ONLINE EXTRA: Q&A With Bill Bresnan—A Pioneer Seeks Wider Horizons Out West

By Mavis Scanlon

The big cable operators have nothing on Bresnan Communications. After selling his 1 million subscriber company to Charter in early 2000--at the height of the market--cable pioneer Bill Bresnan waited for the next great deal to come his way. It took several years, but by early 2003 he was back in business. Now, the company is offering the same services to folks in the Western hinterlands that its counterparts in big urban areas are providing, including telephony. CableWORLD caught up with Bresnan in early December, days before his 71st birthday; following is an expanded version of the interview with Bill Bresnan that appeared in the print version of this issue.

Bill Bresnan is "accustomed" to running large operations, and is "anxious" to do so.

CableWORLD: What was behind the flurry of cable acquisitions and programming deals your company announced late last year?

Bill Bresnan: We acquired several systems from Comcast about a year and a half ago. As a result of rebuilding and expanding the channel capacity we announced programming deals. A lot of the activity relates to rolling out new services and adding additional video channels. With the Net2Phone deal we're going to be rolling out telephony services. We have our first system up and running. We're not offering that service commercially to customers yet but we have 100 friends and family on the service and we're making sure everything runs well.

CW: What's the status of the Bresnan cable plant?

Bresnan: Overall, 94% of our customers have broadband service available to them now. Any system that we rebuilt is rebuilt to 750 MHz or 860 MHz; there are some systems at 550.

CW: Where does the company gain economies of scale?

Bresnan: We have a partnership with Comcast that allows us to acquire a lot of things [including programming] at their negotiated rates, so that's been very helpful to us.

CW: Comcast owns an undisclosed chunk of Bresnan Communications--what are some of the other benefits of that partnership?

Bresnan: I get their views on some of the things they are able to do that a company our size couldn't do.

CW: What percentage of the company do they own?

Bresnan: That's undisclosed.

CW: Let's disclose it in the Q &A.

Bresnan: (laughs) No, I don't think so.

CW: What is the company's focus for 2005?

Bresnan: To continue to roll out new services. We have high-speed Internet service available to 94% of our customers, DVRs available to 95% of our customers, high definition available to 65% right now, and VOD to 35%. Telephony will be a major undertaking next year. We have that tested and operating well in Grand Junction, and will be rolling it out commercially during the first quarter.

CW: By the end of next year will all these services be ubiquitous?

Bresnan: Well, the only thing I don't know for sure is whether we will have had a chance to roll out telephone everywhere. We're going to roll that out as quickly as we can, but the other services will be available everywhere. As you know the companies that have been offering telephony have done very well, and we expect to do very well, too. So we're anxious to get it out. It helps to make the total cable package very attractive from a consumer standpoint.

CW: Are you looking to acquire any Adelphia assets?

Bresnan: Without commenting specifically on Adelphia, we would like to grow the company. We have approximately 300,000 video customers now. At one time, we had over a million customers. So we're accustomed and able to run large operations, and we're anxious to do that. Obviously any acquisition has to make economic sense. Just to get larger just for the sake of getting larger is not the right thing to do. So we're looking and hoping to make other acquisitions. When we sold the company to Charter in February of 2000 we kept about 25 people out of 78 with me [here at our Purchase, N.Y., headquarters]--senior executives as well as sales support--as we searched for other acquisitions to restart the company. That search was successful when we acquired these Rocky Mountain systems from Comcast. We now have just under 50 people in our home office, including support staff. We have all the capabilities and all of the disciplines--engineering, telephone, Internet, marketing, accounting and finance, operations. We have the ability to grow quickly and to grow significantly larger if it makes sense.

CW: Why should consumers in your service area take cable instead of satellite?

Bresnan: We've been successfully defending our territory because we provide local service. We provide local channels, although satellite is [also] adding more local channels. But I think our customers appreciate the local service and the wealth of services that we offer--video on demand, subscription video on demand, high-speed Internet.

CW: How do you market cable in your service areas?

Bresnan: We try and let customers know that cable service has a greater value. Satellite guys are aggressive and giving away free equipment and free service upfront, but we're not trying to sell at the lowest price. We're not trying to beat their $29.95 for 65 channels--we're marketing a good package of service that's very high quality. We have local representation in all of our markets. We have enough bandwidth to provide high definition of all the local stations as they roll it out. It's a superior service, and we're positioning ourselves as the quality provider both in our offerings as well as our friendly customer service.

CW: What drew you back into cable operations?

Bresnan: I never really wanted to get out. From the time we actually closed [the Charter deal] we were looking for opportunities. [Charter's offer] was a very serious offer, one that we couldn't ignore. We hired investment bankers--Waller and Goldman Sachs--to help us sort out what was the best thing to do. Through that process, additional offers came in, and we ended up selling to Charter. It's no secret we sold at that time for $4,500 a sub. We pretty much had a fiduciary obligation to do that. By the way, my management team all had little pieces of the company, and so it was an opportunity for an awful lot of people.

We decided that we would keep a part of the team together, and go after other acquisitions. It's not as if we had to be convinced to get back in. We happened to sell right at the peak. The market went downward after that and we were looking at other potential acquisitions both in cable field and telecom. [But] we couldn't get comfortable with the numbers, and we never did a deal. We did bid on a few and ended up not getting them because we did not bid high enough. Thank God we didn't--the market continued to go south and south and south.

CW: You sold at the peak and bought at a low valuation. Luck or good planning?

Bresnan: We were lucky. I think that it's a combination of good fortune and [a great team.] It's a lot of just using common sense. When you see prices get kind of so high that you think you can't buy at that price then you have to seriously consider whether you should sell.

CW: Would you consider taking your company public now?

Bresnan: Not right now. Valuations in public market are way undervalued.

CW: What's going to change that?

Bresnan: I don't know. Analysts said cable has to have free cash flow because in the past the industry has never had free cash flow--the industry always had capital expenditures to deal with and rebuilding every 10 years or so. So companies are now generating free cash flow, and yet I don't believe are getting credit for it. And the future I think is very, very bright. Even though these companies are announcing some degradation of their basic sub counts, their cash flows are going up because of the services they are rolling out.

The public marketplace in cable is often not realistic--when things are well they seem to overreact. And then when there's a little negativity they go [overboard] the other way. I think the cable stocks are very undervalued right now, so I wouldn't make an equity offering at this time. We could do it at our size, but being public is not a cakewalk anyway because you do have to spend a lot of time on non-operating issues.

CW: What was your reaction to Cox going private?

Bresnan: I think that's very smart of them.