beginning saturday morning at eight eastern through monday morning at eight eastern. ..

>> guest: i can move from one thing to the next quickly, and it's great fun. i oversee all three businesses, and, um, and, you know, all the programming and marketing aspects and business aspects, and it's a lot of fun. i love, you know, managing the process and managing people, and most of all these great brands. >> host: and we're sitting right across from your booth here, we're neighbors, c-span and your brands. but tell people the three channels that you manage. >> guest: well, there's comedy central, there is spike tv, and there is tv land. >> host: and how have the demographics changed for each of those? >> guest: well, three distinct channels with three distinct audiences. comedy central's targeting generally young men, spike's slightly older men. more for guys, spike tv more for guys, more for men, and tv land's more for adults.

spike and comedy central are going for guys, and the land's a 50/50 split. >> host: you're being honored today with the vanguard award for programming, so congratulations. >> guest: thank you very much. >> host: you've been in the business a long time now. >> guest: 30 years. i was talking to my colleague about remembering the first show i ever went to when i was working for the cable news network, the then-fledgling cable news network, and ted turner was working the booth. >> host: we seem to be on the precipice, you keep hearing again and again of the explosion in the merger of the internet and traditional television, whatever that is today. how do you hope to exploit that as all of these services integrate and, also, explode with speed? >> guest: well that, you know, that's the question that's on everybody's mind, and that's a subject that we're all discussing every day endlessly. um, but i do know and i'm pretty certain that, um, the answer is

it all revolves around programming. and original programming. so none of these platforms mean anything without programming and without content. so whether you're a cable operator or a satellite distributer or you're netflix or hulu or whoever u you're going to need content. as long as we continue to create great, compelling content, ultimately, we're going to be okay because that's really what this is all about, and that's what people want. and they want more than ever and in as many ways as possible, and they want it when they want it. how it gets figured out and how we make money doing it, i think we're going the get there. but, again, the key is creating the content and, you know, i have to agree with sumner redstone that content is king. >> host: the choices available for people, i mean, you've built brands for 30 years in somewhat established ways.

the choices were narrower, but when you look at the amount of choices available and the platforms especially younger people are using, how do you perceive that you'll be able to establish new brands with the multiplicity of choices going forward? >> guest: well, i think the established brands, you know, are going to be paramount in helping us to establish new brands or subbrands, you know? whereas, you know, sort of broadcast networks has almost turned into barker channels at this point, people aren't showing up at 8:00 anymore to watch that particular show, but they will hear about it, and they will ultimately get there. i feel like, um, you know, the comedy centrals of the world, the spike tvs, the tv lands, the mtvs, the espns, the cnns, whoever it is, we've still got the reach and the power to market in a way that really can't be challenged at this point. >> host: because the loyalty of your established viewership allows you to -- >> guest: well, i think it's an

advantage. by the way, that won't be the only way you can do it, and there will be those guys who do break out of the pack of millions. because, you know, the sort of barrier for entry on the internet is not very great. um, but then you've got to find it. it's like panning for gold. now, there will be some things that break out over time. something great will happen there, and explode up, but it ain't going to be everybody. and they've got a lot of competition once they, you know, once they do rise up in terms of a lot of the great, established brands in the world. >> host: there are some growing pains at this point. there are intellectual property challenges, contract issues being fought out in the courts. do you assume that we'll get past these growing pays or that they'll get more complex as time goes on? >> host: people continue to move past them on an issue by issue basis, but it feels to me like every day you wake up, and there's a new issue.

there's a new platform, for sure, which brings a new issue with it. so i feel like that's an ongoing, you know, sort of evolution. i'm, you know, it felt like there was a period over the last sort of, i don't know, 15 years where we were just kind of in this place where everything was kind of -- we understood where everything was going and where everything was going to be, and then at some point, you know, the world exploded on us. and i think that's going to be going on for the next couple years. it's going to be a lot of disruptions. but, you know, i think we'll get there, you know? this is, this is an industry with great leadership, um, and a lot of smart people who are doing a lot of smart things. and, you know, to date i feel like the right steps are being taken and no one's running off and, you know, in a way that, you know, puts everything in jeopardy. >> host: how does comcast's purchase of nbc, there merger of the two, how does that change

the competitive land scape for you? >> guest: you know, in terms of how we approach them as distributers which is what our relationship with them, you know, again, we're going to assume that, you know, we will, you know, we'll continue to have the kind of relationship we've had overall. we're, you know, because we're a pure content company and we're very comfortable being a pure content company and that's what we want to be, you know, we look at that as, okay, they're big with a lot of moving pieces, we're going to keep on doing what we're doing, and in that regard we should be able to maintain the relationship we've had with them traditionally where we're a content provider, and they're a distributer. and, you know, they might be looking at the world differently given the business that they're now in, and we'll see how that, you know, sort of manifests itself over time. but, you know, um, in terms of how we view ourselves and view our relationship day-to-day, i'm not sure there's a great change of -- >> host: thinking about access to their cis customers now that they have programming services that they are responsible for.

>> guest: again, you know, if you continue to do what we've done historically which is, um, create great brands -- >> host: that people want. >> guest: -- that people want, that just always is the key. it wins every day, you know? giving people what they want and everything else be damned. >> host: you made reference earlier to netflix and hulu. they think the cable industry has their head somewhat in the sand about the potential for growth for these so-called over the top services. what's your view about what their game plan might be and how it would affect you as a content provider? >> guest: you know, right now, you know, we're just taking it one step at a time with them and, you know, sort of a very short, looking at everything sort of short term. we'll see where it goes down the line. as a programmer, you know, i'm more concerned of are they going to be competing with me in terms of making original programming one day, competing on that level. that's something we are looking at and talking about quite a bit. in terms of, you know, how we view them as a distributer, um, you know, we, like i said, it's

sort of a one day at a time kind of thing. you know, we've got tremendous relationships in the satellite and cable community, and those are very important to us and a big part of our business, and, you know, where netflix and hulu end up, you know, remains to be seen. >> host: in the copyright area, how concerned are you about piracy particularly on an international basis with your established brands, and what are you looking for from doj or washington in that regard? is. >> guest: well, you'll probably see a big issue for us at via come, para-- viacom, paramount pictures has been a real leader in terms of how they're pursuing people who infringe on their copyright. viacom's really leading the charge. look, it's a big issue, and, you know, it's a little, it's been a little bit like, you know, you find a leak, and you plug it up and then all of a sudden, you know, another one, you know, springs up. but, you know, we're at it, we're diligent about it, and

it's something that's got to be conquered and managed going forward because, you know, making sure everybody gets paid for this content is, you know, that's the business. and without it we don't have one. >> host: another aspect of getting paid for it is this whole concept of being able to track your services on multiple platforms. what is your message to nielsen about getting with the program, being able to understand actually where the eyeballs are? >> guest: another big issue. look, we want to be where the audience is, and the audience is clearly, you know, givenning to -- beginning to, you know, use and interact and use our content on various platforms in various different ways, and it's incumbent upon us and, ultimately, nielsen to make sure that we can get credit for that. um, again because that's how we're going to keep this business healthy and vibrant, um, and continue to invest in our programming so we can make more great content. >> host: came from the opening session where brian roberts, the head of comcast, demonstrated

lightning-fast speed of infinity and smart program announcements. and also the connection with facebook and other social apps platforms. what does that mean for you with regard to social media services and how they help you expand your brand? >> guest: i mean, that's incredibly exciting. we are, um, of course, all our brands and across the company we are great fans and users of social media. and we see it as an enormous tool in order to market what we're doing, to communicate with our audience, to have a back and forth dialogue with our awd dense and, you know, whether it's a paramount, you know, pictures feature -- i'm sure you read a lot about super 8 and the success they had in marketing that via twitter -- or a show we launched last night, aptly divorced on tv land in which we utilized facebook, twitter, etc.

again, this is where the audience is. they are very much engaged with these processes, and we're there, we want to be there, and i think it's a great tool. um, first of all, i find it fascinating as a consumer, and, you know, from a business standpoint it's got a lot of great opportunities. you know, comedy central where we have a young guy audience, you know, we have seen ourselves, um, as we market things moving away from traditional, you know, marketing. we're less now about billboards and, um, print magazines and more so online in social media which is where that audience is. particularly young guys. >> host: right over your shoulder is a very large picture of jon stewart. >> guest: he looms large over my shoulder at all times. >> host: he'll be happy to hear that, i'm sure. last summer our network carried the colbert/stewart rally on the mall in washington. talk to me about your plans to

be involved in the upcoming election. >> guest: well, you know, active to the point where we sort of, you know, it's something of great interest to jon and stephen and their audiences. we have this semiannual, not semiannual, i guess -- we call it every two years, biannual? thank you. we have a biannual thing we call indecision. so, you know, our next round of indecision is coming up. that's what we call our coverage, and, you know, jon will be out there, stephen will be out there. they have become, um, very important stops for a lot of people who are looking to send a message despite the fact that we're a comedy channel which is, you know, incredible enough. but they'll be right in the thick of it. but, you know, we don't, you know, we're not a news organization. we're there to make people laugh, we're there to take a look at the world and the process and, ultimately, make fun of it, and that's what they'll be doing. um, but we look forward to it. you know, having an election

year, um, on comedy central with jon and steven is sort of an olympic year, you know? we get a lot of attention, more viewers flock to us because like the olympics everybody's interested in the big race. and it's a good time for us. [laughter] >> host: sticking with that note, new book coming out ben shapiro has written. you are among the several programming executives featured. he makes the case there are just not enough conservatives represented. do you agree with that charge on his part, and are you concerned that the gop house or the people that follow them might bring up issues in the election year? >> guest: um, i'm not sure i agree with him completely, um, you know, that's a very specific view. and whether that becomes an issue in this election is hard to, it's hard for me to imagine. with everything that's going on in the world, that that's where folks are going to focus.

only time will tell, and i've certainly been wrong before. [laughter] >> host: as we close since you're talking to c-span, tell me a wit about your concern -- a bit about your concerns for washington and how they might effect your business. >> guest: oh, gosh. i'm not sure i have anything i would specifically say to washington except that, um, you know, it's a, you know, it's a complicated era that we're moving into in terms of, you know, as we talked about all the new platforms, all the race duptions and all the -- all the disruptions and all the issues facing us. and we've had a tremendous relationship over the past 30 years and have helped this industry build itself up to the place where it is today. and, you know, we're not done yet, and we certainly look forward to their partnership and cooperation and support going forward. and taking this industry to the next level over the next 30 years. >> host: doug herzon,

congratulations again on your award, and thank you for spending time with "the communicators." >> guest: thank you. >> host: we are on the floor of the 2011 cable tv convention in chicago with kevin leddy who's been in this business now for more than 30 years, is that right? >> guest: a little bit more, actually, 34. >> host: hard to get reminded of all the time going by. i want to start there because of your perspective of how this business has changed. give me your snapshot of where it is as a business right now. >> guest: certainly a terrific business for time warner cable. you know, we spun off from time warner about two years a and our stock price is up 200% since we spun off. cash flow's up, revenue's up, commercial business is going great, high speed data business is going great, so it's a great time to be in cable. >> host: tell me about your specific job. >> guest: i have a lengthy title which is executive vice president of technology policy and product management. and i work for the cto of the

company, and my real day-to-day responsibilities are to help create a long-term technology strategy for the company that supports all the new products and services that we want to introduce over two years. >> host: time warner made a lot of headlines this year when you announced your new aps for ipad. will you talk to me about what the goal of that is and where it is in if it deployment? -- in its deployment? >> guest: the ipad app is part of a much broader goal, the goal of our video product strategy is for any. any content on any device anytime anywhere. and we've made great progress against that strategy over the last few years. one of the key enablers of the strategy is better navigation, and can that better navigation can either come from improvements to our settop box

or using consumer electronics devices to navigate the content. so we're pursuing both. we're improving navigation on our settops by building a high-speed data pipe to those settops so that they can do functions accessed from the cloud, they can do search funks, find programming more easily, download better graphics, have a better visual experience on the settop. but the other half of that strategy is to use the power of consumer electronics devices. so ipads have tremendous capability, big processers in them, a lot of graphics capability, a beautiful visual display. so customers can use an ipad to view our content, but more and more they're going to use ipads to navigate the content that's available to them. so we'll have a better guide available through the ipad.

you'll be able to use your ipad as a remote control, and you'll be able to find what you want more easily. >> host: when you use the word ipad s that a generic term for tablets or are you talking about ipad specific? >> guest: we started with the ipad, but we'll serve lots of other tablets. we'll work with samsung, we're working with the android tablet, we'll expand to iphones and destroyed phones, and we're -- droid phone, and we're creating a video portal through pcs. >> host: since launch which has not been that long ago, you've already got 360,000 people who have signed up for the ipad app? >> guest: the downloads are now over 500,000. >> host: did that exceed your expectations? >> guest: yes, it did. now, there are some of those downloads, to be fair, outside of our footprint. it's not always clear to cus customers --

>> host: people want the service, but they can't get it. >> guest: it's not always clear whether they're time warner customers. a very large percentage of the people who have ipads in our footprint have downloaded the application, and they're using it more and more all the time. >> host: and how many channels are available on it? >> guest: we've only got 80 channels on it today. we don't have the local broadcast channels available yet, and we don't have a lot of sports programming. so as we administer sports and local broadcasters, we expect the usage to go up quite a bit. >> host: we should be fair, you're the second largest facility for c-span, and tell people about the c-span applications are available as well. but it's not been without launch bumps. for example, a lawsuit against viacom, disney, i believe, has also raised concerns about having its products screened under you're current contract negotiations. your job involves policy and technology, are you concerned about these initial issues on content providers' part?

>> guest: no. i can't really speak very much about that issue because we're in the lawsuit, but, um, we believe we have the right to stream content on a customer's premise. it acts pretty much like an additional outlet, any oh screen in the -- any other screen in the house. >> host: over time you expect the industry will come to some sort of resolution about this. >> guest: yeah. i think you're right, susan, it will. >> host: one of this things you're talking about here is monetizing this in a way that you can capture the people using the services for advertising purposes. how do you see that progressing? >> guest: i think we need to report the viewership, so we're working with nielsen for an application that would report that viewership so that the network can get credit for it and monetize it through advertising. that's an important part of getting on all these other devices. >> host: is it a technological solution from nielsen? how do you see that as being addressed? is. >> guest: i'm not sure. but i think the most straightforward way to do it is

to have nielsen download an application to the ipad and monitor that usage. >> host: your boss, glen brit, has been quoted, and he's been talking about the fact here that broadband is going to be the major business for time warner in the years ahead, that, in fact, you can even see yourself beginning to serve broadband-only customers in a more frequent basis. can you talk to us about your strategy with regard to that and how much work you're doing that falls into that strategy? is. >> guest: i think video is still the foundation of our business, so we need to continue to improve video. it's the main reason most of our customers have our services in their home. so we will do everything we can to remain very competitive on our video offerings. but there are some customers, for example, directv and echo star customers that get their video from somebody else and use our high-speed day saw -- data as their internet access.

so we'll enable that, too, out of our 14.5 million customer relationships today, two million customers only take high-speed data from us already. >> host: let me go back to your use of the tablet as a better navigation tool. you did a panel session. can you talk to me a little bit more about that concept and where that, how it's progressing? >> guest: yeah. a lot of it comes back to something i was talking about a minute ago which is using cloud-based computing to enhance navigation. we've always been constrained in our navigators by the capabilities of the settop box which have good processers in the them but relatively limited, relatively limited graphics capabilities. but if we can start to access servers at our head end, then we can do much more intelligent navigation. we can give customers a lot more information about the programming that they're

viewing, we can start to do recommendation engines similar to what you see from amazon and other online providers who are recommending books to you. if you want a recommendation engine to recommend programming to you, it will enable that. you'll also get a lot better graphics about the programming, so you'll see dvd box art, you'll see some scenes from the movie. it'll be much more intelligent than what you've got to do on a settop. >> host: now, a lot of that intelligence comes from the use of cookies or being able to track people's preferences. that gets into the whole arena of privacy and people worried about how much of their own processes are being scored. how are you approaching that with regard to providing services while customers are more and more concerned about privacy? >> guest: i think, you know, the cable industry is extremely careful about privacy. part of the regulations that govern our industry have talked

about privacy for years, so we've always been very, very careful about it. if we provide a recommendation engine for customers, it'll be on an opt-in basis. >> host: do you foresee the day that there will be no longer settop boxes in be people's homes? >> guest: yes. so that's the other half of what we're demonstrating here at the show this week. we have our services streaming directly to a samsung television and a sony television. so you get over into the cable net area. um, the television manufacturers are creating what they call connected tvs or smart tvs in the case of samsung they have browsers in them, and similar to the ipad we can create applications with our navigator to download to those televisions. so today we're streaming 80 channels in our demonstration, the same 80 channels that are going to the ipad are also

going to the samsung television. that samsung television can also access the continue tent that's -- content that's stored on dvrs in a customer's home, so you don't need a settop box on that tv. and the sony television is accessing our video on demand directly through the network, too, without a settop box. >> host: where is all of that integration and innovation originating? is it the consumer electronics manufacturers? is it some working group that brings all of the parties together? can you tell me how it's being developed? >> guest: we're both in very competitive industries, so trying to work out those partnerships in if large forums is difficult. but individually we can partner with them and work these things out. so we're working with sony directly and samsung directly, but i can't imagine that they would want to sit down together and work these things out.

>> host: so time warner's -- excuse me, going directly to these manufacturers with these innovations? >> guest: that's right. they're in our laboratories in denver working with our engineers. >> host: but you already explained about the ipad app, the confusion on the part of customers, people wanting beyond the boundaries of the service area. how does this play forward as individual companies such as yourself are developing new applications that aren't widely available? >> guest: um, i think you're going to see lots of different applications on these televisions and not all of them will be available to all customers in all parts of the country. but we can, just as we do with the ipad, we can download an application to the samsung televisions that are in our footprint. so i think it'll be relatively clear to customers. >> host: how much are you keeping an eye on what other cable operators are develop anything the area of new products and saying, hey, i'd like to do that too?

i'm thinking, for example, as i ask this question comcast's partnership announcement with spike for video telephone calls over the television. are you looking around for ideas that you can then incorporate into your own company? >> >> guest: absolutely. all the time. we'll take any ideas from anybody, including our competitors and other cable companies. so i really like the skype application that comcast is going to be doing, and we're meeting with comcast and skype as well to see if we can do it too. >> host: social media, another area that's really been burgeoning. talk to me about how you see social media applications being deployed in your service areas and enhancing your business. >> guest: i think it's at another part of smart navigation, more intelligent navigation. um, you can either pick programming better yourself based on all the additional information we're going to give you, or there can be these recommendation engines that we talked about, or you can get recommendations from third parties.

we should have access to rotten tomatoes, for example, on the screen so that you can see nationally what other people have thought about a movie or a show. the fourth way would be to get opinions of your friends. so having facebook available on screen and letting teenagers or people in general talk about the programming they're watching while they're watching it, i think, will be very popular. the integration of social networking makes a lot of sense for navigation. >> host: one of the things that's happening then is people are watching tv, using applications and, possibly, doing social media while they're using your product, all of this creates additional demand on your broadband, on the pipe. and programming that we hear people have been talking about the multitasking that's going on which means that a single home that might have consumed eight hours of television in the past you now have