It. If it had hit us, we would have been dead in an instant. That is sunday on cspans q a. Now a look at the changing landscape of Television Technology and the intern. Key Industry Leaders discusses innovations and insights on what the future may hold for consumers. Speakers include comcast cspan 3 brian ronlts, affirm offerman l. President time armour, and michael powell, who now heads the national cape and telecommunications association. These discussions were part of the threeday internet and tv expo held earlier this month in chicago. This is about an hour and 20 minutes. This year michael thought he would snap chat the whole thing has been periscope it, although that would have been in bad test. I know you doan want another power point, as exciting as those can be. What we decided to do was an actual interview with a real reporter. That would be me. I play one on television on hbo. So we are going to do an interview. We are going to do a bunch of interviews throughout the show. Peter is going to be interviewing some figures. We wanted to start off by talking to michael. I brought my own chairs. These are the red chairs of the code conference. Before that it was all things d. Many people have sat in these chairs including steve jocks, bill gates and president obama. We thought it was appropriate to put michael on the hot seat to begin the show. Michael, come on out. [applause] were you squared . No. Some of those internet billionaires can be very messy. We had them cleaned. We are going to be talking about a range of things and all kinds of things have happened in the cable industry. Lets start off with the con accepts of what you are trying to change. The industry is changing rather rapidly and suddenly even more than it seems especially because of digital challenges you are all facing. I think thats right. The central reason we rebranded the show and really changed its mission, if i were to butt it in a sentence, is to expand our peripheral vision. Video has become so much more dimensional, much more textural. There is this fascinating intersection of television and technology all brought about by internet functionality wired and wireless, and i think it was time for our industry to sort of look beyond its traditional bounds and traditional players and invite and include them in a show that attempts to be the place to have a conversation about trends taking place in this exciting and changing industry. It can be said this internet thing has been kind of a big deal for the kids for a while. Kids seem to like it. People seem to be using these crazy technologies. When you talk about peripheral vision, is it enough . All kinds of industries have been disrupted rather substan itfly. Has the cable industry reacted quickly enough . I think they have responded, but i think it needs to be accelerated with a new kind of urgency. As you say, i think we are really starting to see exponential leaps home regard digitalization. They are really setting the tone of a new kind of behavior that i think is nontraditional. When i look at kids today you can get fascinated by the technology, but you really should look at their behavior. I think teenagers are doing the same things teenagers have always done. They are passionate about community. They are passionate about their friends. They are passionate about watching each other and building friendships around that. I think what has really come into their world is the ability to have real life be entertainment, to have the video has been moving pictures of people doing things profound and idiotic. But they are able, through the creation of new screens and devices, and a connective tissue through the internet to be continuously plugged in to their friends and community. So what is competing with Traditional Television is real life. The ability to document share and prop gate that. What happens to an industry in that situation. It would seem if people are not linking to cable has been not having a relationship to cable have bad feelings has been not using it. My kids have a very different at touchdown towards things. When my son was 4 we bought a new large television. When it got home he started hitting it. I thought he had mental problems at this point. He kept hitting the television, and i said what are you doing . He said it doesnt move and doesnt do what i antwane to do. I was used to swiping. My older son almost lives on vine. Now he is periscoping almost all the time. Most of iteveryone nane between him and his friends. How do you meet that challenge when the behaviors change so rapidly . The first thing you have toss to the physical locations they are going. For the better part of television history, there was one consumer Electronic Device that was central to you consuming content, and it was the television. Studies have shown real declines of people watching on that vehicle. It has been in the last decade that we have handed our kids smartphones, tablets and laptops. There has been a proliferation of screens. There are more intimate screens. They can huddle up together. One thing cable has done is to be able to port their content off their systems and into those devices. That is a first step that is really important. Then you have to think about how do you exist as a companion to the selfpublished, selfcreated kind of content because that lives on the internet. If you oneandone to be part of that experience, i dont think it is enough to ask a consumer to completely change ecosystems to go from watching periscope to watching game of thrones. Lets talk about that, speaking of periscoping and game of thrones. A lot of people wear scoping the first game of thrones. Then the c. E. O. Of twitter seemingly talking about what a victory it was. Do you look at that as a victory, the ability to live stream anything you want. The other day i periscoped my lunch by the San Francisco bay and i got 5,000 viewers who were very interested in my lunch. Sorry i missed that one. It was a gripping episode of shrimp salad. It does create problems for the industry. They sold this for a lot of money, and a lot more people watched it because of that. The way i think about disruptions is they tend to come with an enormous amount of good and an element of bad like all things. The good is an amazing experience in which you can have this dynamic almost spontaneous experience of people from around the world who are documenting and catalogging events that you never would have had access to. But what comes with that, in the instance you are talking about, there are opportunities to violate intellectual property and copyright. There are opportunities to frustrate models that have been built and a lot of people have been vested in. Those fighters were paid hundreds of millions of dollars on the Television Rights associated with that fight. The second thing i wind wore in some is what privacy means in a space like that. I have been playing with periscope and some of the snap chat stuff, and what i am intrigued by is not the people doing it, but the people caught doing it. The people who didnt agree to being broadcast around the world. I think society is going to be working through the meaning of that for a long time, but i think that potentially has a negative side. What companies do you think are going to be very important . You talked about bringing these Digital Companies in. Is it google with an ability to do a lot of these things are has been amazon many shows, has been apple . Who is the most powerful player right now from your perspective . I dont know that i would say the most important. There are a number you should have to intensely follow. I think google you always have to intensely follow not only because of their extraordinary dominant position in the search ecosystem. They are mostly how we find things, and they are always looking for ways to index, tag scrape and identify anything in the Digital Space through their algo rhythms. That is a powerful function. The jutanugarn space is fascinating. The first time i ever saw jutanugarn was my 12yearold showed it to me. I remember being amazed at that. As you look at the soaring of video clips and mini serious and shows that are being produced, it is something to watch. I also think amazon for a similar reason. What i am intrigued by, by both companies, the video isnt necessarily their primary business. They are using video to drive very profitable businesses that pull through. Amazon wants me to be a prime consumer and buy my shaving karim as well as watch a show. They can take risks and burn money in certain ways that would be harder for a traditional companies. They have been very, very profitable for several decades. Other companies, it would be harder to get market permission to take those kinds of risks. And then you have to watch, to finish your question, the rahim sword of groundup digital disrupters. If you havent seen the discovery functions on snap chat, if you have never looked at periscope has been played with vine, you owe it to yourself to look. There is an amazing amount of creativity going on there now. I know it is meaning fully different yated content. You can spend hours watching people fall down. When you are in this environment, what does the modern Cable Network look like, and then what does the modern Cable Company look like . At some point it will be the connectivity that is important and Everything Else rides on it. You have touched on it. The cable industry is the countrys leader in broadband infrastructure that makes all this possible. As the demand for videos soar, the necessity of that network being high quality increasing in capacity, heavily invested in is going to be at a higher premium. The greatest give to the country the cable industry has as distributors is providing that infrastructure and continuing to grow it currently at a rate of 50 increasing speeds per year, 16 billion last year alone in investment to continue to make that quality experience possible. That is an increasingly important part of the cable business. We shouldnt declare its demise too quickly. There are 102 million cable subscriber households in this country. That is not going to drop down to five overnight. There are still high quality programs and events that continue to be driven by an infrastructure that has a proprietary quality of service, Service Commitments that a cable infrastructure does. The intern is wonderful, but you get what you get as sling discovered when it had suggestion problems when you get a huge demand. And they had legal problems too. Legal problems as well. But the internet is best effort. Your bits are competing with all kinds of other bits, and there is not a permission within the regulatory structure to manage those bits with any priority. There are going to be needs for high Priority Networks that can take advantage of those swords of things. In that vein, Customer Service issues, commerce liking the internet. The Net Neutrality fight had a lot to to with that idea. They played that rather well. Sure they did. I am a Firm Believer that words and messages dont work if you are not liked. When i was in the army, people used to say george s. Patton said i dont have to be liked to lead. I think that is foolish. I think you have to be well regard by your customer base. You have to have a trust relationship with them to build. If that is afraid, you are ripe for the next pickup policy fight to be turned against you just to be based on reputation critique. I think the industry is highly conscious of that problem. They are very selfaware. They are not delusional about it. I think there are a number of very important committed efforts under way to change that perception over time, improve the quality of the product and improve the experience. What they have to recognize is that even if you are improving at a rate of 3 x, the Consumer Expectation and adaptation is increasing faster. One thing the internet has done is raise the expectation of consumers for any content. They want it here and now reliable to innovate every six months not every 18 months. If you are going to be in that game, you have to be in an innovation cycle. I was on a plain yelling about internet connect yift. You are in a tube of death and you are mad if things arent down loading fast enough. That is what people expect. That is right. We just have a few more minutes. When you are looking outwards at the industry what, is a cable is there a cable industry . Should it be called that . I know you put the x on the end. Those are good. It feels modern. Very modern. And we didnt capitalize anything. Small letters. Wow. We use a slash. That bothers people a great. Punks weighs is everything. Doctor punctuation is everything. Should it be called the industry industry anymore. It denotes we are a motorized horse kind of a thing. [laughter] that would be a car. That is an opportunity for you. A driverless car. You can text drink and watch television statement. They brought the deliverless cars the Driverless Cars in, and the only thing they were talking about is if the open carry laws could be done away with. I do hate the name. It has a proud history but it needs to be retired in some way. I think your past can be part of your glory, but it also can be a weight around your ankle when you are looking at a tumultuous future with new challenges. And it also doesnt fairly capture what they do. This industry has successfully deployed the most sophisticated infrastructure in the history of the world in the fastest amount of time and increasing quality of that at exponential rates. It should be more centered around its future as associated with the internet and less in the minds of consumers of the disruption it may with broadcast tv. It is a cultural change. It matters what you look like. It matters that i voted not to wear my tie this afternoon. A big move for you. A huge move for you. Spage quaking back in silicon valley. He is not wearing shirts anymore. That is why i smelled the chair. My last question in wrapping up, what is the last thing you would like to see invenused . Is it v. R. Has been complete surround entertainment . Give me something . I think it is going to be who will graphic holographic. I think there will be a day where game of thrones will be played out in almost three dimensions in your room. And do you have to be dismembered as part of that . Absolutely. That would be more dangerous to play in it with them, but i hope that is after me. Michael, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you all for coming. [applause] ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the chairman and c. E. O. Of Comcast CorporationBrian Roberts. [applause] it is great to be back. Hearing michael just talk about how not to wear a tie, and we are at intx. Here we are. You are who you are. The timing is perfect. We had earnings yesterday at comcast. We had a terrific quarter. I want to thank our team. We have a lot of momentum. Let me just address my friends at timewarner cable and say thank you very much. You are completely gracious. But we are mooching on. Being here today allows us to show you what we have been cooking up in the labs. I am really excited to show you a few things and then invite you to come to the floor of the convention and see live and first hand our fabulous booth. So the cloud has really changed everything and it allows us to keep innovating at a pace that is really unprecedented for our industry. We wont call ours ourselves the cable industry anymore. Here is the x1 operating system. It is clean simple, elegant. You have the save features. All sorts of new enhancements there i am not going to do today. On demand continues to grow and get better and better. Usage is incredible. We have now had 38 billion orders since we have really launched on demand. Search is what i want to show you a little bit of today. That is the key to everything as the content quantity keeps increasing. We are up to Something Like 2. 4 million searches every day using x1. And then we have apps, the xfinity app section, and we keep expanding that. That will be a big part of our future as well. Today i am excited to say that we are officially finally launching the Voice Control remote. Let me explain what that means. It takes search to a whole new level. There is no extra charge to any x1 customer to have a voice remote. We purchased five million to six million devices for this year alone. If you are a customer in the room at the convention, come by our booth, and we will get you a voice remote, and you can take it home and play with it yourself has been we will send it to you. There are more than three million commands possible. That is just the beginning. We have shown you before changing chance and searching by name. But we are now taking voice to a whole new level. Today you can tune to any movie, but what if you cant remember the name of the movie . You cant just say life is like a box of chocolates. It will figure that out and automatically tune in. Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. Now tom hanks looks a lot younger then. So you could say how old is tom hanks . We built search functionality right into the remote. We call it x1 answers. People are using their smartphone to do things like this. We thought we should put it all right into the remote control. The next thing we are working on is find the ferrest gump running scene. This would involve working with content companies, but it can take you right to the section of the movie, has been the show has been the sporting event you want to do. Great song you are watching. What is this song . Running on empty. So the product continues to come up with new ways to allow you to enjoy one show, searching and getting answers. Our folks in the labs have been really amazing. Show me the Comcast Timewarner cable merger. [laughter] get down [applause] that pretty much sums it up. [laughter] so we really are moving on. So let me switch gears. Lets show something completely different available for parents and their children. If you say go to kids mode automatically using your Voice Control, you are now in a zone that is completely safe for any children under 12 years old. If you pick a show, here i will pick i carly. We have a Wonderful Partnership with common sense media, go in, see a show, see what age is truly appropriate. And here we are. Now from here i could say create an i carly play list. This is a new