The National Show opening session Sunday was well attended and well intended, featuring author Malcom Gladwell as the moderator and cable pioneers Bob Miron, Geraldine Laybourne, John Hendricks and Brian Lamb as panelists. The session was interesting enough although too long, with scattered anecdotes of how early cable nets got started and some insights into what leads to success. Miron, the chairman of Advance/Newhouse Communications, talked about some of the crazier ideas he’d heard as an operator — an all-documentary network (Discovery), a 24-hour news channel (CNN). Another wanted to broadcast the House and Senate — what dumber idea could you come up with? (C-SPAN). You listen. If you’re truly entreprenuerial, you support it.” Hendricks, the man with that documentary network notion, warned of letting technology get in the way. Broadcasters were too taken with the the way their nets were distributed instead of looking at their primary business as content.Several of them referred to a seminal moment for cable in the early ’70s when a copyright agreement between studios, broadcasters and operators allowed distance signals to be unfrozen and set off a wave of creativity and technological advances. A little ironic given some comments later at the post-session press Q&A about the need to control copyright. Laybourne, the founder of Oxygen, spoke of the copyright issues swirling about the industry now, particularly with Cablevision’s network DVR: “We always expect to be paid. Honestly, I think the lawyers at all of our companies are looking at it it and trying to figuire out a strategy.” Hendricks put it a little differently: “We firmly believe if the consumer’s directing controlf of their media, it’s something they have the right to do.” But, he is “very concerned” about third-parties “using and manipulating” content out of context or in ways that Discovery didn’t intend. Multichannel News has more on the network DVR.
One other issue: I asked about how phone company competition could be changing dyanamics, bringing up the Disney-Verizon announcement without specifics. Laybourne responded: “Somebody who’s launching a product with Verizon is launching because they haven’t been able to build a broad coalition.” Looking at it a little differently, Disney-ABC’s deal with Verizon gives it a launch pad that can be used to draw other distributors in.
You can download the audio for the hour-plus opening session here
Or you can stream it here … click on the arrow:
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