Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and how the Tech Area. It's time for a classic episode. Last week we had the Comcast Story Part one as our classic episode. So guess what this week it's the Comcast Story Part two. Who to thunk it? This episode originally published on November eleven, two thousand fifteen. As I said last week, I'm pretty sure we're due for a part three. I'm gonna have to get to work on that and um and pair it with these previous episodes so that we can, you know, have a fuller picture. In fact, by the time you hear this this uh, this classic episode, maybe I will have already done that because I record the classics in batches, and I think I'm about four months ahead now, so maybe by the time this classic publishes, I will have already done part three. It's like time travel, but more boring. Anyway, let's sit back and listen to the Comcast Story Part two. We talked about the founding and the rise of of Brian Roberts, the son of founder Ralph J. Roberts. I thought i'd pick up specifically right there. This is going back to n that's when Ralph J. Roberts named his son, Brian Roberts, the president of Comcast. Not the time, Brian was just thirty years old, and the announcement caused a bit of a stir because here's this young guy taking over the role of president of a major cable company that had been making some pretty pretty hefty moves in the industry. Now, Ralph J. Roberts said he would stay on as the chairman of the company. And while thirty is pretty darn young to be the president of a rapidly growing company, Brian had actually been working for Comcast in one way or another since before he was ten years old. According to some reports, he was seven when he started working, which meant they had twenty three years of experience working for Comcast. I do question exactly what he was doing at seven years old, but that's the story, at least in certain Comcast literature. But that would mean that he was actually one of the more senior employees of Comcast. He had worked there longer than a lot of other people there, so at least from a seniority standpoint, it wasn't that unusual, although some might argue that it was a little weird for a father to name his son the president of the company he founded. At any rate, Brian Roberts definitely dedicated himself to the success of the company, there was no question about that. Around that time, operations were continuing to grow in Britain. If you listen to the last episode, you know that one of the things Comcast looked at in the eighties was to expand in in the UK because it was starting to get really difficult to grow in the United States. They were starting to reach full penetration of cable service and the few cable companies that were left were really expensive and limited in their range, so they looked elsewhere. Well By, they had one million customers in the United Kingdom, and Comcast made additional purchases in the cell phone space as well here in the United States in order to grow its business, as m Cell was not growing as quickly as the company had hoped. If you remember, m Cell was the cable the cell phone service company they purchased in an effort to get into a new field. But am Cell kind of suffering the same issues that the cable service industry was suffering and that people weren't necessarily flocking to M cell to become customers. So instead of trying to push that business out harder, Comcast looked at acquiring additional cell phone service companies to bolster its customer base US that way, so if growth isn't there, you should just go out and buy it, I guess. In the headquarters for a Comcast, which were located at one Meridian Plaza in Philadelphia, caught fire. The building was totally destroyed. The fire took nineteen hours to extinguish, so Comcast as actually the corporate headquarters was shut down for about eight days until they set up a temporary headquarters four blocks away from their original burnt out home. Also in Comcast held a bit of a marketing stunt. They completed a five way international phone call to demonstrate you don't need a telephone company to make a call, even a complicated one, and that really prompted telephone companies to argue that they should be allowed to enter the cable television business, since the cable television business was now dominating in the phone business, at least in cell phone coverage. Also in Comcast, bought interest in Store Communications, the company that had previously sold as Florida Operations to several years earlier. You remember I mentioned that in the previous episode, and Comcast became the third largest cable operator in the United States after it acquired the US cable operations of McLean Hunter. The company also launched a new public company in the UK called Comcast UK Cable Partners and Comcast made golfers extremely happy when they partnered with a few other companies and became a founding investor of the Golf Channel, which, as I recall, was one of the earliest channels to offer high definition programming. That was a little bit later, but thank goodness you could watch golf and high definition. I find golf very relaxing to watch. I that's the best thing I can say about it. I guess I certainly takes skill to play, and I lack it at any rate. That year, Comcast also entered a partnership with Sprint UH Telecommunications Incorporated and Cox Communications, and together they formed the Sprint Telecommunications Venture, which was later called Sprint Spectrum LP and later still was called Sprint PCs. So once again, Comcast continues to try and diversify, expanding into cellular service and wireless service. Comcast itself would continue to grow mainly through acquisitions. As we've seen in our previous episode, the company would buy up other cable operators and mostly expand that way, eliminating competition along the way, which certainly helped and in Comcast had more than four point three million customers, mainly through this tactic of buying up existing companies and converting them into Comcast, so customers found themselves becoming Comcast customers just through these acquisitions. Comcast bought a sixty three percent share of the Philadelphia Flyers from a company called Spectacre, which was created by Flyers founder Ed Snyder. Comcast had created a new company with this partnership, and it's now called Comcast Spectacre. The company not only owns and manages the Flyers, but also the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, and the company has divisions overseeing the venue, ticketing and concessions. This is not the only sporting franchise that Comcast owns. There are others in the Philadelphia area as well, which makes sense. I mean, that's again where Comcast headquarters are, That's where a couple of the co founders of Comcast grew up and uh they are still very much heavily involved in the sports area of Philadelphia. Comcast also announced it would create a new channel in Philadelphia just called Comcast sports Net, specifically a regional sports channel for the Philadelphia area. And finally, in nineteen Comcast got into the broadband business. The company launched a service called Comcast at Home, with the AT being the AT symbol, and they launched it in Baltimore, Maryland, and Sarasota, Florida, kind of as a sort of prototype. They're they're testing grounds. They wanted to see if this business would have any legs, and the trial run offered a cable modem service to customers and as it turned out, and ended up being a fruitful business, which Comcast quickly began to adopt and roll out in other areas. In nineteen seven, another major company took interest in Comcast, and that major company is Microsoft. So Bill Gates's company invested one billion dollars in Comcast in ninete. The purpose of that investment was to help Comcast deploy high speed data and video services through its infrastructure. So Comcast was starting to look at ways of creating a fiber optic coaxial sort of system, replacing lots of copper lines with fiber optic lines to deliver much faster service. And it was through this investment that Comcast was able to afford that infrastructure without affecting its operating funds too much. And in this way, this was a step to move towards the world we live in now, in which people in the United States can get high speed Internet streaming to different devices in the home and not just PCs. In fact, in the press release that Microsoft VP of Corporate Development, Greg Maffei had taken part in, MAFE had said, like Comcast, Microsoft has always believed that increasing network bandwidth is a key to the eventual convergence of the Internet, the PC, and the television. So even then there was a look at we're using these pipes in the parlance of the web. We're using these pipes to deliver TV and to deliver broadband. Broadband, by the way, is being delivered over Why of those six mega hurts channels that I talked about in the first episode that cable can you cable can hold hundreds of mega hurts, So broadband internet connection is just six mega hurts of a cable that's plenty of space available for that. We'll be back with more about Comcast and its history after this quick break. So Microsoft was saying, we've got this delivery system that's doing both television and Internet. It's only a matter of time before we start to see these different technologies start to converge into a single technology. And as it turns out, that's very much true. It took a little bit longer than what they were expecting, I imagine, but that's what we're seeing now. A lot of people either have smart televisions or they have their TVs hooked up to one or more set top devices that allows them to view Internet content on their televisions. And there are some who argue that eventually that will be the primary and perhaps only way that will get content on our TVs. That we won't receive programming from a cable service directly. It will be through an Internet service. And that's quite possible. Well more and more people are opting for that, as we'll say later in the episode. At any rate, by this time, cable television wasn't even the largest division within Comcast. Cable tv was taking a back seat. Uh, So Comcast had interest in content and cellular services, and there were growing concerns that the company in charge of delivering content was also in the business of creating content, and those concerns would grow over the following years. This is where you started seeing people make noise about net neutrality. How can a delivery system remain unbiased when it also was creating content being delivered on that system. In other words, if you are a company that creates content and you're also a company that allows content to be delivered to customers, how can anyone be certain that you don't give your own content preferential treatment. Maybe you slow down other types of content across your network, maybe you don't allow it to even broadcast on your network. Maybe you tell your customers, hey, the stuff we have is the best stuff out there. You don't need anything else. These were big concerns, and while Comcast was largely playing nice, uh, it was a it was a worry that perhaps in the future that would not be the case. And so we really started getting into the conversations about net neutrality around this time. I mean they had been around before that, but this is when it really started to take more of a spotlight, and that would increase over the years. Skipping ahead to two thousand one, Comcast bought the Outdoor Life Network and expanded its investment in the Golf Channel, which ended up giving Comcast controlling interest in that network. And it also announced it would purchase a T and T Broadband for a cool seventy two billion dollars. At that time, a T and T Broadband was the largest cable TV provider in the United States. So Comcast both eliminates some competition and grows its own cable television services by buying another service. Uh, which no big surprise again if you're looking back along the history of Comcast, that was the tactic from day one. Really. In two thousand two, Comcast unveiled plans for HD television and video on demand services. Again, the Golf Channel was one of those early HD channels. As I recall, this was, you know, one of those things where the United States was definitely trailing behind Japan by several years. But HD television's back in the early two thousand's were really expensive. I don't know if you guys remember, because these days, you know, you can go out and buy an HD television for a relatively low cost. Still, several hundred dollars. But you know, when you start looking at things like four K televisions, they are relatively inexpensive. HD ones, that is, HD are relatively inexpensive compared to four K, but just like four K. Now, back then, there were very few channels that actually offered up h D content. So you can get an HD television, but there wasn't much to watch on it at the time. The Golf Channel was one of those things, so if you really like golf, you can get a really good look at it. Uh. Also, Brian Roberts assumed the role of CEO of the company, becoming president and CEO in two thousand two. Not long after that, he would actually also assume the role of chairman, so became president, CEO and chairman of Comcast. Again, keep in mind this is the son of the founder, Ralph J. Roberts. In two thousand four, Comcast made an unsuccessful bid for a hostile takeover for the Walt Disney Company. Now that might sound pretty weird, because today Disney is bigger than ever. Disney owns so much. Disney bought Marvel, Disney bought the Star Wars franchise. The movies are doing really well, But in the early two thousand's, Disney was in turmoil. There were leadership issues. People were disenchanted with Michael Eisner as the chairman of Walt Disney. The company itself was not doing as well in the market as it had been previously. Some people were beginning to feel that Disney itself had the company had lost its way, and people like Roy Disney, who had been on the board of directors, seemed to be in dismay at the state of the company. So the bid was somewhere in the fifty four billion dollar range, and it was based on stock price. It was going to be a stock exchange deal if this were to actually go through. But it was a hostile takeover. And what does that mean. Well, originally Comcast was sending messages to Disney chairman Michael Eisner, but Eisener refused to discuss a deal. Then Comcast went over Eisner's head and sent a letter of intent directly to the board of directors saying, we want to purchase your company. Here the here's the deal where we want to do it in stock. The stock is currently valued at fifty four billion dollars. Now Disney itself was being valued somewhere in the sixty six billion dollar range. H but again, it was kind of struggling at the time. So comcast hope was that the Board of directors would come and talk to Comcast and they would be able to work this out, and that uh you know, maybe the word board of directors thought this would be the best approach in order to make money for shareholders for Disney shareholders, and the attempt was huge news because the number of properties that would have been involved were significant. Disney at that time was already the parent company of ESPN and ABC, so those would fall under the role of Comcast. Then Comcast the delivery system would also be in control of ABC and ESPN, and people were worried that this would mean Comcast would be able to leverage that over other providers. So let's say Time Warner Cable and it comes up and Comcast says, hey, I own ESPN, and if you want ESPN to run on your cable networks to your cable customers, you're gonna have to pay X amount to have access to that content. Uh, you know, it would have been a very powerful leveraging tool, but there was no need to worry about that. The deal actually fell through when shareholders for both Disney and Comcast were resisting the move for different reasons. Comcast stock price fell eleven percent over the time from when they announced the bid to the time when they decided to walk away. Now, because the stock price fell eleven percent, and because their bid was about an exchange of stock, the value of the stock they were bidding fell, I mean, it wasn't as valuable as it used to be. This would be as if I went up to you and said, hey, I want to buy your shoes for ten bucks, and you say, well, I'll think about it, and the next day I come up to you with a ten dollar bill. But in that time, the value of ten dollars has decreased, meaning the buying power of that ten dollars is less. It's similar, except now we're talking about actual stock, not the value of currency. But the point being that what used to be worth fifty four billion dollars was now worth less than that, So that made it a much less attractive deal for the Disney board of directors. Meanwhile, the board of the board of Directors are also getting the message from their shareholders, we don't want you to sell this company to Comcast, and since both parties were receiving this kind of resistance, Comcast announced it would drop the bid just a few months after it had first announced its intention and uh and Roberts had said he was very disappointed in the Disney board of directors for not coming in and communicating with him. He thought that it was the best deal for both companies. Meanwhile, the board of directors didn't uh didn't really dignify that particular statement with a response. Also into the and for Comcast purchased a little company called tech TV and who boy, is this a heck of a story. So Comcast carried a company a channel called G four, which catered to video game fans. It was mostly content related to video games in some way, including things like review shows, shows that just did clips of video games, uh, game shows that were video game related, lots of stuff like that. Tech TV, on the other hand, was a more general technology based channel where they had everything from product reviews to h question and answer like people could call in and ask experts how to do certain things with their computers, like how to install motherboards, that kind of stuff like actual technical help UM, as well as shows that were things like like they had their own video game review shows, so there were there were competing shows on the two channels. So Comcast purchases tech TV in two thousand four and then merges it with G four, creating the G four Tech TV channel, and then kind of letting the two slates of of programming battle it out to see which ones would remain and which ones they would get rid of. And I've got a lot of friends who worked either for G four or tech TV, and I hope to do an episode in the future. I've already recorded some interviews about this. Actually, I hope to do an episode in the future about tech TV and G four and the merging of the two, and to include interview segments that I have gathered over time. So that's something I want to do in the future, and it will definitely be a long episode, probably a multi partner because it was so complicated. It was a venture that people when when these channels first started, they were really excited about them because this was these were industry is that were all getting more and more important. Over time. People were getting more interested in technology and computers and video games. But when you get these big corporations like Comcast involved, sometimes the ideas that people had when they first founded the channel end up getting changed or lost or or discarded, and uh, it creates a very emotional kind of story. So keep in tune with tech stuff. Let me know if that sounds interesting to you, because I do hope to do it in the future. I still have to do several more interviews in order to get kind of a full story of it. We're about to wrap up the Comcast story as of two thousand and fifteen at any rate, but first we need to take another quick break moving on with Comcast. By the way, GIF tech TV doesn't exist anymore. In case you were wondering if if you weren't aware, G four tech TV eventually went away and I believe became the Spike Network. If I'm not mistaken, or it's no, it's Esquire, I'm sorry, it's the Esquare network. I believe um Esquire would eventually take over for G four tech TV, and so that channel no longer exists and a lot of good people worked for that channel over time. Anyway, two thousand five, Comcast joins a group of investors, which included Sony Corporation of America, to purchase a twenty steak in Metro Goldwyn Meyer better known as MGM Studios, so the entertainment studios that produced lots of movies, including the James Bond franchise. It turned out to be a pretty tough investment, so five years later, in two thousand ten, MGM would file for Chapter eleven bankruptcy and they would emerge from bankruptcy after a little more than a month after entering bankruptcy with the creditors MGMs creditors taking control of the company. So that was a pretty rough time. I mean, it was an investment, it was a gamble, and unfortunately for the investors, the market for DVDs was really falling out by that point and that ended up taking a big hit. MGM took a big hit from that. That same year two five that is, Comcast unveiled at digital phone service and plans to purchase internet businesses, further getting involved in both the delivery and production of cable content both on TV and on the Internet. So if you have ever looked at Comcast Exfinity, which is the brand for their digital service to homes, you often will see that it can be bundled where you get phone service, cable television, and Internet broadband all bundled together. That's, you know, a calculated approach that com guests made back in this time. In two thousand seven, that's when Comcast actually acquired Fandango, the movie ticket service, the one that kind of precipitated this whole discussion about Comcast in the first place, because if you recall from episode one of this series, I mentioned that I started looking into this after I had problems buying Star Wars tickets because the Fandango service had been overwhelmed by demand and it pretty much collapsed. By the way, in case you were worried, I did eventually get Star Wars tickets for opening night. I just had to wait till the next morning. It's just I am not a good Jedi. I don't have patience, So it was a tough, tough twenty four hours or so. At any rate, Comcast purchased Fandango back in two thousand and seven, and uh, Fandango is one of those services that I personally find a little rustrating. I much prefer when movie theaters have their own, uh theater specific services to to sell tickets to customers, because you don't have to worry if there's a huge amount of demand for the overall film, typically speaking, because it's distributed amongst all those theaters. It's when you have a centralized service where all that demand is going to a single collection of servers where you start running into these problems. And granted the Star Wars issue was a special case, it's not like that's going to happen with every movie. For example, Jim and the Holograms. Don't think that one's going to collapse the system, even though it's truly outrageous, truly, truly, truly outrageous. So two thousand seven, Fendango acquisition happens. UM I could go on about the cable service companies that Comcast acquired over the next few years is but by now you guys are all familiar with that story. It's the same story over and over. It's just the names and the prices change from case to case. In an effort to grow the company and increase the number of customers, Comcast kept acquiring other businesses, including ones like Patriot Media, Susquehanna Communications, and others. UH and Comcast and Time Warner together would split up the assets of another company called Adelphia Communications. Adelphia had gone bankrupt and so as part of the UH in order to settle the debt that Adelphia had acquired, they started selling off assets, and Comcast and Time Warner we're both allowed to buy up some of those, which not great news necessarily if you wanted more competition, uh, since these were the two big players in the United States at that same time. Comcast continued to launch channels like fear Net and Exercise TV, and so they were controlling the distribution and content in an effort to set itself apart from competing cable and satellite services. Also, the Walt Disney Company, while it was not open to a hostile takeover bid, it did sell off its thirty nine share in the E Networks to Comcast. So Comcast was able to pick up a significant share in those those uh, those companies, those those networks, they didn't have controlling interest, but is nothing to sneeze at now. That doesn't even cover the continued interest in wireless broadband. Comcast was one of the companies that invested in clear Wire Corporation, for example, so Comcast was still very much interested in expanding in that industry as well. And the next really big big piece of news dates to two thousand nine and that's when it was announced that g E had agreed to sell controlling stake in NBC Universal to Comcast. Now, the approval for this deal would take quite some time. Congress scrutinized this deal, and it wasn't until two thousand eleven that Congress approved the deal, and the acquisition itself wouldn't be complete until two thousand thirteen. So from two thousand nine to two thousand thirteen this deal was taking place. That's how big a deal we're talking about here. And the approval from Congress was actually conditional. It wasn't yeah, go ahead and you can buy them. And they actually had some some specific conditions that the companies had to adhere to. Comcast had to make assurances that it wouldn't prevent NBC programming from airing on competing broadcast services. They couldn't just say, well, now anything that's on NBC can only air on Comcast, or it can air on other stations, but only if you pay an outrageous premium for the broadcast. That was part of the agreement that Comcast would not make those kind of moves um. It also sparked another round of discussions about net neutrality, making certain delivery services aren't so wrapped up in programming that they begin to tinker with accessibility. And uh, this is still a big deal today. I mean, this is a giant thing about about these distribution companies getting involved in content on this level, and as they own more and more of it, there's a greater concern that they will cause real issues for customers, that it hurts the customer In the long run. It's a great business decision, you know, from the business side, you can't argue it because it's gonna make tons of money for shareholders. But as a customer, as the person who comes home and wants to watch television, it's a negative experience, or it can be. It can certainly lead to one. So that's why these conditions were built in to the agreement. And then in two thousand and fourteen, skipping ahead to that, Comcast made a move to acquire its competitor, Time Warner Cable and this is when the Internet totally lost its mind. For very good reason. This action, more than any other, brought that net neutrality argument into the spotlight. Comcast was essentially saying that they wanted to buy its chief competitor, which would drastically reduce options for customers in numerous markets, which Comcast actually argued was a benefit to the customer if you can believe it. Now, keep in mind again, and most markets, customers don't have that much choice. They might have a choice of one cable provider and maybe one or two satellite providers, which is getting fewer and fewer anyway because of other acquisitions and consolidations. But that's it. They don't necessarily you know, it's it's it's rare. When you're in an area where you're like, well, I can get either Time Warner or I can get Comcast. It may be that you have either Comcast or a mobile wireless provider or satellite, and that's it. You don't have option between cable companies in other words, and that is problematic. And Comcast was arguing that by buying Time Warner it would actually be an improvement to customers by streamlining everything. But when asked about it, when when people said, well, does this mean that since there be no competition, you could lower the customer bill, they said no, not necessarily. So, in other words, customers would not see any benefit from this. The the benefits of competition are that companies will start to offer better prices and better options for customers in an effort to win more customers. But when you don't have competition, there's no reason to do that. In fact, you want to have higher prices because you can't go anywhere else for those services. That's the reason why monopolies are frowned upon and and normally either prevented or broken up. Although, as we talked about in our A T and T podcast, even the efforts to break up monopolies don't last forever. Often these companies will coalesce back together kind of like kind of like a planet getting broken up into space and then the gravity's crushes all the pieces back together, so you have a planet again. It's almost the same thing. Uh. Anyway, I don't want to get off on a total rant there, but if you listen to episodes about A T and T about net neutrality, those sort of discussions go into greater detail about this sort of stuff. Anyway. Uh, there are only a few markets that really allow you to have some choice in the United States, and that's a real problem. And people opposed to the Time Warner deal argued that if it went through, there'd be a true monopoly in cable service in the United States, it would belong to Comcast. Now, there were also numerous examples of regions that were passing laws restricting public broadband initiatives. In other words, lobbyists for the cable industry we're working with politicians to make difficult or even illegal for a government to offer broadband service as a utility. And there are certain areas in the United States where this was a big deal, specifically in places like Chattanooga. If Joe McCormick was in here, he's from Chattanooga, he could tell you about the crazy fast Internet service that people in Chattanooga can get through municipal WiFi, and cable companies really battle against that. They say it's unfair, which blows my mind, but that would be an entirely different episode for me to go into all of those details. At any rate, municipal broadband service became a battleground which continues to this day. The Federal Communications Commission has ruled that states are allowed to offer up broadband services, but cable interests are still fighting that decision and appealing it and arguing that the FCC doesn't really have the authority to make that statement. In the first place, just as they resist other competitors like Google Fiber entering their turf. So what cable companies have done is they've divided up the United States into into neighborhoods that they can effectively control because they're the only party in town, and then they do their best to keep everybody else out. And again, this makes perfect sense from a business perspective. You don't want competition to come in and shake things up. But for customers it's not such a great story. So it gets pretty ugly and a lot of people, especially on my side of this, have a lot of harsh things to say. And I will again try to avoid editorializing anymore than I already have. Uh And it's it's entirely possible that I have blinders on here. It's not like I think that the other companies are necessarily altruistic, but I always like to see more competition rather than less. Anyway, back to Time Warner. That's what started this whole digression of the first place, was the proposal for Comcast to acquire Time Warner. The deal would involve around forty five billion dollars in stock, and Congress began to scrutinize the deal, and a lot of advocacy groups were calling for the deal to just be outright rejected. Comcast agreed to divest itself of nearly four million subscribers, essentially handing them over to Charter Communications, and this was supposed to be a sign of good faith, saying Comcast had no plan on taking over the entire industry. Charter Communications would still be there and they had three point nine million more subscribers than they had before because Comcast was giving them up. So see, there's competition. There's still Charter Communications. It's not like by buying time Warder all cable would be Comcast for now, never mind the fact that once again there's not true competition in most markets. Anyway, while the deal was being considered, a T and T also announced its plans to acquire Direct TV for forty nine billion dollars, which added fuel to the fire of people worried about net neutrality and about media consolidation. There were tons of people now looking at these two major deals saying, we really need to think about this because if we go down this pathway, customers could be really hurt by the lack of choice. Further down, the road. In April two fifteen, Comcast and Time Warner announced that they were dropping the deal after numerous challenges and delays were brought up against it, and it was also rumored that the Department of Justice in the United States was leaning towards denying the deal in the first place, so walking away might have also been an attempt to make it seem as though the two companies had arrived at this decision themselves, rather than it being forced upon them by another party. The ongoing challenges for Comcast today include the FCC wanting to classified broad band as a title to utility, which Comcast and other cable companies are challenging. And also this is really troubling for cable companies, especially well specifically cable TV companies. There's a flagging interest in cable television. This is not a big surprise for most of my listeners. I'm sure, I bet there are a lot of you out there who are cable chord cutters. You know you've you've cut the chord for cable TV, and you get your entertainment through the Internet, but not through television. You might feed the Internet to your TV, but you're not getting it through cable TV. I'm sure there are a lot of you out there who are doing that right now, and I bet there's some of you out there who are fall into the category that is now being called cord never's. Cord never's are people who have never subscribed to cable television. So we're talking about young adults who have never taken it upon themselves to get cable TV. They're not interested. It's not how they consume entertainment. They get everything they want through the Internet or through over the air broadcast, but they've never seen the value of subscribing to a cable television service. We're seeing both of those populations grow over time. Now that means that cable television providers are experiencing a crunch. They're losing customers who are cutting the cord, and they're not gaining new customers fast enough because more and more people are choosing not to ever subscribe to cable TV in the first place. So you're getting a narrowing band of customers for cable television, which is really created an error of desperation in that industry. And it means that you're getting some some pretty hard moves in that that industry and it could ultimately mean that in the future, our television content will primarily come through the Internet, and cable TV as a thing will no longer exist. The industry it self will cease, and we'll have a totally different model for delivering television and creating television. That's a possibility. It's still going to take some time for that to happen. I mean, it's not like cable TV is in so much trouble that it could crumble at any second. It's still a huge, multibillion dollar industry. It's just a multibillion dollar industry that already is seeing loss of customers on either side of it, people leaving and new people not coming in. So it'll be really interesting to see where that goes over the next i'd say decade decade um. I think we're gonna see more and more people turn to the Internet. We're gonna see more services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon offering up their own original content that you can only get through those services. I know that Disney is looking at the possibility of launching its own streaming service as well, So it may be that in the future, instead of subscribing to a cable company and then picking a package that gives you certain channels. You may have to pick between different streaming video services. In fact, you already do for certain things, like you might not be an Amazon Prime member, which means you don't get certain Amazon shows, or you might not be a Netflix subscriber, which means you don't get certain Netflix shows or Hulu. All of these have original content and in order to access it you have to subscribe to the to the services generally speaking, so maybe in the future we have more and more of those, which puts the burden still on the customer. You have to decide what you're willing to pay for and what you don't you feel is not worth the money. You just you just don't see it. But it's bad news for cable TV providers. Comcasts, however, of course, is in the position where it's not just a cable TV provider, it's a content provide fighter and its Internet broadband provider, so it has some other businesses that it wants to protect, and it may be that in the next few years we see Comcast doubled down on Internet content and broadband delivery, We'll probably also see Comcast continue to fight competition in those spaces, specifically, things like the entrance of Google Fiber into different regions. So that's what I think we're going to see in the future. For Comcast. It's gonna be more of a focus on broadband um and and Internet content, and we'll price see some pretty tough battles for municipal WiFi, for municipal broadband, for UH stuff like Google Fiber to be allowed to come into neighborhoods, and personally encouraged by the direction I've seen over the last year or two where it looks like the general consensus is that competition is a good thing. I don't even hate Comcast specifically. I I I have very strong opinions because of my own personal experience with this company. But that's my own personal experience and it's not a universal experience, and I would never suggest that my experience is the same that everyone else has had. But I love to see competition because it means that customers have choice, and I would much prefer to have choice than to be forced into using a specific provider because there is no other option, because that means that I can't weigh my options and make a decision. I have no deciding power. Um By creating that sort of competition. I can make those decisions, and maybe I stay with Comcast. Maybe I decided that's the best way for UH for me to get the access I need, or maybe I switched to a competitor like Google Fiber, which is rolling out service in Atlanta as I record this, UM and it will probably take another couple of years before that's complete. But the fact is that I think the more choice you have, the better better off you are as a consumer, up to a point. Obviously, if you have five hundred choices, then you have another problem ahead of you, which is, how do you decide among five hundred candidates, which one is the best. I hope you enjoyed that classic series on Comcast. As I said, I planned to do a part three, and who knows, it may already be out. In fact, maybe you listen to that one first, in which case, welcome back in time. And yeah, the cable industry has seen a lot of disruption over the last few years. We've seen a decline in cable subscriber numbers. UM not from you know, I s P service like actual cable SERVI this, but cable TV service certainly has seen a decline. So it'll be interesting to see how these companies all pivot. We've seen evidence of that with all the various acquisitions and mergers over the years. We're seeing it right now with Discovery, Warner Brothers, UM actually Warner Brothers Discovery. Sorry I've mishmashed the names there, but yeah, we're seeing cable networks, cable providers, all these companies try and adjust to a world that's moving away from the cable TV UH format. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover on future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out and let me know. One way to do that is to download the I Heart radio app is free to download and use. You can navigate over to the tech Stuff part of that app. Just search for tech Stuff in the search bar. You'll see that there will be a little microphone icon on the Tech Stuff that lets you leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in length, and you can let me know what you would like me to cover in future episodes. If you would prefer not to do that, you can always leave me a message on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and how the Tech Area. It's time for a classic episode. Last week we had the Comcast Story Part one as our classic episode. So guess what this week it's the Comcast Story Part two. Who to thunk it? This episode originally published on November eleven, two thousand fifteen. As I said last week, I'm pretty sure we're due for a part three. I'm gonna have to get to work on that and um and pair it with these previous episodes so that we can, you know, have a fuller picture. In fact, by the time you hear this this uh, this classic episode, maybe I will have already done that because I record the classics in batches, and I think I'm about four months ahead now, so maybe by the time this classic publishes, I will have already done part three. It's like time travel, but more boring. Anyway, let's sit back and listen to the Comcast Story Part two. We talked about the founding and the rise of of Brian Roberts, the son of founder Ralph J. Roberts. I thought i'd pick up specifically right there. This is going back to n that's when Ralph J. Roberts named his son, Brian Roberts, the president of Comcast. Not the time, Brian was just thirty years old, and the announcement caused a bit of a stir because here's this young guy taking over the role of president of a major cable company that had been making some pretty pretty hefty moves in the industry. Now, Ralph J. Roberts said he would stay on as the chairman of the company. And while thirty is pretty darn young to be the president of a rapidly growing company, Brian had actually been working for Comcast in one way or another since before he was ten years old. According to some reports, he was seven when he started working, which meant they had twenty three years of experience working for Comcast. I do question exactly what he was doing at seven years old, but that's the story, at least in certain Comcast literature. But that would mean that he was actually one of the more senior employees of Comcast. He had worked there longer than a lot of other people there, so at least from a seniority standpoint, it wasn't that unusual, although some might argue that it was a little weird for a father to name his son the president of the company he founded. At any rate, Brian Roberts definitely dedicated himself to the success of the company, there was no question about that. Around that time, operations were continuing to grow in Britain. If you listen to the last episode, you know that one of the things Comcast looked at in the eighties was to expand in in the UK because it was starting to get really difficult to grow in the United States. They were starting to reach full penetration of cable service and the few cable companies that were left were really expensive and limited in their range, so they looked elsewhere. Well By, they had one million customers in the United Kingdom, and Comcast made additional purchases in the cell phone space as well here in the United States in order to grow its business, as m Cell was not growing as quickly as the company had hoped. If you remember, m Cell was the cable the cell phone service company they purchased in an effort to get into a new field. But am Cell kind of suffering the same issues that the cable service industry was suffering and that people weren't necessarily flocking to M cell to become customers. So instead of trying to push that business out harder, Comcast looked at acquiring additional cell phone service companies to bolster its customer base US that way, so if growth isn't there, you should just go out and buy it, I guess. In the headquarters for a Comcast, which were located at one Meridian Plaza in Philadelphia, caught fire. The building was totally destroyed. The fire took nineteen hours to extinguish, so Comcast as actually the corporate headquarters was shut down for about eight days until they set up a temporary headquarters four blocks away from their original burnt out home. Also in Comcast held a bit of a marketing stunt. They completed a five way international phone call to demonstrate you don't need a telephone company to make a call, even a complicated one, and that really prompted telephone companies to argue that they should be allowed to enter the cable television business, since the cable television business was now dominating in the phone business, at least in cell phone coverage. Also in Comcast, bought interest in Store Communications, the company that had previously sold as Florida Operations to several years earlier. You remember I mentioned that in the previous episode, and Comcast became the third largest cable operator in the United States after it acquired the US cable operations of McLean Hunter. The company also launched a new public company in the UK called Comcast UK Cable Partners and Comcast made golfers extremely happy when they partnered with a few other companies and became a founding investor of the Golf Channel, which, as I recall, was one of the earliest channels to offer high definition programming. That was a little bit later, but thank goodness you could watch golf and high definition. I find golf very relaxing to watch. I that's the best thing I can say about it. I guess I certainly takes skill to play, and I lack it at any rate. That year, Comcast also entered a partnership with Sprint UH Telecommunications Incorporated and Cox Communications, and together they formed the Sprint Telecommunications Venture, which was later called Sprint Spectrum LP and later still was called Sprint PCs. So once again, Comcast continues to try and diversify, expanding into cellular service and wireless service. Comcast itself would continue to grow mainly through acquisitions. As we've seen in our previous episode, the company would buy up other cable operators and mostly expand that way, eliminating competition along the way, which certainly helped and in Comcast had more than four point three million customers, mainly through this tactic of buying up existing companies and converting them into Comcast, so customers found themselves becoming Comcast customers just through these acquisitions. Comcast bought a sixty three percent share of the Philadelphia Flyers from a company called Spectacre, which was created by Flyers founder Ed Snyder. Comcast had created a new company with this partnership, and it's now called Comcast Spectacre. The company not only owns and manages the Flyers, but also the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, and the company has divisions overseeing the venue, ticketing and concessions. This is not the only sporting franchise that Comcast owns. There are others in the Philadelphia area as well, which makes sense. I mean, that's again where Comcast headquarters are, That's where a couple of the co founders of Comcast grew up and uh they are still very much heavily involved in the sports area of Philadelphia. Comcast also announced it would create a new channel in Philadelphia just called Comcast sports Net, specifically a regional sports channel for the Philadelphia area. And finally, in nineteen Comcast got into the broadband business. The company launched a service called Comcast at Home, with the AT being the AT symbol, and they launched it in Baltimore, Maryland, and Sarasota, Florida, kind of as a sort of prototype. They're they're testing grounds. They wanted to see if this business would have any legs, and the trial run offered a cable modem service to customers and as it turned out, and ended up being a fruitful business, which Comcast quickly began to adopt and roll out in other areas. In nineteen seven, another major company took interest in Comcast, and that major company is Microsoft. So Bill Gates's company invested one billion dollars in Comcast in ninete. The purpose of that investment was to help Comcast deploy high speed data and video services through its infrastructure. So Comcast was starting to look at ways of creating a fiber optic coaxial sort of system, replacing lots of copper lines with fiber optic lines to deliver much faster service. And it was through this investment that Comcast was able to afford that infrastructure without affecting its operating funds too much. And in this way, this was a step to move towards the world we live in now, in which people in the United States can get high speed Internet streaming to different devices in the home and not just PCs. In fact, in the press release that Microsoft VP of Corporate Development, Greg Maffei had taken part in, MAFE had said, like Comcast, Microsoft has always believed that increasing network bandwidth is a key to the eventual convergence of the Internet, the PC, and the television. So even then there was a look at we're using these pipes in the parlance of the web. We're using these pipes to deliver TV and to deliver broadband. Broadband, by the way, is being delivered over Why of those six mega hurts channels that I talked about in the first episode that cable can you cable can hold hundreds of mega hurts, So broadband internet connection is just six mega hurts of a cable that's plenty of space available for that. We'll be back with more about Comcast and its history after this quick break. So Microsoft was saying, we've got this delivery system that's doing both television and Internet. It's only a matter of time before we start to see these different technologies start to converge into a single technology. And as it turns out, that's very much true. It took a little bit longer than what they were expecting, I imagine, but that's what we're seeing now. A lot of people either have smart televisions or they have their TVs hooked up to one or more set top devices that allows them to view Internet content on their televisions. And there are some who argue that eventually that will be the primary and perhaps only way that will get content on our TVs. That we won't receive programming from a cable service directly. It will be through an Internet service. And that's quite possible. Well more and more people are opting for that, as we'll say later in the episode. At any rate, by this time, cable television wasn't even the largest division within Comcast. Cable tv was taking a back seat. Uh, So Comcast had interest in content and cellular services, and there were growing concerns that the company in charge of delivering content was also in the business of creating content, and those concerns would grow over the following years. This is where you started seeing people make noise about net neutrality. How can a delivery system remain unbiased when it also was creating content being delivered on that system. In other words, if you are a company that creates content and you're also a company that allows content to be delivered to customers, how can anyone be certain that you don't give your own content preferential treatment. Maybe you slow down other types of content across your network, maybe you don't allow it to even broadcast on your network. Maybe you tell your customers, hey, the stuff we have is the best stuff out there. You don't need anything else. These were big concerns, and while Comcast was largely playing nice, uh, it was a it was a worry that perhaps in the future that would not be the case. And so we really started getting into the conversations about net neutrality around this time. I mean they had been around before that, but this is when it really started to take more of a spotlight, and that would increase over the years. Skipping ahead to two thousand one, Comcast bought the Outdoor Life Network and expanded its investment in the Golf Channel, which ended up giving Comcast controlling interest in that network. And it also announced it would purchase a T and T Broadband for a cool seventy two billion dollars. At that time, a T and T Broadband was the largest cable TV provider in the United States. So Comcast both eliminates some competition and grows its own cable television services by buying another service. Uh, which no big surprise again if you're looking back along the history of Comcast, that was the tactic from day one. Really. In two thousand two, Comcast unveiled plans for HD television and video on demand services. Again, the Golf Channel was one of those early HD channels. As I recall, this was, you know, one of those things where the United States was definitely trailing behind Japan by several years. But HD television's back in the early two thousand's were really expensive. I don't know if you guys remember, because these days, you know, you can go out and buy an HD television for a relatively low cost. Still, several hundred dollars. But you know, when you start looking at things like four K televisions, they are relatively inexpensive. HD ones, that is, HD are relatively inexpensive compared to four K, but just like four K. Now, back then, there were very few channels that actually offered up h D content. So you can get an HD television, but there wasn't much to watch on it at the time. The Golf Channel was one of those things, so if you really like golf, you can get a really good look at it. Uh. Also, Brian Roberts assumed the role of CEO of the company, becoming president and CEO in two thousand two. Not long after that, he would actually also assume the role of chairman, so became president, CEO and chairman of Comcast. Again, keep in mind this is the son of the founder, Ralph J. Roberts. In two thousand four, Comcast made an unsuccessful bid for a hostile takeover for the Walt Disney Company. Now that might sound pretty weird, because today Disney is bigger than ever. Disney owns so much. Disney bought Marvel, Disney bought the Star Wars franchise. The movies are doing really well, But in the early two thousand's, Disney was in turmoil. There were leadership issues. People were disenchanted with Michael Eisner as the chairman of Walt Disney. The company itself was not doing as well in the market as it had been previously. Some people were beginning to feel that Disney itself had the company had lost its way, and people like Roy Disney, who had been on the board of directors, seemed to be in dismay at the state of the company. So the bid was somewhere in the fifty four billion dollar range, and it was based on stock price. It was going to be a stock exchange deal if this were to actually go through. But it was a hostile takeover. And what does that mean. Well, originally Comcast was sending messages to Disney chairman Michael Eisner, but Eisener refused to discuss a deal. Then Comcast went over Eisner's head and sent a letter of intent directly to the board of directors saying, we want to purchase your company. Here the here's the deal where we want to do it in stock. The stock is currently valued at fifty four billion dollars. Now Disney itself was being valued somewhere in the sixty six billion dollar range. H but again, it was kind of struggling at the time. So comcast hope was that the Board of directors would come and talk to Comcast and they would be able to work this out, and that uh you know, maybe the word board of directors thought this would be the best approach in order to make money for shareholders for Disney shareholders, and the attempt was huge news because the number of properties that would have been involved were significant. Disney at that time was already the parent company of ESPN and ABC, so those would fall under the role of Comcast. Then Comcast the delivery system would also be in control of ABC and ESPN, and people were worried that this would mean Comcast would be able to leverage that over other providers. So let's say Time Warner Cable and it comes up and Comcast says, hey, I own ESPN, and if you want ESPN to run on your cable networks to your cable customers, you're gonna have to pay X amount to have access to that content. Uh, you know, it would have been a very powerful leveraging tool, but there was no need to worry about that. The deal actually fell through when shareholders for both Disney and Comcast were resisting the move for different reasons. Comcast stock price fell eleven percent over the time from when they announced the bid to the time when they decided to walk away. Now, because the stock price fell eleven percent, and because their bid was about an exchange of stock, the value of the stock they were bidding fell, I mean, it wasn't as valuable as it used to be. This would be as if I went up to you and said, hey, I want to buy your shoes for ten bucks, and you say, well, I'll think about it, and the next day I come up to you with a ten dollar bill. But in that time, the value of ten dollars has decreased, meaning the buying power of that ten dollars is less. It's similar, except now we're talking about actual stock, not the value of currency. But the point being that what used to be worth fifty four billion dollars was now worth less than that, So that made it a much less attractive deal for the Disney board of directors. Meanwhile, the board of the board of Directors are also getting the message from their shareholders, we don't want you to sell this company to Comcast, and since both parties were receiving this kind of resistance, Comcast announced it would drop the bid just a few months after it had first announced its intention and uh and Roberts had said he was very disappointed in the Disney board of directors for not coming in and communicating with him. He thought that it was the best deal for both companies. Meanwhile, the board of directors didn't uh didn't really dignify that particular statement with a response. Also into the and for Comcast purchased a little company called tech TV and who boy, is this a heck of a story. So Comcast carried a company a channel called G four, which catered to video game fans. It was mostly content related to video games in some way, including things like review shows, shows that just did clips of video games, uh, game shows that were video game related, lots of stuff like that. Tech TV, on the other hand, was a more general technology based channel where they had everything from product reviews to h question and answer like people could call in and ask experts how to do certain things with their computers, like how to install motherboards, that kind of stuff like actual technical help UM, as well as shows that were things like like they had their own video game review shows, so there were there were competing shows on the two channels. So Comcast purchases tech TV in two thousand four and then merges it with G four, creating the G four Tech TV channel, and then kind of letting the two slates of of programming battle it out to see which ones would remain and which ones they would get rid of. And I've got a lot of friends who worked either for G four or tech TV, and I hope to do an episode in the future. I've already recorded some interviews about this. Actually, I hope to do an episode in the future about tech TV and G four and the merging of the two, and to include interview segments that I have gathered over time. So that's something I want to do in the future, and it will definitely be a long episode, probably a multi partner because it was so complicated. It was a venture that people when when these channels first started, they were really excited about them because this was these were industry is that were all getting more and more important. Over time. People were getting more interested in technology and computers and video games. But when you get these big corporations like Comcast involved, sometimes the ideas that people had when they first founded the channel end up getting changed or lost or or discarded, and uh, it creates a very emotional kind of story. So keep in tune with tech stuff. Let me know if that sounds interesting to you, because I do hope to do it in the future. I still have to do several more interviews in order to get kind of a full story of it. We're about to wrap up the Comcast story as of two thousand and fifteen at any rate, but first we need to take another quick break moving on with Comcast. By the way, GIF tech TV doesn't exist anymore. In case you were wondering if if you weren't aware, G four tech TV eventually went away and I believe became the Spike Network. If I'm not mistaken, or it's no, it's Esquire, I'm sorry, it's the Esquare network. I believe um Esquire would eventually take over for G four tech TV, and so that channel no longer exists and a lot of good people worked for that channel over time. Anyway, two thousand five, Comcast joins a group of investors, which included Sony Corporation of America, to purchase a twenty steak in Metro Goldwyn Meyer better known as MGM Studios, so the entertainment studios that produced lots of movies, including the James Bond franchise. It turned out to be a pretty tough investment, so five years later, in two thousand ten, MGM would file for Chapter eleven bankruptcy and they would emerge from bankruptcy after a little more than a month after entering bankruptcy with the creditors MGMs creditors taking control of the company. So that was a pretty rough time. I mean, it was an investment, it was a gamble, and unfortunately for the investors, the market for DVDs was really falling out by that point and that ended up taking a big hit. MGM took a big hit from that. That same year two five that is, Comcast unveiled at digital phone service and plans to purchase internet businesses, further getting involved in both the delivery and production of cable content both on TV and on the Internet. So if you have ever looked at Comcast Exfinity, which is the brand for their digital service to homes, you often will see that it can be bundled where you get phone service, cable television, and Internet broadband all bundled together. That's, you know, a calculated approach that com guests made back in this time. In two thousand seven, that's when Comcast actually acquired Fandango, the movie ticket service, the one that kind of precipitated this whole discussion about Comcast in the first place, because if you recall from episode one of this series, I mentioned that I started looking into this after I had problems buying Star Wars tickets because the Fandango service had been overwhelmed by demand and it pretty much collapsed. By the way, in case you were worried, I did eventually get Star Wars tickets for opening night. I just had to wait till the next morning. It's just I am not a good Jedi. I don't have patience, So it was a tough, tough twenty four hours or so. At any rate, Comcast purchased Fandango back in two thousand and seven, and uh, Fandango is one of those services that I personally find a little rustrating. I much prefer when movie theaters have their own, uh theater specific services to to sell tickets to customers, because you don't have to worry if there's a huge amount of demand for the overall film, typically speaking, because it's distributed amongst all those theaters. It's when you have a centralized service where all that demand is going to a single collection of servers where you start running into these problems. And granted the Star Wars issue was a special case, it's not like that's going to happen with every movie. For example, Jim and the Holograms. Don't think that one's going to collapse the system, even though it's truly outrageous, truly, truly, truly outrageous. So two thousand seven, Fendango acquisition happens. UM I could go on about the cable service companies that Comcast acquired over the next few years is but by now you guys are all familiar with that story. It's the same story over and over. It's just the names and the prices change from case to case. In an effort to grow the company and increase the number of customers, Comcast kept acquiring other businesses, including ones like Patriot Media, Susquehanna Communications, and others. UH and Comcast and Time Warner together would split up the assets of another company called Adelphia Communications. Adelphia had gone bankrupt and so as part of the UH in order to settle the debt that Adelphia had acquired, they started selling off assets, and Comcast and Time Warner we're both allowed to buy up some of those, which not great news necessarily if you wanted more competition, uh, since these were the two big players in the United States at that same time. Comcast continued to launch channels like fear Net and Exercise TV, and so they were controlling the distribution and content in an effort to set itself apart from competing cable and satellite services. Also, the Walt Disney Company, while it was not open to a hostile takeover bid, it did sell off its thirty nine share in the E Networks to Comcast. So Comcast was able to pick up a significant share in those those uh, those companies, those those networks, they didn't have controlling interest, but is nothing to sneeze at now. That doesn't even cover the continued interest in wireless broadband. Comcast was one of the companies that invested in clear Wire Corporation, for example, so Comcast was still very much interested in expanding in that industry as well. And the next really big big piece of news dates to two thousand nine and that's when it was announced that g E had agreed to sell controlling stake in NBC Universal to Comcast. Now, the approval for this deal would take quite some time. Congress scrutinized this deal, and it wasn't until two thousand eleven that Congress approved the deal, and the acquisition itself wouldn't be complete until two thousand thirteen. So from two thousand nine to two thousand thirteen this deal was taking place. That's how big a deal we're talking about here. And the approval from Congress was actually conditional. It wasn't yeah, go ahead and you can buy them. And they actually had some some specific conditions that the companies had to adhere to. Comcast had to make assurances that it wouldn't prevent NBC programming from airing on competing broadcast services. They couldn't just say, well, now anything that's on NBC can only air on Comcast, or it can air on other stations, but only if you pay an outrageous premium for the broadcast. That was part of the agreement that Comcast would not make those kind of moves um. It also sparked another round of discussions about net neutrality, making certain delivery services aren't so wrapped up in programming that they begin to tinker with accessibility. And uh, this is still a big deal today. I mean, this is a giant thing about about these distribution companies getting involved in content on this level, and as they own more and more of it, there's a greater concern that they will cause real issues for customers, that it hurts the customer In the long run. It's a great business decision, you know, from the business side, you can't argue it because it's gonna make tons of money for shareholders. But as a customer, as the person who comes home and wants to watch television, it's a negative experience, or it can be. It can certainly lead to one. So that's why these conditions were built in to the agreement. And then in two thousand and fourteen, skipping ahead to that, Comcast made a move to acquire its competitor, Time Warner Cable and this is when the Internet totally lost its mind. For very good reason. This action, more than any other, brought that net neutrality argument into the spotlight. Comcast was essentially saying that they wanted to buy its chief competitor, which would drastically reduce options for customers in numerous markets, which Comcast actually argued was a benefit to the customer if you can believe it. Now, keep in mind again, and most markets, customers don't have that much choice. They might have a choice of one cable provider and maybe one or two satellite providers, which is getting fewer and fewer anyway because of other acquisitions and consolidations. But that's it. They don't necessarily you know, it's it's it's rare. When you're in an area where you're like, well, I can get either Time Warner or I can get Comcast. It may be that you have either Comcast or a mobile wireless provider or satellite, and that's it. You don't have option between cable companies in other words, and that is problematic. And Comcast was arguing that by buying Time Warner it would actually be an improvement to customers by streamlining everything. But when asked about it, when when people said, well, does this mean that since there be no competition, you could lower the customer bill, they said no, not necessarily. So, in other words, customers would not see any benefit from this. The the benefits of competition are that companies will start to offer better prices and better options for customers in an effort to win more customers. But when you don't have competition, there's no reason to do that. In fact, you want to have higher prices because you can't go anywhere else for those services. That's the reason why monopolies are frowned upon and and normally either prevented or broken up. Although, as we talked about in our A T and T podcast, even the efforts to break up monopolies don't last forever. Often these companies will coalesce back together kind of like kind of like a planet getting broken up into space and then the gravity's crushes all the pieces back together, so you have a planet again. It's almost the same thing. Uh. Anyway, I don't want to get off on a total rant there, but if you listen to episodes about A T and T about net neutrality, those sort of discussions go into greater detail about this sort of stuff. Anyway. Uh, there are only a few markets that really allow you to have some choice in the United States, and that's a real problem. And people opposed to the Time Warner deal argued that if it went through, there'd be a true monopoly in cable service in the United States, it would belong to Comcast. Now, there were also numerous examples of regions that were passing laws restricting public broadband initiatives. In other words, lobbyists for the cable industry we're working with politicians to make difficult or even illegal for a government to offer broadband service as a utility. And there are certain areas in the United States where this was a big deal, specifically in places like Chattanooga. If Joe McCormick was in here, he's from Chattanooga, he could tell you about the crazy fast Internet service that people in Chattanooga can get through municipal WiFi, and cable companies really battle against that. They say it's unfair, which blows my mind, but that would be an entirely different episode for me to go into all of those details. At any rate, municipal broadband service became a battleground which continues to this day. The Federal Communications Commission has ruled that states are allowed to offer up broadband services, but cable interests are still fighting that decision and appealing it and arguing that the FCC doesn't really have the authority to make that statement. In the first place, just as they resist other competitors like Google Fiber entering their turf. So what cable companies have done is they've divided up the United States into into neighborhoods that they can effectively control because they're the only party in town, and then they do their best to keep everybody else out. And again, this makes perfect sense from a business perspective. You don't want competition to come in and shake things up. But for customers it's not such a great story. So it gets pretty ugly and a lot of people, especially on my side of this, have a lot of harsh things to say. And I will again try to avoid editorializing anymore than I already have. Uh And it's it's entirely possible that I have blinders on here. It's not like I think that the other companies are necessarily altruistic, but I always like to see more competition rather than less. Anyway, back to Time Warner. That's what started this whole digression of the first place, was the proposal for Comcast to acquire Time Warner. The deal would involve around forty five billion dollars in stock, and Congress began to scrutinize the deal, and a lot of advocacy groups were calling for the deal to just be outright rejected. Comcast agreed to divest itself of nearly four million subscribers, essentially handing them over to Charter Communications, and this was supposed to be a sign of good faith, saying Comcast had no plan on taking over the entire industry. Charter Communications would still be there and they had three point nine million more subscribers than they had before because Comcast was giving them up. So see, there's competition. There's still Charter Communications. It's not like by buying time Warder all cable would be Comcast for now, never mind the fact that once again there's not true competition in most markets. Anyway, while the deal was being considered, a T and T also announced its plans to acquire Direct TV for forty nine billion dollars, which added fuel to the fire of people worried about net neutrality and about media consolidation. There were tons of people now looking at these two major deals saying, we really need to think about this because if we go down this pathway, customers could be really hurt by the lack of choice. Further down, the road. In April two fifteen, Comcast and Time Warner announced that they were dropping the deal after numerous challenges and delays were brought up against it, and it was also rumored that the Department of Justice in the United States was leaning towards denying the deal in the first place, so walking away might have also been an attempt to make it seem as though the two companies had arrived at this decision themselves, rather than it being forced upon them by another party. The ongoing challenges for Comcast today include the FCC wanting to classified broad band as a title to utility, which Comcast and other cable companies are challenging. And also this is really troubling for cable companies, especially well specifically cable TV companies. There's a flagging interest in cable television. This is not a big surprise for most of my listeners. I'm sure, I bet there are a lot of you out there who are cable chord cutters. You know you've you've cut the chord for cable TV, and you get your entertainment through the Internet, but not through television. You might feed the Internet to your TV, but you're not getting it through cable TV. I'm sure there are a lot of you out there who are doing that right now, and I bet there's some of you out there who are fall into the category that is now being called cord never's. Cord never's are people who have never subscribed to cable television. So we're talking about young adults who have never taken it upon themselves to get cable TV. They're not interested. It's not how they consume entertainment. They get everything they want through the Internet or through over the air broadcast, but they've never seen the value of subscribing to a cable television service. We're seeing both of those populations grow over time. Now that means that cable television providers are experiencing a crunch. They're losing customers who are cutting the cord, and they're not gaining new customers fast enough because more and more people are choosing not to ever subscribe to cable TV in the first place. So you're getting a narrowing band of customers for cable television, which is really created an error of desperation in that industry. And it means that you're getting some some pretty hard moves in that that industry and it could ultimately mean that in the future, our television content will primarily come through the Internet, and cable TV as a thing will no longer exist. The industry it self will cease, and we'll have a totally different model for delivering television and creating television. That's a possibility. It's still going to take some time for that to happen. I mean, it's not like cable TV is in so much trouble that it could crumble at any second. It's still a huge, multibillion dollar industry. It's just a multibillion dollar industry that already is seeing loss of customers on either side of it, people leaving and new people not coming in. So it'll be really interesting to see where that goes over the next i'd say decade decade um. I think we're gonna see more and more people turn to the Internet. We're gonna see more services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon offering up their own original content that you can only get through those services. I know that Disney is looking at the possibility of launching its own streaming service as well, So it may be that in the future, instead of subscribing to a cable company and then picking a package that gives you certain channels. You may have to pick between different streaming video services. In fact, you already do for certain things, like you might not be an Amazon Prime member, which means you don't get certain Amazon shows, or you might not be a Netflix subscriber, which means you don't get certain Netflix shows or Hulu. All of these have original content and in order to access it you have to subscribe to the to the services generally speaking, so maybe in the future we have more and more of those, which puts the burden still on the customer. You have to decide what you're willing to pay for and what you don't you feel is not worth the money. You just you just don't see it. But it's bad news for cable TV providers. Comcasts, however, of course, is in the position where it's not just a cable TV provider, it's a content provide fighter and its Internet broadband provider, so it has some other businesses that it wants to protect, and it may be that in the next few years we see Comcast doubled down on Internet content and broadband delivery, We'll probably also see Comcast continue to fight competition in those spaces, specifically, things like the entrance of Google Fiber into different regions. So that's what I think we're going to see in the future. For Comcast. It's gonna be more of a focus on broadband um and and Internet content, and we'll price see some pretty tough battles for municipal WiFi, for municipal broadband, for UH stuff like Google Fiber to be allowed to come into neighborhoods, and personally encouraged by the direction I've seen over the last year or two where it looks like the general consensus is that competition is a good thing. I don't even hate Comcast specifically. I I I have very strong opinions because of my own personal experience with this company. But that's my own personal experience and it's not a universal experience, and I would never suggest that my experience is the same that everyone else has had. But I love to see competition because it means that customers have choice, and I would much prefer to have choice than to be forced into using a specific provider because there is no other option, because that means that I can't weigh my options and make a decision. I have no deciding power. Um By creating that sort of competition. I can make those decisions, and maybe I stay with Comcast. Maybe I decided that's the best way for UH for me to get the access I need, or maybe I switched to a competitor like Google Fiber, which is rolling out service in Atlanta as I record this, UM and it will probably take another couple of years before that's complete. But the fact is that I think the more choice you have, the better better off you are as a consumer, up to a point. Obviously, if you have five hundred choices, then you have another problem ahead of you, which is, how do you decide among five hundred candidates, which one is the best. I hope you enjoyed that classic series on Comcast. As I said, I planned to do a part three, and who knows, it may already be out. In fact, maybe you listen to that one first, in which case, welcome back in time. And yeah, the cable industry has seen a lot of disruption over the last few years. We've seen a decline in cable subscriber numbers. UM not from you know, I s P service like actual cable SERVI this, but cable TV service certainly has seen a decline. So it'll be interesting to see how these companies all pivot. We've seen evidence of that with all the various acquisitions and mergers over the years. We're seeing it right now with Discovery, Warner Brothers, UM actually Warner Brothers Discovery. Sorry I've mishmashed the names there, but yeah, we're seeing cable networks, cable providers, all these companies try and adjust to a world that's moving away from the cable TV UH format. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover on future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out and let me know. One way to do that is to download the I Heart radio app is free to download and use. You can navigate over to the tech Stuff part of that app. Just search for tech Stuff in the search bar. You'll see that there will be a little microphone icon on the Tech Stuff that lets you leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in length, and you can let me know what you would like me to cover in future episodes. If you would prefer not to do that, you can always leave me a message on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.