Comcast CEO Brian Roberts didn’t show up for his keynote interview, but Steve Burke, president of COO, did. Some notes from his interview:
Internet is not built for unicasting. But we’ll do it.
ABC.com streaming: We pay them about $1 billion a year for carrying ESPN and others. If you ask Bob Iger, he will tell you he is not interested in putting ESPN online. I don’t necessarily see a conflict. For us, we’re coming up on 10 million high speed customers, and that’s good for us.
The fear of the so-called Internet bypass is not a realistic fear for us. We’re looking at making Internet be a bigger opportunity…maybe our portal is one way of doing it.
Public Wi-fi: I don’t consider it a threat..it will mainly be about home connection…so it is not a substitution, but a complementary. Also, people want to have one company who they get multiple services from.
Net neutrality: We or any other cable company has not preferenced or block any of the sites…that would be dumb. We have no intention of doing it. I think it is a faux concern. I just think we need to have the unfettered ability to compete.
Fundamentally, people would like to watch video on their TV in their living room. We will try to leverage our position in the living room to bring video from the Internet to TV.
Our interest in Disney: Our main interest was because of the concept of windowing…we’re all for collapsing them.
We’re going to do more original content for our portal, as well as use other media companies’ content.
Cable a la carte: I bet TV companies would be ok with a la carte…it is not neccesarily a negative, though a big risk. Most people would want a package. For people in the entertainment business, they would fight it tooth and nail.
Comcast PowerBoost: You would be able to boost the speed to 16 meg when you’re at the computer, but then you’re not on it, it would go down to 6 meg. We would also develop the ability to download video very very fast through our own network, not public Internet.
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