NCTC Founding President Mike Pandzik Dies

NCTC founder Mike Pandzik in Cable Center Oral History
NCTC founder Mike Pandzik in a 1999 oral history video produced for The Cable Center. (Image credit: Barco Library/The Cable Center)

Mike Pandzik, 77, former head of the National Content & Technology Cooperative (NCTC), has died, according to that group’s current CEO.

“I wanted to reach out to the NCTC member community and let you know we lost an incredible force this week. Mike Pandzik, former CEO of NCTC, passed away,” NCTC CEO Lou Borelli said. “Mike started in the early days of the cable industry and was the founding CEO of NCTC and served for the next 20 years.” 

“Mike Pandzik was a great leader in our industry, and his vision led to the creation of NCTC, which stands strong today for ACA Connects members,” said former ACA Connects president and CEO Matt Polka. “But more than that, Mike was a warm and welcoming friend to me and ACA Connects in our earliest days and every day thereafter, and I will always be grateful to him.”

Pandzik retired in 2005 from the group he launched from his living room office.

Recruited by the Mid-America Cable TV Association, Pandzik helped launch NCTC, then called the National Cable Television Cooperative, in 1984. NCTC represented about a dozen cable companies  with fewer than 110,000 subs at the time.

NCTC represents smaller operators in joint negotiations with programmers to help give them more bargaining power.

After service in the Navy, Pandzik started his career in TV in 1966 as a cameraman for the Nebraska Public Television. After graduate school, he transitioned to the cable side at Sunflower Cablevision in Lawrence, Kan.

He joined HBO in 1978 to head up sales and marketing in Kansas City, then moved to New York to head up new business development before being lured back to Kansas City and NCTC. ■

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.