, in terms of miles. Their bandwidth requirements are medium at best, like for M2M [machine-to-machine communications]. I don’t know if it’s disruptive, but it feels like there’s something interesting there.

Another I’m still constantly watching are display surfaces. They’re also ripe for disruption, more in the five-to-eight-year horizon. I don’t know if it’s flexible displays or cheaper displays, but it feels like we’ll have a lot more screens in our lives, and not just mobile. Fixed screens too.

Nair: I’ll take disruptors. Primarily, disruptors really are those competitors who aren’t interested in profitability — for five-plus years. That’s a long time.

Home entertainment trade organization DEG: The Digital Entertainment Group has named Mike Dunn, president of 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, as its new chairman for the 2016-17 fiscal year.

Dunn previously served as vice chair for DEG. The group named Matt Strauss, executive vice president and GM of video services for Comcast Cable, to take over Dunn’s prior role.

Sofia Chang, EVP of worldwide digital distribution and home entertainment for HBO, will continue to serve as DEG’s CFO, while Mike Fasulo, president and COO of Sony Electronics, will continue to serve as DEG’s secretary.

Former chair Ron Sanders, president of Warner Bros. Worldwide Home Entertainment Distribution, will serve in the position of Ex-Officio.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.

READ MORE: Full INTX coverage.

BOSTON – The growth of media consumption on personal devices, the desire to add programming without incurring capital and content costs and aspirations to reach viewers in growing multicultural populations came together at a breakfast session at INTX on Wednesday.

A programmer-and-distributor tandem talked up the Vemox over-the-top product Olympusat is pushing that enables pay-TV providers to add live and on-demand Spanish-language programming. Jaime Montes, director of content acquisition and digital TV services at Consolidated Communications, a telco (formerly known as SureWest) with a digital-TV product, said it embraced Vemox as part of an effort to add programming in bulk without having to do many separate linear launches. He said Consolidated hopes to have a full OTT programming array – a la Sling TV – by the third quarter of the year, though it won’t replace the need for traditional TV via the set-top box for at least a decade. “It’s a complement to the linear package that we have out there.”

Olympusat Holdings CEO Tom Mohler said IP delivery of packages like Vemox gives distributors flexibility in packaging and the ability to reach mobile devices.

Christian Martinez, head of U.S. multicultural sales for Facebook, got the session started by observing that video consumption “has gone to our mobile phones.” That in turn has changed storytelling, requiring that some stories be told quickly, to audiences that are relatively young and accustomed to dealing with more than one screen device at a time. “Let’s break the mold” in terms of reaching multicultural audiences, he said.

Javier Garcia, senior vice president and general manager of multicultural services at Comcast Cable, said his business area is a key center of growth at the company. “We had the best year in multicultural ever at the company,” he said. His team is responsible for introducing new products and features at a rapid clip, he said. In addition to video tweaks – such as launching TV Japan on video on demand – those products target multicultural customers for voice services and home security, he said. A native of Colombia, Garcia said home security was a concern for his family when moving from Bogota to homes in the United States, based on their experience of living in a dangerous place.

Other speakers at the event emphasized the need to offer the right content to targeted audiences. TV One vice president of marketing & partnerships LaTanya Butler, for example, said African-American audiences are eager consumers, but expect programming to stay “true to your culture.” David Hanono, vice president of digital development at BBC Worldwide Latin America and U.S. Hispanic, said he has found that quality programming in the documentary, nature and scripted realms from the BBC translates well from “British English” into other languages. “There is tons of appetite for scripted content,” he added, an observation that Mohler of Olympusat echoed.

Condista partner Jorge Fiterre; Patrick Rivet, head of worldwide distribution at Thema-Alterna TV; and Mark Walton, president of sales and marketing at One Caribbean Television, also shared in the conversations at the session, which was produced by Multichannel News. Walton even brought a moko jumbie action figure, representing the stilt dancers that are a brightly colored fixture at carnivals in the Caribbean. Not all consumer groups – including African-American ones – are homogeneous, he said.

Bucking a trend amplified by a small but growing cord-cutting trend and the popularity of over-the-top video options, Comcast just came off a first quarter in which the MSO added 53,000 subscribers, its best first-quarter video result in nine years.

While a portion of the credit goes to X1, Comcast’s Internet protocol-capable next-generation video offering, those results are due to a confluence of efforts and initiatives that span not just the core product but also areas such as improved customer care, according to Matt Strauss, Comcast Cable’s executive vice president and general manager, video services.

Multichannel News technology editor and Next TV editor Jeff Baumgartner recently caught up with Strauss to discuss Comcast’s new video products and strategies involving X1, TV Everywhere, its new IP-delivered “Stream” product, and future 4K plans.

Editor's Note: An expanded version of this interview will appear in Multichannel News’s show dailies at this week’s INTX show in Boston.

MCN:As you look at the second half of the year, what are your top priorities?

Matt Strauss: We’re really focused first and foremost on continuing to execute against the deployment of X1. We’re seeing a lot of very positive benefits from X1, both on the churn and on the increased consumption side. We’re now at about 35% penetrated, and it’s even higher if you just look at triple-play subs — about 50% of our triple-play subscribers now have X1.

What goes hand in hand with that is that we also want to finish out the deployment of our cloud infrastructure. We’ve been deploying cloud across our footprint — both cloud streaming and cloud DVR — and we are very close to getting 100% deployment. We want to finish that up by the middle to end of this year.

Finally, we want to continue the penetration and usage of our products and services. We’ve got a very ambitious deployment for our new consolidated Xfinity app. With the upcoming Olympics [in Rio] we want to use that as an opportunity to shine a light on this new application, which we think is a tremendous value to our customers.

Related:INTX 2016: Comcast's Roberts Says No Plans to Take Pay TV Over-the-Top

MCN:With respect to the pay TV momentum, how much credit does X1 get, even as you continue to improve other areas like customer care and customer experience?

MS: It certainly is contributing. When you look at X1, we’re seeing improvements in churn. X1 customers are also consuming more video. They also have a higher attachment rate to DVRs and typically they take additional outlets in their home. There’s no doubt that X1 is contributing, but I don’t know if there’s any one silver bullet.

When it comes to growing the video business, it’s really a combination of several factors and investments that we’ve been making over the past few years, in how we’ve been improving our infrastructure, moving more to IP.

MCN:What kind of usage patterns are you seeing with the Xfinity TV app? Is the big challenge getting the message out to customers so they understand the app’s full capability?

MS: I’d almost characterize it as we’re in a moment in time because we have the Xfinity TV in-home app and we have our Xfinity TV Go app. We are in the process of consolidating those into just one app, which will be the Xfinity TV app. This unification … will provide this unprecedented access to content both in the home and out of the home. And I think those lines are going to continue to get more and more blurred.

When you look at the usage of our app in general, we have about 42% penetration of our mobile app among our double-play customers on a monthly basis. On a quarterly basis, it’s almost 60% who are using one of our apps, and that’s up about 16% year-over-year.

Related:CEO Roberts: Comcast, X1 Ready for Olympics

MCN:What’s next for Comcast with respect to 4K? You’ve got the app for Samsung TVs but we’ve seen some recent reports that you’ll really be focusing more on a strategy that puts an emphasis on High Dynamic Range (HDR)?

MS: While there’s hyper-attention on 4K, when we look at the total video experience, we think 4K is part of the offering. But HDR, which is not necessarily getting the same amount of attention, is in many ways more immersive and, we think, impactful.

Instead of deploying maybe a half-baked solution, which we’re starting to see a little bit of in the market, we thought it was more prudent to deliver the complete experience … and that’s what’s being developed with our Xi6 box, which we’ll be testing this year, but it’s going to really be deployed next year.

MCN:The video market continues to be abuzz about skinny TV bundles. Comcast has been going after that segment with the Stream TV product in some select markets. What have you learned so far, and what’s next on the rollout plan?

MS: In many ways X1, we think, is satisfying the demand for how many of us watch television. The average person watches about 130 hours of video every month.

But there are changes in how other segments are consuming video. When we look at skinny bundles, we believe that they are in some ways a manifestation of the economy as anything else. It’s rare that you hear someone say that they want fewer choices. What’s more likely is that you might hear someone say they want to pay less.

We have been experimenting with skinny bundles and experimenting with ensuring we’re getting the right product to the right customer at the right time in their life, whether that’s Internet Plus or the Xfinity On Campus product, or Stream.

While Stream is, at the moment, comprised of a skinny bundle, the strategies behind Stream are much more around how we’re going to transform the overall end-to-end customer experience, and Stream is just one example of how we are expanding into that terrain.

RELATED:Comcast Defends MFNs in FCC Video Access Inquiry | Comcast, EA to End X1 Gaming Trial

Comcast Cable has promoted several senior vice presidents across many areas of the company, including customer experience, consumer services, technology and product, enterprise and business services, advanced advertising,  and sales and marketing

Consumer Services Group

-Javier Garcia, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Multicultural Services

Javier directs, designs, and implements Comcast’s multicultural services vision and strategy across all Xfinity products. Since joining Comcast in late 2014, Javier and his team worked closely with the product team to lead the company’s bicultural transformation initiatives, including the launch of the X1 bicultural experience, a first of its kind TV viewing experience that gives bicultural families more choices in how they consume TV and movies in the home.  Javier holds an MBA from The Wharton School of Business, an MA in International Affairs from the University of Pennsylvania and a BS in Civil Engineering from Universidad de Los Andes (Colombia).

Customer Experience

-Piers Lingle, Senior Vice President, Customer Experience

In this role, Piers leads efforts to deliver next generation customer experience options for Comcast’s customers.  Since 2010, Piers has been a key leader in product development of Xfinity video products, in particular the X1 Platform. In 2015, he moved from the product group with Charlie Herrin to take on the challenge of transforming Comcast’s support and experience model by leveraging the same product approach he used in his previous role. Piers graduated cum laude from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a BA in Political Science. 

Technology and Product

-Ruth Dawson, Senior Vice President, Comcast Innovation Labs, and General Manager of Comcast Silicon Valley

In this leadership role, Ruth ensures Comcast stays at the forefront of technology and product trends that are critical to our business. Ruth has led the Silicon Valley campus since 2014, and along with her product team, delivered key product innovations such as the X1 Sports App, and multiple X1 third party applications. She is a Betsy Magness Leadership Institute Fellow who also attended the Wharton Executive Leadership Development Program.

-Tom Loretan, Senior Vice President and Executive Creative Director, User Experience and Product Design

Tom leads interface, graphic, package, industrial, and product design across all Xfinity customer experiences. Tom holds several Comcast patents and he and his team were honored by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences with a Creative Arts Emmy in 2014 for outstanding achievement in user experience, and visual design for Xfinity X1. Tom was born in New York and studied Graphic Design and Computer Graphics at Massachusetts College of Art and Rhode Island School of Design.

-Elad Nafshi, Senior Vice President, Next Generation Access Networks

Elad leads one of Comcast’s largest initiatives – the deployment of the company’s all digital migrations – and has been instrumental in the launch of Comcast’s IP-based cable services such as cloud DVR, Stream TV and Xfinity On Campus. His team also leads other initiatives centered on ensuring that Comcast’s network capacity expands and evolves to keep pace with the next generation of hyper-connected devices, homes and experiences. He graduated from The Buchmann School of Law at Tel Aviv University in Israel with a focus on corporate law. He also holds a master’s in business from the William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Rochester in New York, where he specialized in finance and electronic commerce.  

-Noam Raffaelli, Senior Vice President, IP and Communications Services

In this role, he leads architecture, development, and operations of high-speed data, WiFi, voice and video communications, consumer email. Noam is a graduate of the Center for Computing and Information Systems, part of the Israeli Defense Forces, and holds an MS in Finance from the London City University.

-Fraser Stirling, Senior Vice President, Hardware Development

Fraser leads the product management and development of all of Comcast’s devices with the mission of improving new product service velocity, product differentiation, and cost management. Since joining Comcast in 2014, Fraser has transformed our design standards, putting focus on the industrial and technical design, and helping consumers see the product as more than just another piece of technology in the home. He and his team launched the first voice-enabled remote control, and he was instrumental in developing the Gigabit Home Gateway and the next generation of X1 devices. Fraser received his HND in Music Technology and Electronics from Glasgow Caledonian University in the United Kingdom.   

Engineering and Platform Services

-Rob Holmes, Senior Vice President, Advanced Advertising

In this role, he leads Comcast’s cross-company advanced advertising efforts to deliver multi-screen, interoperable technologies that will better serve the entire TV ecosystem and elevate television advertising accountability and efficiency at scale.  His team is responsible for the strategic development and deployment of advanced advertising platforms, including data-enabled advertising, enhanced targeting and dynamic ad insertion, and innovative tools that provide a streamlined, automated process for buyers and sellers.  Rob received his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar, and his BA from Princeton University.

Enterprise Business Intelligence

-Marc Sirota, Senior Vice President, Applied Analytics

Marc joined the Enterprise Business Intelligence (EBI) organization in 2013 following 13 years of experience at Comcast in both field and headquarter roles. Over the past few years, Marc has played an integral role in building and executing the EBI roadmap. In this role, he will continue to lead the Applied Analytics team to promote cross-footprint adoption of data-driven and analytics-focused solutions to inform decision-making and strategic planning.  Marc attended Bloomsburg University, where he received his BS in Accounting.

Business Development

-Ebony Lee, Senior Vice President, Growth Development

Ebony provides business strategy, planning, and portfolio management for Comcast’s growth initiatives and strategic partnerships. In his role, Ebony works with internal and external partners to identify and evaluate new business ventures that can diversify and grow the business.  Ebony joined Comcast in 2008 and was a founding team member of Comcast’s next generation X1 platform. She also handled business affairs for the innovation technology joint venture between Comcast and Verizon Wireless. Ebony holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BS in Commerce from the University of Virginia. 

Sales and Marketing

-Luci Rainey, Senior Vice President, Consumer Marketing

In this role, Luci is responsible for driving growth of Xfinity products across all customer segments with a focus on marketing across the entire customer lifecycle, including acquisition, customer development, and loyalty & retention. As a leader she has a passion for talent development and marketing education.  She is involved in adjunct lecturing on marketing at Boston College, as well as various conferences. Luci holds a BA in journalism from Indiana University Bloomington. 

Comcast Business

-Todd Goodbinder, Senior Vice President, Comcast Business SMB Sales

In this role, Todd will be responsible for all SMB field sales, including both inside and outside direct sales channels, and partner closely with local and regional teams to continue to build Comcast’s growing SMB segment. Most recently, he has evolved our inbound business sales efforts to include active outside sales and retention, contributing significantly to SMB growth and customer churn reduction. Todd went to the University of Kansas where he received his BS in Business Administration and Accounting.

Comcast said it has promoted Lynn Charytan to executive vice president and general counsel of Comcast Cable, where she will oversee the legal affairs of the operator and its technologies, products and services.

Charytan, formerly SVP of legal regulatory affairs and senior deputy general counsel for Comcast Corp., will also continue to oversee regulatory compliance with the NBCUniversal transaction requirements. She reports to Comcast Cable CEO Neil Smit, with a dotted line reporting relationship to David Cohen, Comcast Corp.’s senior executive vice president, in connection with her continuing regulatory oversight responsibilities.

She will be based at Comcast’s headquarters in Philadelphia and will also work at the company’s office in Washington, DC.

Charytan joined Comcast in 2010 after 17 years at WilmerHale in Washington, DC, where she served as the chair of its Communications, Privacy and Internet Law Practice Group.  During her tenure at the firm, she counseled clients in all sectors of the communications industry on law matters pertaining to telecommunications, privacy, security, and the Internet. Prior to joining WilmerHale in 1993, Charytan spent two years as in-house counsel to The Washington Post.  She also clerked for Judge Stanley Sporkin on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. 

Charytan was one of 13 execs named to the Multichannel News 2015 class of Wonder Women.

“Lynn’s success in partnering with many of our business teams, her broad and deep experience as inside corporate counsel for Comcast, combined with her decades of work on regulatory matters as outside counsel in the communications and entertainment industries, makes her the ideal leader to assume this role,” Smit said, in a statement.

 “Lynn has done an outstanding job leading our company’s legal regulatory affairs function as well as assisting Comcast Cable on many business activities,” Cohen added. “She is highly respected throughout our company and in the cable and telecommunications industries, and it gives me great pride to see her continue her rapid career growth at Comcast.”

Comcast and Univision have put a deal in the back of the distribution net for the U.S. Spanish-language media leader’s cable sports network.

Beginning in October, Comcast will make Univision Deportes Network available to a wide swath of its customer base through carriage on its Digital Preferred package and Xfinity Latino levels of service.

With the long-term contract, financial terms of which were not disclosed, Univision Deportes Network will add upward of 12 million Xfinity customers and boost its subscriber base past the 52 million mark. When the futbol-centric UDN bows next month on Comcast systems, the service, which kicked off in 2012, will have positions with all 10 of the nation’s top distributors.

A spokesman for Comcast, whose NBCUniversal programming arm’s Telemundo and mun2 are competitors to Univision’s varied services, said negotiations have been taking place over the past year and the patties finally reached terms that makes sense for its subscribers.

Comcast’s Hispanic distribution platform delivers more than 60 Latino networks in both Spanish and English to Xfinity TV customers. UDN will be available in standard-definition and Comcast’s largest Hispanic markets, which include New York, Miami, Houston, Chicago, San Francisco, Sacramento, Albuquerque, Fresno, Denver and El Paso, will begin receiving the channel in high-definition by year-end.

Although the launch comes after the 2014 World Cup – UDN became Univision’s de facto service for the FIFA competition during the months of June and July – the sports service still serves up an array of futbol fare, topped by action from Mexico’s top circuit, Liga MX.

Additionally, UDN, which ranks as the top Spanish-language cable sports network in primetime and total-day, presents Mexican national soccer team matches, as well as action from Major League Soccer, the Copa MX and CONCACAF Champions League circuits. It also covers Formula 1 racing and boxing, while keeping tabs on the NFL, NBA and MLB.

“Univision Deportes Network offers terrific programming and will be a great addition to our growing lineup of networks for Hispanic customers,” said Marcien Jenckes, executive vice president, consumer services at Comcast Cable.  “Comcast is already the nation’s largest provider of Latino packages and we’re excited to add UDN’s wide range of sports programming for our Xfinity TV customers."

“We are pleased to expand the reach of UDN and our popular sports content through this deal with Comcast,” said Juan Carlos Rodriguez, president of sports, Univision Communications. “This partnership speaks to the growing influence of Hispanics and underscores Univision’s position as the gateway to a growing and increasingly influential consumer base.”