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By Paul S. Maxwell
San Francisco made a nice change of pace (back to New Orleans next year just in time for a late May steam shower)...except for a rainy Sunday night, the weather cooperated.
Panels were lively...attendance was brisk...jaywalkers were relatively orderly...facilities (mostly) worked...and it was all Comcast, all the time. From the local system to the wired convention center to the huge Comcast programming booth (does "Comcast" sound like a programmer?) to the ubiquitous Steve Burke (who did a heck of a good job as convention committee chairman).
New prez Kyle McSlarrow made a successful debut.
Controversies pretty much stayed in the background.
Opening remarks noted that deals "used to get done" at the show, but that maybe that wasn't the case anymore. But each day CableFAX Daily reported dozens of new deals...booths were busy...
Comcast and Time Warner seemed pretty pleased...and, until the last day of the show, thought they had Adelphia. But a presumably bored Cablevision, wanting to find more challenges for Tom Rutledge, made an all-cash bid just to make certain everyone had something to talk about at the chairman's reception (hosted by Glenn Britt, of course).
Cramming the show into one less day was an interesting thing to do...it really started Saturday instead of Sunday, but Comcast management--which chartered a couple of JetBlue planes to take all the East Coasters home on a red-eye Tuesday night so they could be at their desks by 8 Wednesday morning--got that extra workday back.
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| Except for the missing Frank Drendel (who left early to squire around yet another congressperson), the board of directors of the Cable TV Pioneers gathered after our annual National Show meeting. From left to right: Les Read, Bill Bresnan, Arthur Dwyer, Mike Pandzik, Jim Faircloth, me, Susan Bitter Smith and Rex Porter. Good breakfast...good new class of Pioneers, too. But, next year, we'd like to see a little more diversity in the new class. |
"On Demand" was the designated subject...and progress is real. But more programmers (and not a few operators) were mesmerized by the prospects for wireless programming applications.
But, even after almost four years of talking, the question of how a cable operator should partner with a wireless provider (cellular and/or wi- or max- or other-Fi) still is unanswered...the question: Who "owns" the customer? It's complicated...but a "quadruple" play (everyone is, of course, with new Federal Confusion Commission Chairman Kevin Martin, afraid of calling it "four-play") is definitely in cable's future.
HDTV growth will be more linear than hoped...no exponential take-rate growth is likely...unless the sets drop to $300-$500.
Most interesting technological development I saw was from Andy Addis and Hillcrest...even CableLabs' Dick Green agreed. It's a thinking-out-of-the-box navigational concept.
More likely for short-term deployment, the voice-activated navigator called Promptu (gesundheit) from Agile TV looks like a winner, too.
Indecency got discussed...but no one got too upset...because this is one issue that might fade. It was disingenuous of new Chairman Martin, though, to talk about the startling growth of complaints to the commission about indecency without mentioning that the growth has--almost entirely--been generated by one very active group. The "groundswell" just ain't all that big.
Overall, a show with a growing sense of optimism and enthusiasm...
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