Many years ago, Bill Gates said that one day we'd be able to click on the shoes of a character in a TV show and buy them online. Whether that happens or not, are you thinking about new ways to combine your assets in programming, customer knowledge, and technology?
Brian L. Roberts
If you drop a channel, you're incredibly unpopular, and if you pass along a rate increase, you're incredibly unpopular.
We support an open Internet and having rules - the right kind of rules that are legally enforceable and allow for investment and innovation.
It seemed to me the perfect company for the 21st century would be one that was technology-orientated with great content and national scale.
We took the brains out of the set-top box and put it in the cloud. Having our software in the cloud gives consumers the ability to click their remote control and navigate through thousands of choices in a simple and elegant way. That's magic.
We did some soul-searching. Was the cable industry obsolete? Was it an opportune time to get out? Our conclusion was that if you rebuilt your system with this new fiber-optic coaxial hybrid - which we now call broadband - the glass was half full, not half empty. We could compete.
You have to have a business model you believe in and like.
We love our business. We have never been more enthusiastic about cable and its future.
Today NBC makes certain content available online and I can't imagine we will change that process.
I think cable has been under-appreciated for its contribution to society.
Comcast NBCUniversal has an incredible array of brands and ways to deliver those brands and experiences for consumers.
NBC News will help define Comcast.
The day is coming when, in 45 seconds, you can download a movie.
It's a huge mistake not to embrace social media. We need to stay in touch and stay relevant to young people.
In the case of Comcast, we're taking a lot of our technology into the cloud, so you don't need a new box every time you want to innovate. And it's all speeding up.
You can't just buy the sports section of 'The New York Times.' You take the whole paper.
It's really important we stay in touch with our customers and try to, over time, have more packages and flexibility than perhaps we have historically offered. And that's part of that tension that is healthy that is going on in the marketplace.
I go back to when we met with the late Steve Jobs. He couldn't understand why we didn't put Wi-Fi in every cable set box. And I literally went home and said, 'Tell me again - what's Wi-Fi?'
We have a broad, well-positioned company, so when 'Minions' comes out, it can be in theme parks all over the world. We own Fandango. We can advertise on a network. We can have the characters pop up on the Golf Channel.
What unfortunately happens is we have about... 350 million interactions with consumers a year, between phone calls and truck calls. It may be over 400 million, and that doesn't count any online interactions, which I think is over a billion. You get one-tenth of one-percent bad experience, that's a lot of people - unacceptable.
We provide a breadth of live and catch-up content - what we define as this season's content, none of which is available in the Netflix rerun world.
We are going to have a suite of products that you subscribe to - television, high-speed Internet, phone, home security, energy management, maybe even health care - and we are going to have many customers that are going to buy those products directly from us.
Verizon had just come out with FiOS, and AT&T had U-verse. We came up with a couple of options, and then our marketing people came in and said, 'What do you think of Xfinity?'
In our case, one of my earliest experiences working in the company was being asked to be on Ted Turner's board, and I saw that the value creation from owning networks was stunning - new channels, international opportunities, synergy, many things that Turner Broadcasting built for decades.
I can get my voicemail transcribed and sent to me as e-mail. I want to be able to have my address book and all my life come up on my TV and video chat. The whole telecommunications experience through a wire is still very relevant.
I think Jay Leno is fantastic.
If you had to pay separately for just PBS, probably, sadly, not a majority of Americans would do that. So there's many channels, whether it's Discovery Channel or C-SPAN or many, many others, that just aren't viable.
Our products weren't getting some of the excitement they deserved because you were waiting on hold on the phone, or we missed an appointment.
We are a mixed marriage, so our kids were raised with a little less Judaism than I was raised with.
