Businessweek spoke with Comcast CEO Brian Roberts about his company’s 2011 purchase of NBCUniversal and its future in an evolving business.
Speaking on the benefits of subscribing to Comcast rather than depending on a Netflix-type service, Roberts said: “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.”
“So from broadcast television to sports to news to the Grammys, the Olympics, this season’s episodes of ‘The Voice’ — all of those pieces of content and thousands of hours per month are not available on Netflix,” he notes. “So with all the press about cord-cutting, facts would say that [Netflix] has really been more additive. There are more multichannel video subscribers today than there were a year ago.”
Roberts believes “television will change more in the next five years than in the last 50. This will be really great for consumers,” he predicts, adding that “people want more control, more choice, and more personalization.”
He spoke on the $6 billion cost for the Olympics — and the $4 billion Comcast is expected to spend through 2020: “We paid a 1 percent increase over the prior Olympics for a decade of content and also received all media and technology rights to the Olympics for the next 10 years in the U.S. This means we have the rights to put Olympic content on all devices in and out of the home and even on devices that haven’t yet been invented.”
Roberts heralds Comcast for being ahead of the curve. “We were the first cable company or phone company to go all digital, and most of our customers now are digital… In each of the last seven quarters, we’ve added more new broadband subscribers than the previous quarter. So the pace of change at our company is accelerating, and there has never been a more exciting time to work here.”
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