Archive for April, 2008

There are only three weeks left before The Cable Show ’08 commences in New Orleans. We’re launching this blog in order to clue you in to all the exciting developments, make sure you have all the information you need to attend and to provide on-site coverage of the Show.

In our very first post, we promised to bring you guest commentary. I’m pleased to present our first contributor: David Broberg, Vice President of Consumer Video Technology for CableLabs.

We created this blog to tell cable’s story. The cable industry has spent $130 billion on our network since the 1996 Telecommunications Act was passed. That investment of private capital has spurred fundamental change in how we work, play, communicate, and entertain ourselves.

NCTA President & CEO Kyle McSlarrow testified today at the Senate Committee on Energy and Commerce hearing “The Future of the Internet.” You can hear an MP3 of his delivered remarks and, earlier today, we featured a post that summarized his remarks.

The cable industry has consistently demonstrated its commitment to policies that ensure all Americans have access to affordable broadband. This includes: Proposals to create a fund tailored to expanding broadband into unserved areas.

It’s worth revisiting a topic that never goes off the radar: Concern about content. Everybody can agree that cable transformed the television landscape by vastly expanding viewing choices, but not every viewing option is to everybody’s taste.

The issue of mandatory “a la carte” for cable television service continues to be a hot topic. This is actually a pretty broad and complex topic, so I’d like to break it down a bit.

The cable industry has spent more than $100 billion since the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to create the most extensive and robust broadband network found in America.

There are many ways that the cable industry has expanded consumer choice. You don’t have to be that old to remember a time when you had maybe a half-dozen TV viewing choices – maybe a few more, maybe less – and now you probably have hundreds.

More than 15 million Americans have switched to cable’s digital voice service. One big reason that consumers are switching is the significant savings that can be found, especially if the service is included as part of a bundle that includes video and high-speed Internet.

In 2007, J.D. Power and Associates’ annual rankings of telephone service provider customer satisfaction ranked cable companies #1 in customer satisfaction in all six US regions.

It’s worth noting that cable’s phone business has grown in a fairly short period of time. The current competitive age can be traced back to the passage of the deregulatory 1996 Telecommunications Act.

NCTA has been drawing attention to the DOCSIS 3.0 specification for almost a year now. You may have seen the video of Comcast’s Brian Roberts demonstrating wideband at The Cable Show in Las Vegas last year.

NCTA’s CEO Kyle McSlarrow was featured on Ad Age Magazine’s online video series 3 Minute Ad Age earlier this week.  McSlarrow recently addressed the Association of Cable Communicators (ACC) - the industry’s association for public releations practitioners.  In a conversation with cable consultant Steve Effros, McSlarrow raised, among other things, the relative lack of discussion about broadband policy among the Presidential candidates and the status of the DTV transition.