Welcome to CableTechTalk.com, the new blog of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA). We are the primary trade association of the cable television industry in the United States, representing cable operators serving more than 90 percent of the nation’s cable television households and more than 200 cable program networks, as well as equipment suppliers and providers of other services to the cable industry.

Our industry is at the forefront of technology change. Cable operators have spent more than $110 billion since 1996 to build a robust network for delivering voice, video and data services to our customers. We’ve dramatically increased the amount of video programming available, saved consumers hundreds of millions of dollars through telephone choice, and driven the deployment of high speed Internet – leading to a sea change in the way we interact with the world around us.

But we didn’t start this blog just to tell you all that. We launched this blog to talk about telecom policy. Today’s vibrant public policy discussions are driven by conversation and debate taking place online, so we hope this blog will contribute to that dialogue.

We’ll be talking about proposed legislation and regulation at the federal, state, and local level. We’ll voice our support for changes that would lead to a better, more competitive technology landscape. When we think legislation is unnecessary or detrimental, we’ll talk about that, too.

And, while we will certainly express our views, our goal is to have a dialogue. So, we’ll be inviting the people who make cable work – from our chief technology officers to the technical executives that manage our industry’s research & development arm, CableLabs – to talk about the management of large scale networks and the effect that changes in regulation would have on the customer’s experience. And we’ll also invite people with whom we may not agree to engage in debates across their blogs and ours. We’re looking to cross post ongoing exchanges in an effort to provide you with the kind of information that helps you decide for yourself.

We’ll make our best efforts to use this medium in a way that is familiar to you and other bloggers and blog readers. We’d like to talk with you, not at you. We want to provide you with information, but we hope you will do the same in return. We’ve opened up the comments so you can give us feedback and share your thoughts.

We’ll also talk about the stuff that makes life fun. We’ll take a look at the newest gadgets and tech toys – the consumer electronics that benefit from and leverage cable’s platform. To that end, we’re kicking things off with a week of blogging from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Our two bloggers-in-chief (more on them in a moment) will bring you the latest in home and personal electronics direct from the show floor. They’ll take you behind the scenes at the biggest electronics show on earth, and give you a peak at what’s cool and new, from their perspective inside the cable industry.

Our two resident bloggers are Paul Rodriguez and Michael Turk (Here are their bios). In addition to being NCTA employees, they’re avid bloggers and blog readers themselves. And they’re looking forward to talking with you in the days and months ahead.

But as I said, they won’t be the only voices you’ll hear. This blog will have dozens of authors, all with unique perspectives.

So, thanks for visiting, and come back often.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 8:30 am and is filed under NCTA Actions, News Items. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.