While many 2012 Next Wave leaders are rising
stars within their companies, bound one day for
top executive spots, Comcast’s Marcien Jenckes
has, in many ways, already arrived. As the head
of video services at the nation’s largest multichannel
provider, he currently has oversight
over operations that produced $19.6 billion in
revenue for the MSO in 2011.
Jenckes’ appearance on this year’s list, however,
highlights his emergence as an industry-wide
leader in developing and deploying next-generation
video products that are crucial not only for
Comcast’s future, but for a wide array of outside
programmers and broadcasters.
The most obvious
example of
those products is
Comcast’s TV Everywhere
efforts.
Currently the
MSO offers more
than 125,000
titles on demand
for its VOD,
online and iPad
applications and
is aggressively
rolling out new IP
and cloud-based
services, including
its recently
deployed X1 platform. That will both expand the
amount of content available on a multitude of
devices and radically improve the way consumers
can access and experience that content with
new apps and interactive applications.
In the short term, those efforts have helped
slow the amount of subscribers Comcast has
lost through the last six quarters, making it
the only MSO to see that kind of improvement.
“We have shown a significant reduction in sub
losses and expect to be in a position where the
company can start growing from a video sub
perspective again,” Jenckes says.
But many of the new services Comcast is
deploying also mark a fundamental transformation
of the cable business. “I always like to say,
we are moving from a construction company to
a software company,” which will use new IP and
software-based services to rapidly deploy new
offerings and technologies, Jenckes says.
To speed that transition, Jenckes is himself one
of a new breed of cable industry leaders hired
from the online world. He arrived at Comcast in
November 2010, after a variety of jobs at AOL
and a stint as CEO of online syndication company
Grab Networks. “Neil [Smit, president and CEO
of Comcast Cable and executive VP of Comcast
Corp.] has made a big effort to bring in talent
from outside the cable industry to help change
the way we think,” Jenckes says.
