Robert Pittman, the co-COO of AOL Time Warner, has a singular message: The future of AOL Time Warner ? and of the entire broadband industry ? is very much dependent on the company's relationship with the customer. Simply put, the more services an operator deploys to a customer, the more revenue it makes from that customer.

For AOL Time Warner, the key to that customer relationship is home networking. ?One ISP?is nice, but the big idea is that the cable company puts in a jack and that's your data port,? Pittman said last week in a one-on-one discussion with Char Beales, president and CEO of the Cable and Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM), at the Western Show. ?Once you have that in the home you enable a whole [array] of new services.? Those services could include networked CD player-type devices, telephony services, high-speed and dial-up connections for multiple PCs in one household and home-networking connections. Each of those services could feasibly add $10, $20 or $30 a month to a customer's bill.

?Pretty soon you've got a model which says we've tripled the revenue out of the home,? Pittman said.

The challenge, however, is marketing those new revenue-generating services to consumers.

To that end, Time Warner Cable recently reassigned John Billock as vice chairman and COO of the cable unit from AOL TW's HBO unit. His broad perspective and marketing background are just what's needed at the cable unit as it shifts its emphasis to selling new services to consumers from designing an infrastructure and upgrading its cable plant, according to Pittman.

He declined to discuss any possible plans on AOL TW's part to buy AT&T Broadband, but said that as far as acquisitions go, AOL TW is looking at services that consumers want and that capitalize on what the media giant already offers, or services that leverage infrastructure the company already owns. Then the question is ?do we buy it or make it?? he said. Contrary to some opinions, AOL TW does not spend its time looking lustfully at companies just for the sake of getting bigger, Pittman said. Rather, ?all of us are continuing that focus on the consumer.?

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