NCTA: Cable confident of its competitive position

ATLANTA--The cable industry remains supremely confident of its ability to compete with telcos in all areas but two: hype and lobbying power.

That was the message of early sessions of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, holding its National Show in Atlanta this week.

Things are going well “across the board in the cable landscape,” said Time Warner Chairman and CEO Richard Parsons, in a general session panel. “We are seeing a real uptick in subscriber acquisitions. Telcos are way off the pace – they have an awful lot of money to spend and they will need an awful lot of investor patience.”

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts also touted cable as reaching its peak, saying “there have never been more new products to sell, and that is lifting all our boats.” His company “is ready to have the best year we’ve ever had.”

By contrast, Roberts said, the telcos “are putting Ma Bell back together but they don’t have any new products. We’re just scratching the surface of where this industry wants to go.”

Both men also said they don’t see either Internet-based video, such as the new video streaming service being trialed by Disney at www.abc.com or the entry of players such as Google and Yahoo! into video content posing a serious challenge to cable’s financial future.

“I don’t think an end-around the cable network is even conceivable in the foreseeable future,” Parsons said in a news conference. In fact, cable’s own video product is morphing into an on-demand service, beginning with features such as Time Warner’s Start Over service, he said. “Our service is sufficiently robust that it can’t be replaced with something that is episodic or provides a slice of content.”

Cable stands to benefit whether the video streams over its broadband pipes or through the set-top box to the TV, Roberts said. “The more video streaming into the house, the better for us,” he said. “Then more people will want to be connected to our broadband pipes.”

In the CEO panel and at an earlier CTO session, cable execs took pot shots at the IPTV plans of telephone companies as being more hype than substance.

“Verizon isn’t doing fiber to the home, they are doing fiber to the side of the house and then they are using coax,” said Michael LaJoie, CTO of Time Warner Cable. “IPTV is a buzz word, it’s like talking about freaking fiber. Consumers want to watch the programming, they don’t care how it is delivered.”

He and fellow CTOs Chris Bowick of Cox Communications and David Fellows of Comcast said cable will be able to use switched digital video capabilities now in development to deliver the more customized video content over their existing HFC plant.

“Sure I see telcos as a threat,” joked Fellows. “They have 95% of my telephone business.”

The investment community will catch on if cable stays the course, Parsons said. Right now, the hype around the video plans of the telcos and of Internet companies is creating uncertainty that is making investors nervous but continued double-digit ARPU growth will eventually win them over, he said.

NCTA President and CEO Kyle McSlarrow said cable needs to do a better job of telling its story and relating its history of private investment and entrepreneurship, something his organization is trying to do through its current public policy initiative called Cable: A great American success story.

“In the policy universe, if you don’t define yourself, someone else will,” he said. “This is an industry that creates new jobs in this country, and invests in our infrastructure.”

McSlarrow also unveiled a new television ad which portrays telephone companies as stodgy old men selling black rotary phones, cutting jobs and breaking promises made to get sweetheart deals.