LOS ANGELES – Comcast is not planning to make any major cultural changes at NBC Universal, assuming that its proposed $30 billion deal for NBCU is approved by U.S. regulators, as expected, about six months from now.
Speaking here at a Hollywood Radio & TV Society event Tuesday morning just before the official kickoff of the 2010 Cable Show, Comcast Chairman and CEO Brian Roberts told a packed audience that the giant MSO plans to invest in NBCU and revitalize the main NBC broadcast network. But he promised not to mess with the culture at the numerous NBC broadcast and cable properties, which include a number of local NBC stations in major U.S. markets and such well-known cable channels as Bravo, USA Network, CNBC, MSNBC, and SyFy. He also said Comcast will try to strike a balance between producing powerful programming and maintaining its social responsibility.
"We are not going to try to ‘Comcastize’ NBC Universal," Roberts said. "We don’t have a ‘Comcast way’ so to speak."
Seeking to reassure his potential future staffers in the crowd, Roberts also vowed that Comcast would approach the programmer differently than its current parent, General Electric Co. Under the merger plan, Comcast would wind up with 51% control of NBCU, while GE would retain a minority stake, at least temporarily.
"[GE chairman and CEO] Jeff Immelt made no secret that the business did not fit into the core of what he is reshaping GE to be," Roberts said. "To any of the NBCU employees in the audience, as great a company as GE is, you are not the core of what they do. You can’t say that about Comcast."
Interviewed by former News Corp. COO Peter Chernin (who’s now head of Chernin Entertainment, a TV and movie producer advising Comcast on the NBCU deal), Roberts also touted Comcast’s plans to greatly expand the number of movies in its video-on-demand (VOD) portfolio. He said Comcast will start by providing its Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. cable subscribers with access to about 11,000 movie titles, boosting the volume of on-demand offerings in those two areas from 8,500 hours to more than 70,000 hours, including “thousands of hours” of HDTV content.
Roberts (pictured at right at Tuesday’s Cable Hall of Fame event) said Comcast will carry out this VOD expansion through a new, “next-generation” storage and distribution system. But he didn’t spell out the gear that the company plans to use for the expansion.
Although Comcast passes no more than one-quarter of U.S. homes with its cable systems, Roberts boasted that the company generates more traffic through its VOD platform than Apple Inc. does through its popular iTunes store. He said that Comcast on-demand users, who now order up about 350 million on-demand views monthly, have viewed more than 1.5 times the amount of content downloaded on iTunes over the “last few years".
Yet Roberts, a big Apple fan himself, noted that Apple is “universally beloved” while cable companies like Comcast are not. He said Comcast remains focused on bolstering its customer service reputation, and is now using social media platforms like Twitter to communicate better with customers. “I haven’t given up that goal,” he said. “That’s what we have to shoot for. We can improve the service experience.”
Pointing to the company’s TV Everywhere service, Fancast Xfinity TV, Roberts said Comcast is also focused on developing products to reach viewers on devices ranging from small mobile phones to 150-inch widescreen TVs. Comcast, which began offering Xfinity nationally on a beta basis in December, allows customers to access content from dozens of networks on-line. It also plans to launch a new, supposedly easier-to-use version of Xfinity within three months.
Alan Breznick is a Toronto-based senior analyst at Heavy Reading, part of the Light Reading Communications Network. He is also covering the Cable Show for Cartt.ca.
