FYI:
This Week in Comcast: David L. Cohen on the future of pay-TV
By Michelle Caffrey, Philadelphia Business Journal - September 26, 2017
https://www.bizjournals.com/philadelphia/news/2017/09/26/comcast-david-cohen-paytv-att-time-warner.htmlquote:Comcast Senior Executive Vice President David L. Cohen shared his thoughts on cord-cutting, M&A activity, Trump’s tweets and, of course, net neutrality in a wide-ranging interview on C-SPAN this past weekend. While the majority of his comments contained familiar talking points and analogies, he did shed some additional light on what the view looks like from his perch in the Comcast tower.
On the future of pay TV
When asked by Tony Romm, Recode senior editor for politics and policy (note: Comcast's NBCUniversal is an investor in Vox, which owns Recode), about what the traditional pay-TV industry will look like in 20 years, Cohen was honest.
"I’m not sure I know what pay-TV and cable looks like 20 months from now," he said with a laugh. "I think that in somewhat shorter time frame, but longer than next year, I think we’re evolving in a way that is consistent with our vision of what we’re going to see. So I think we’re going to see a continued role for what I’ll call traditional cable television."
One of the lynch pins behind that view point? Live sports. Cohen said he can’t imagine fans not wanting to watch football games or the Olympics live on large TV screens, and Comcast has a strong hold on what it calls “big events” like the Super Bowl and the 2018 World Cup. At an investor’s conference earlier this month, CEO Brian Roberts said Comcast has the rights to air 24 of those events in the next year, three times as many as the company with the second highest amount.
While digital outlets like Amazon and Twitter are said to be looking to do more with sports, Cohen said he wasn’t sure that posed a major issue to the big event strategy.
"I don't know whether it’s threats,” he said. "Every competition is not a threat."
Instead, it can push behemoths like Comcast to adapt and innovate quicker, like the arrangement it’s struck with Snapchat — Comcast’s invested $500 million in its parent company Snap during its IPO — to produce original Olympic coverage just for the disappearing video and photo messaging platform.
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How the Trump administration could impact M&A activity
Cohen made one thing clear — Comcast is not scrambling to buy up companies to stay afloat.
"We love our company,” he said. “Post AT&T [Broadband] acquisition and NBCUniversal acquisition we view ourselves as essentially, strategically complete."
The Philadelphia-based corporation is not closed off to the M&A market entirely. If a deal increases shareholder value, it could be considered, he said, and the Trump administration will be less hostile to both horizontal and vertical deals. That conflicts with the populist theme Trump pushed during his campaign, threatening to break up Comcast itself at one point, but Cohen sees the president’s tweets on those issues as more conversational items that won’t necessarily be reflected in actual regulatory decisions, especially since the tweets often conflict each other.
"Maybe I’m immune to it, maybe I’m wrong, but I’m actually less concerned than a lot of my friends about the president’s tweets,” he said. “I think it’s a bit of a release valve for him and in that sense it’s not unhealthy."
He said he’s also seen greater restraint and substance in those tweets since General John Kelly took over as chief of staff. The full interview, just about a half hour long, is on C-SPAN’s site https://www.c-span.org/video/?434254-1/communicators-david-cohen ...
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