The leagues have their own networks. Right now, of course, theres a lot of attention being paid because fox is going to launch a new channel, fox sports one, on august 17th. Nbc launched a channel, there are conference networks, turner, cws. We have plenty of competition, ask its hostly a competition for programming rights, more talent, for advertising dollars and, ultimately, of course, for eyeball withs. Host so where does it go from here . Guest oh, i just think it gets more complicated ask more competitive, right . Everybody understands that sports and live sports right now is the sweet spot of media. It is almost the only thing that you have to watch live. So that has increased its value, and i think everybodys seeing that now whether they be social media sites that are partnering with us to tweeting about sports or to show sports as we have, show live sports on facebook. Other networks, other cable networks, the league, i think everybody understands that sports rights are quite valuable. Host mr. Skipper, when it comes to espn sports and tv everywhere, is espn available on all devices . Guest uh, yes it is. That is the Perfect Question for me, because the answer is, yes. Its available on all devices. This has been very important to us, and it goes back to live, right . If you have to watch your game live, it is best to be in your living room with a big 70inch hd screen in front of you. But if youre in the office for the world cup, you watch it on your computer. If youre at a picnic while your baseball games playing, you watch it on your tablet. If you happen to be in a business meeting, you might look down at your smartphone and watch the game there. So its very important to us. We were first with our watch espn products. Espn2, espn3, espnu, all available 24 7 wherever youd like to watch. Host what about the potential deal with verizon that espn has talked about where you could have live streaming, but it wouldnt count against your cap . Guest that was really an exploration, and were always looking into being on top of technology, doing new things. As to whether people hitting their caps would interfere with their ability to get espn, we explored it. Weve not moved forward with it. We dont anticipate anything imminent, and its just really about our wanting to make sure our products are available to our fans. Host is there a price point where people will say, no, i do not want sports, i do not i cannot afford to pay be for sports anymore . Guest look, were highly cognizant in providing as much value to fans as possible. And thats why weve aggregated the portfolio of sports rights we have. The new College Football championship is going to be on espn. All of cimp l done is wimbledon is on espn. All of the u. S. Open tennis will be on espn starting in 2015. The british open, which is starting in a few weeks, will be on e, spn. On is and on. Sunday night baseball, monday night football. There is a lot of value when you watch it on any device with, as we were just discussing. Then you can check scores on your sportscenter app and go on espn. Com and get articles. So we provide a lot of value. We think its appropriately priced. And generally, as we survey fans and as we talk to our distributer partners, they believe it to be appropriately priced as well. Host what do you say to senator john mccain who has introduced again, talked about his a la carte bill . He has mentioned espn by name. Whats your response to him . Guest our response is, of course, highly respectful for what hes done for our country. And hes often been right. In this case hes very wrong. A la carte will not lead to more choice for consumers, itll lead to less choice. It will not lead to less expense for consumer, it will lead to more expense for consumers because systems will be forced to raise their prices per channel. The channels will go out of business. So it will not work. This is another myth that gets perpetuated in this discussion, and that is the myth that theres an awful lot of people out there not watching espn. Last week 113 Million People watched or logged on or listened to or read espn. 88 of all households who get espn watch espn. So theres not a lot were not a niche channel. Go into any bar in the country, go through any airport, any dorm room, any fraternity house, espn is on. Were off in the backdrop for whats happening around the country here, because its live sports. So were not a niche channel, so thats just wrong. Guest let me start, first of all be, i talked about a better user interface, simpler, more intuitive. We rolled out last year trio which is a very interesting way to see products in the window pane that brings up content in a much more progressive way that our customers love. And then in december of this last year, in december of 2012, we had a recommendation engine that tracks what you consume as a customer. You can like or dislike, and its done for you privately and personally. You can turn it off if you want it turned off. But you on an individual level, not a household level, it knows what you like, and it starts to gather that and give it back to you. At the same time, video on demand platform at 20,000 hours of storage, we doubled the amount of storage to 40,000 hours of of storage. And thousand were ready for the now were ready for the last two pieces of puzzle. Were bringing an ip video gateway which is your device in your home that has six tuners, two terabytes of storage, and its an ip gateway so down the road we can start to connect it to the internet and bring apps and cop tent to your Television Set content to your Television Set. On top of that i said our customers want us to tib the second screens in their life. We built a tablet app that when you pick be it up, you touch it, you tell it who it is, it presents to you in three simple window panes your library, your live content and your on demand content and its all centered around you, peter. It knows what you like, it knows nine shows right now that are on the air live that are most relevant to you. It knows what you prefer. And even in vod, it brings the stuff out of this huge library and sorts it down and brings it to the top. So immediately you have at your fingertips what you wallet. You can stop and say im enjoying this, but i want to see it on a bigger screen. You can send it all to the Television Set and enjoy it. When you set that tablet down and the next person in the household can pick it up, and it can say, im pat. It moves on to the next user. Very cool. Guest all the Cable Companies have been losing market share for years. Whats different now is this phenomenon of chord cutting that people have been talking about for ten years, at least empirically didnt show up in the numbers until the second half of 2010. People started talking about it in the first half of 2003. But in 2010 you, there was a watershe would moment that watershed moment that the rate of prescription growth in pay tv dropped below the rate of new household formation. New household formation was already suppressed by weakness coming out of the great recession. But pay tv penetration growth was even lower than that. Or i should say pay tv sup description growth was even lower than that, so mathematically, you had negative growth. That has only accelerated since 2010 to the point that now the pay tv universe is actually contracting in nominal terms. That is, the whole pay Tv Subscriber base is now contracting at a rate of about threetenths of a percent per year. That will probably continue to accelerate even if new household formation continues to improve. And so youve got a genuine problem here that youre no longer seeing unit growth and, in fact, youre seeing unit decline. The Cable Companies share losses, meanwhile, are moderating a bit, but in the context of now a shrinking pie. So their numbers cant be expected to get much better in the video subscriber side. Host and is that all because of people going wireless . Guest well, for the unit growth of the industry, its chord cutting. And i would cutting its not the way that people think of cord cutting in i think the stereotype of the cord cutter is 30something mattser of the universe master of the universe with a terrific computer and access to all the Digital Content in the world at their fingertips. The reality of the cord cutter is quite different. The reality of the cord cutter is a lower income american that may not even have a broadband subscription and is looking at the pay the subscription as a necessary cost reduction. And theyre switching not to the consumption of netflix and hulu and a bunch of online content as much as they are switching back to overtheair broadcast tv because its all they can afford. So youre seeing an affordability crisis, not so much a technology revolution. Host so finally, craig moffett, when you think about the future of tv, what comes to mind . Guest well, you used the phrase the future of tv, and i dont know whether tv is the right phrase anymore. Its the future of video consumptionment consumption. And i suspect that the old adage in technology is everything changes less in five years and more in ten than you would ever expect. Five years from now i think were still going to be looking at a world that is dominated by the traditional pay tv packages. You know, people have waited for years to see the pay tv package blow apart, and i think in some ways that was almost that required a willful ignorance of the economics of the ecosystem to believe that that was going to happen anytime soon. Its starting to happen though. Youre starting to see rogues around the edges not through some seismic change in the Business Model or technology, but through the leakage of people out of the system at a very slow but accumulating rate. Over ten years that will be a very large audience that the programmers and the Entertainment Industry will have to address and have to serve, and i think youre somewhere in that 510 year range where things really start to accelerate and the traditional bundle starts to come apart. Host and youre watching the communicators on cspan, our weekly show focused on Telecommunications Policy and leaders. And this week were looking at the future of television. As we continue, well hear next from brian roberts, chairman and ceo of Comcast Corporation followed by robert marcus, president and coo of time warner cable. After that our discussion with matt polka, president of the american cable association. You said that television will change or tv video will change more in five years than in the last 15. What are some examples of that . Guest its really, well, we take on demand. So we started with some content on a tv set. We now have 40,000 shows on demand. We have 30 billion downloads of on demand in ten years, but where does that want to go . It wants to go to tablets and phone, and we want to be able to integrate the web as well as tv, as well as ratings and twitter, facebook and social media. Its just exploding because of the Technology Options we have as consumers and different generations of consumers have different passions. So weve got to keep it really simple to way more complicated, and we have to recognize were not all the same, so why do we just give one experience . Take the program guide. So we showed today rather than one guide, theres six guides. One just for kids, one just for sports, one just for movies, and so take the kids. You have a preschool ager or a 10 isyearold . And we work with Common Sense Media so parents know if they click 10yearold, these are shows that Common Sense Media recommends for a 10yearold. And if you want to set your guide to do that, good luck between you and your kids to do that or to just have that Information Available for a conversation with your kids. If you want to take your Infinity Home product which in the our case is cameras and home security, Energy Management and lighting control, and you want to do that with one click of your remote while youre watching tv right on the bottom, you can do that too. Youyou couldnt do any of that t a few years ago, and thats the kind of change were excited about. Host john mccain has talked about again his a la carte legislation. Whats your message to john mccainsome. Guest well, i dont think we would have the diversity of channels, i dont think there would be a cspan if people would literally just buy one channel at a time. I dont think most americans, and yet how Many Americans are aware of cspan and have come upon it . And so, you know, if you buy a newspaper, you cant say i dont want the business section, i only want the sports section. You buy a magazine, you may not read every article. You go to supermarkets, you know, theres many businesses that give you a lot of choices. Should we have more packaging flexibility and options for consumers, thats something that i think we are hopeful and weve worked on. Weve already got more packages than weve had ever before. And then finally, the question is is this the governments role, the negotiation between content companies and distributers. But my view that this is best served in the business relationships, not in government laws and mandates. But, you know, were very respectful, its an important subject and one that we want to, again, be part of that dialogue. Guest one of the areas that has been a focus of time, attention, Financial Resources for us is improving our navigation experience. For a long time now weve had a very broad video offering. Hundreds of linear channels and thousands of hours of the on demand content. The challenge has been enabling customers to easily find that content. And what were demoing here at the show is our next generation navigation platform which really is a quantum leap forward in terms of discovery of the great content weve always offered. So the guide uses very rich box art, valueadded metadata to enable customers to learn more about the shows that theyre watching, an intuitive layout, a great search capability and what i think is pretty cool is that based on the show you may be watching, a recommendation of other shows you might be interested in. So the combination of those features really takes our video experience to a totally different level than weve had before and maybe as interesting is that the guide, the user interface, is hosted in the cloud. In addition, its written in a programming language that is standard. In the past a lot of the cable software was proprietary to the cable industry. The limitation that that imposed on us was that development had to be done within the four walls of time warner cable. By using standard language, we now have the ability to capitalize on really Great Development that is occurring outside of time warner cable. So that means theres really smart people out there developing cool apps that might make the experience viewing our video much better. So i think thats very promising. The fact that its hosted in the cloud is also very relevant in that we can make modifications, make updates in response to consumer feedback that can happen overnight with the stroke of a couple of keys on a keyboard. In the past we had to make a Major Software push to literally 15 million settop boxes through the our footprint. Not very flexible. So i think that the new guide, the new user interface really holds a tremendous amount of promise for what the video experience is going to be going forward. Among the other things were demoing are the next, the latest iteration of our twc tv apps. So we about a year ago or so, a little more than a year ago launched a, an app for originally ios platforms, i as and then iphones, which enables customers to view now 300 linear channels of live video and about 4,000 hours of vod content on their iphones or ipads. Rendering any screen really in the home a tv. Which is pretty cool for the guest room where you dont necessarily have a tv permanently installed or if youre in the bathroom and want to use your ipad there. Its pretty cool. The really great new development, and we launched this only several weeks ago, is that a subset of that content that i just described is now available to customers outside the home on their ios devices. So we have about 12 linear channels available, and this is really the summit of rights subject of rights conversations that were having with programmers and about a thousand hours of vod content thats available for customers on the go. What were working through now is the fact that the video Regulatory Regime dates back really to the 1992 cable act, and needless to say over the last 20plus years, the world has changed quite a bit. So the level of competition we face is very different, the role that local broadcast plays in the overall social ecosystem has changed somewhat, and we think its time to make a fresh look. So while we dont have any specific proposals that were advocating at this point in time, we think that its time for a renewed look at the overall regulatory landscape as it relates to video. And then lastly, the key and i think this is a fundamental principle is that we think its critical that any regulation or lack thereof keeps in mind that we need to be incentivized to continue to invest in the physical infrastructure thats the core of every product that we deliver. And if were going to be a world leader in the delivery of highspeed day, if were going to have the fastest speeds, the most capable wifi access points, its key that the Regulatory Environment in which we operate actually fosters, as oppose to inhibits, further investment in that plan. I think theres this common misconception that once the plant is built, were done, and then its just there for the taking. In fact, investment needs to be continual year after year after year. We need to continue to augment the capacity of our plant so that its capable of dealing with an ever increasing amount of traffic and an ever increasing demand for more speed by our customers. Host so would you be in favor at this point of a comprehensive rewrite of the 96 telecom act . Guest yeah, i hesitate to say that, but i think we certainly need to take a fresh look at in elements of the telecom act to insure that the provisions that do survive are ones that are reflective of the current environment which certainly is very different from what existed at the time it was written. Host whats