sherrod said, mother, i already sang to you, remember. i sang three verses of "beautiful savior." she didn't miss a beat. she said, i know, honey. you're better in a group. well, aren't we all. we need one another and we are so fateful and grateful that you are about to join us in the world. congratulations. on our road to the white house coverage, first lady michelle obama and ann romney wife of mitt romney were on the campaign trail this week. tonight at 8:00 eastern, c-span2 will show campaign stops by both. michelle obama in dale city, virginia, on women's health and ann romney in miami on cuban americans. tonight is the 68th annual radio and television congressional

correspondents dinner. john boehner is the keynote speaker with interment by wayne brady. live coverage begins at 9:00 p.m. eastern. two days of live coverage from the chicago tri bun's partners lit fest this weekend on book tv. gary crist and joe allen on the make of president day chicago. rich cohen on the banana man and latin america. that's at 1:00. at 5:00, r. duane bets was convicted as an adult at age 16. his memoir finds him coming of age in prison. sunday at noon, gail collins on texas's role in american politics. lind sea hillsum goes inside the end of gadhafi's libya at 1:00. at 2:00, thomas mallon has a story to tell in watergate a novel. this weekend on afterwards, madeleine albright on growing up in nazi occupied czechoslovakia.

book tv this weekend on c-span2. this is c-span3 with politics and public affairs programming throughout the week and every weekend 48 hours of people and events telling the american story on american history tv. get our schedules and see past programs at our websites. and you can join many the conversation on social media sites. we take you to boston now for the 2012 cable show. the annual gathering of the cable and television association kicked off with a keynote by michael powell. the former fcc chairman talked about the state of the cable industry and new advances. this is just over ten minutes. >> welcome to the great city of boston. and the 20 12 cable show. it's great to have governor patrick welcome us to this wonderful city. you know, when i joined ncta a

year ago, i set out to bring more creativity and energy into this industry. our efforts are bearing fruit. and you will see it reflected throughout this gorgeous convention hall. and our new ad campaign which is up in washington reflects the emotional connection we hope to get across in telling our story. let's take a quick look. >> cable is thriving with new energy and new products and a

very promising future. as the ad makes clear, cable is the platform that offers instant access to infin it possibilities. great programming, the web, friend and family and the hottest internet applications and devices. cable is how we connect to the world, and to one another. now americans they adore television. we watch about 147 hours of tv per month. which may not be entirely healthy, but there is no escaping the immense pleasure we get from the tube. television is the original social medium. watching is a communal experience. sharing what was on last night, convincing a friend to jump on the bandwagon of your favorite show and to catch up quickly so you can talk about it. the joy we feel watching something inspiring, the laughs we share taking in a great comedy and the exhilaration we

feel when our favorite team hits the winning shot at the buzzer. it's all available to us because the cable industry took a mediocre tv experience and made it better. once upon a time americans had only three channels that signed off at midnight at the sound of the star spangled banner. there was little diversity of content and static riddled pictures. cable delivered a technology that improved reception, expanded and diversified what we watch and gave artists a better canvas for making quality shows. dramas like homeland and madmen and educational content from discovery and history, kids programming on nickel odon, sportscenter, cooking shows and news and politics affairs from fixtures like cnn, c-span, cnbc and fox news. they've all made television a rich experience.

the fact that so many americans stuck with cable during the recession is a testament to our value, and our stability. but you know electronics communications does not stand still. the internet may be the most extraordinary advance in the history of information. ushering in an age of new and infin it possibilities. now leaders they take risks. and the cable industry chose to bet big on the promise of delivering broad band. it was an imbishs and risky play. one that is now paying off for consumers. over the doubts of many, cable got the job done. our industry has invested nearly $200 billion of private capital to build the infrastructure to get american online. the men and women who serve our industry pain stakingly dug, pulled and connected homes to the internet across the nation. and they did it without shuffle

ready stimulus fund from the government. cable broad band now reaches, that's worthy of applause i think. [ applause ] kaenl broad band reaches 93% of homes, rich, poor, urban. but the industry has never stopped pushing forward. we have increased broad band speed to over 900% in a decade. we're on the verge of delayed additional technologies to reach speeds so fast the internet itself may be unable to deliver content to match cable's last mile. the cable network makes it possible for us to tweet, and friend and goog. which are now household words. amazon was just a river in south america until national broad band made service the world's largest online retailer. last week fast book launched the

richest ipo in history for a tech company. we congratulate them and i'm sure the california department of revenue thanks them. that kind of extraordinary american success is only possible because of the rich and robust platform that supports it. we celebrate these successes and our progress but there's more to do. many americans still are not online and that needs to change. cable is working to increase adoption by partnering with the fcc to launch a low cost broad band service to low income families across america. this is absolutely critical. because a child without access to the internet will find life increasingly too difficult in the information age. for all cable has proudly done so far, we owe the consumer more. consumers want an imaginative future that blends the power of the web with the magic of television. this industry has never been

content to rest on aging business models. it has always looked to the future to provide consumers with the next exciting thing. too many incumbent industries have failed to keep pace with consumer preferences and disruptive technologies, but aassure you cable will not be one of them. we all know the challenges consumers face in today's dizzying digital marketplace. the consumer experience should be simpler. easier to find the content we want. easier interfaces to control our experience and less reliant on clunky set top boxes. we want the ability to get the content that we paid for here there be and everywhere. we say to consumers, we've heard your wish. and we're working to make it come true by delivering cable content to ipad, x box's, smart phones and whatever the next cool thing is that pops out. you should get greater value for

what you pay including additional services, content on other devices and content that cannot be found elsewhere. we have embarked on an exciting period of intense innovation. cable is experimenting with more portable services, fairer pricing models and more mobile web integration. it's a work in progress. there will be adjustments along the way. and we face competition and that is healthy. wireless broad band is enjoying atro synonymical growth. tell coes remain in the thick of the fight. and satellite companies continue to battle, convinced by their commercials that you will end up in a ditch selling your hair to a wig shop or have a grand kid with a nose ring if you don't get rid of cable. that may be over the top competition, but it's real. there is also a place for internet video providers to compete and compliment the cable model and yes, some con sumser may even cut the cord.

but at the end of the day, cable benefits from the competition. and will work even harder to compete fairly and effectively on value and consumer experience. as these challenges unfold, you can expect critics to weigh. compelling change rarely escapes the doomsayer chorus in washington. rather than dismiss these concerns out of hand, we will respect them and we'll weigh them carefully guided exclusively by our commitment to ensuring a better experience for consumers. but some naysayers are harping because they don't like the u.s. private enterprise model. they prefer a european style regulation with the government effectively owns on controls the network. pumping taxpayer money into subsidizing service and managing competition. they would like the government to have the last word on the pace and scope of innovation.

this would be a disastrous course to take. confiscating private networks to put our already broke government on the hook to keep tens of billions of dollars annually flowing into network innovation. letting politics allocate resources rather than economics and entrepreneurs who kill investment and leave the internet in a state we find today's post office, electric grid or crumbling trps system. a recent washington post article recently said our nation will need to spend $75 billion a year if you want to keep the lights on and your iphone charged. we'll need to spend $9.4 billion a year to keep the toilets flushing. and to do it all the country needs to spend some staggering $262 billion. in stark contrast broad band is thriving. fuelled by the dynamics of the free market. broad band is an american

success. a light regulatory model that favors free enterprise has led to a vibrant digital economy that is empowering educators, business owners and consumers no matter where they live. so i hope you are as excited as i am that we are holding our convention here in boston. this is a storied city with great people and a proud history. we hope to tap into that revolutionary spirit that gave birth to this great nation and continue building a great network worthy of the stars and stripes. thank you very much. thanks for joining us. and have a wonderful cable show. our coverage of the 2012 cable show in boston continues in a moment. but aaron burnett from cnn she sat down with aol chairman tim armstrong. time warner cable chairman and discovery communications president. they attended this annual gathering at the national cable

and telecommunications association. this portion is just over 35 minutes. >> thanks everybody for having us. we're thrilled to be here. it looks so packed in here. looks like there's even standing room only in the back. that's fantastic. we talked about basically the way things are right now in an industry that's changing so quickly especially with smart phones and i guess you have more people have smart phones and dvr's and people get killed walking down the street because they're on their smart phones now. so i wanted to start off by asking each of you, what are the -- how are things changing when it comes to video. a few years ago it was reality television. that was the hot thing. video games now. what's the hot sort of next thing that you're seeing people's use of video. we'll start with david and come

this way. >> good to see you. in some way there's no question that things are changing and that behavorially people are consuming more content on more platforms. we tried to break it in half. on the left side is our traditional cable business. spend more money on cone tent. five years ago we were spending about $550 million on content. now we spend over a billion to deliver great channels. we have over 13 channels in the u.s. we have been able to grow that market share. at the core of that is quality content with great story telling and great characters. the fact that there's now our content is on all platforms allows us to move that quality content in different forms. not too much long form. mostly short form on to all those platforms. for us the core mission is still the same. great quality content. now we have new windows. netflix was a new window for us. amazon, youtube with clips,

being on the web and even this past about two weeks ago we bought a company that distributes short form content but had 100 million streams in a month. and so when you see that be kind of behavorial change where people are consuming content on platforms that never existed before, it comes back, we think to that basic theme of quality content, great characters, great stories, and if you're in the content business, then you could participate in the value of all of that. >> we were joking behind stage that you know when everybody's watching. even though you can't always say because of the privacy concerns. but you know at any given moment. >> i think in some way it's the same and some ways it's challenging.

we often make fun of the cable package. seems like ab old thing and it's not moving forward. it's important to remember that close to 90% of the homes in america subscribe to mull channel tv to that package. either from cable or satellite or telephone. there aren't any products that that many people subscribe to or buy. so it's a very powerful thing. i think what we see happening is the use of technology to make them an even more powerful experience. so we have lots of devices that act like tv's now. we used to just have a big tv on the wall or whatever. now we have more in the house, portable, phones, tablets, whatever. consumers want their tv on all those devices. they want them on all the devices outside the home. they want to access programming when they want. not when the schedule says.

all that is changing. this idea of selling a package of tv programming for scription i think remains very powerful. it's just using the technology to make it better. >> i want to ask about the mobile in just a moment. you've been talking about in terms of you are a biggest investor in digital content. why is that and where? >> so first we file an agreement with them with the notion that content in important to dif rirnt platform. when you look at silicon valley it's not hard to see this is going to be more modernization. content will change that. the come back of aol to focus on content we see similar statistics on line that you see in cable landscape which is 0% of people use less than 15 internet brands a month. people download 30 to 40 apps. they use five to eight.

the curuation of content is signature cant overtime. when we look forward the next 50, 100 years the brands that are either existing are getting to get built in the future are going to get built in the next five years. i think people relying on bundle of content to live their lives. it saves time. theres to be an incredible opportunity to put together the next set of brands and we want to have some of those brands. >> as someone in the business of making content, i love that content is rising. the popularity of the pipe for the while. do people do want to watch -- it's unclear what they want to do. i don't have it with me. i feel nervous i reached down for me. on your smart phone they want to watch television or they want to play games or whatever it is. how is cable really delivering that? it's becoming clear at least, i think as a consumer that that could end up being the primary screen for a lot of people,

right? >> i think it's one of the primary screens. and people use these different devices for different things. they certainly use the length movie let's say than they might their big-screen tv. but they do other things on the phone. particularly watching short things like david was talking about. one of the things we're doing is we're starting to build out wi-fi in places where people congregate. a number of the cable companies today announced that we'll create a common standard for roaming across wi-fi and different cable companies. so the idea is if you're a broadband customer, you can access wi-fi on your tablet and most heavy data usage is wi-fi and not cellular frequencies. so we're very excite add about that initiative. we're building quite heavily in

los angeles right now. >> david, do you think tv everywhere i know has been -- it was evangelized and then a lot of criticism from analysts as of late. is it going to happen? that seems to me -- i hear it tv everywhere. i think, okay, that's got to be an obvious winner. >> i hope it happens. the great thing about tv everywhere, it gives an opportunity with a real business model for us to participate with glen and with the other distributors. which is unusual. we held back most of our content from the web because there wasn't a business model there. when we look at our library, we own all of the content for the last 20 years or so, the netflix model was atrack tiff because it was 18 months or older. tv everywhere is more exciting, if you are a time-warner cable subscriber and you're watching tlc on sunday night, you can come back later and watch any of the shows that you want, but it has the commercials. so on some of the other models, where there's no advertising, and in some cases there's no

measurement it's a particular challenge. here, the model really works. the challenge is that we as an industry have to come together. and if we do, i think that we'll provide a real value to consumers, but we'll do something that's going to happen anyway. somebody is going to come over the top -- if consumers behaviorally want to be able to see our channels and our shows and our characters when they want to see it, then somebody is going to figure out a way to facilitate that. there its nobody that has a better infrastructure or a better relationship with the subscribers than the cable operators. for us, i think it's important for us to paut side dif -- for us to put aside differences which we have this question of what is the right value, but we got stuck when vod came out a few years ago. the dvr hadn't been deployed and there was a great idea that vod was attractive to both of us.

in the end we couldn't figure out how to structure the best content on the vod, so as a result, the dvr became the platform of choice because behaviorally people wanted to see the stuff they wanted to see. vod became a valuable platform but much more secondary. so i think it's imperative for us as an industry to get behind it, but it will require us to agree on value. >> in terms of delivery, how does this all work for you? i know you have a lot of video and -- a lot of broadband intensive applications on your huffington post, for example, i see it all the time. how is this choosing your relationships are and wi-fi delivery play for you? >> we want to be the arms dealer and i think, you know, our job i think is to build the best content, partner with the best advertisers and then look to the distribution partners for distribution. i think today aol hd is on seven or so different partners and the tv space, launching, the huffington post, and the live news show for the web.

and we hope that gets distributed across a number of partners. i think we'll look at those who have direct consumer access and two, we keep a close eye on what are the things that are going to grow and have heavy adoption. we were talking backstage a little bit, i was in the apple store this weekend with my 10-year-old son. and he was in front of one of the screens at the apple store. and he was like, dad, you know, why don't we have this in our house? i was like, what do you mean, have this? the computer or the what? no, the screen. they had up all the significant content brands with direct access on apple tv. i think, you know, from the eyes of a 10-year-old who doesn't know the distribution pipes it's the attractiveness how easy things are used, what content brands are in general. i think when we look at the world, we say let's make our content, content everywhere. and partner with as many people as possible. and then you really have to take

a step back, there is disruption potentially happening. but i think people like glenn and his people have tremendously strong relationships. they're in people's homes. so we're trying to build our content for where the audiences are. >> is cable adjusting? we talked about it as a pipe, now it's tv everywhere, all the other concepts that it's building out. is it adjusting to the needs of the digital company the way that it needs to? >> yeah, i think first off, i think in the last 12 months there's been a fairly aggressive push in the tv and cable space for people to start partnering on more and more of the brands. i think you're starting to see people move quickly which two years ago we didn't see. i think the second piece which is really critical is the consumer usage of the design of the box, the design of the consumer interfaces are really important because as a consumer, you're getting talk from the mobile phone all the way up to the plasma screen. you can get fast, easy, access to content. i think whoever serves the

consumer the best from a curations, speed, is going to have -- have a huge advantage in the future. i think as more investment goes into content and more investment goes across the platform, hopefully it will get easier. >> we are talking about technology. so, glen, i asked this last year, i will keep asking until it happens, i know you have the technological ability to get rid of the cable box. at least s i am -- at least i am aseeming. is it ever going to go the way of the dodo bird? >> yes. although the people from cisco and motorola probably don't want to hear that. so forgive me. the -- what is happening is pretty simple. for better or worse, the world is coalescing around ip standards, internet protocol standards. there's a whole bunch of those and all devices are being made to the standards. there's millions and millions of people who can write software to

that standard. that's the future. our old video platform worked very well for a long time, but it's somewhat archaic. very few people can write software to it. it's not easy. and so that drives the set top boxes and our existing interface. i think listening to tim and talking about the apple store, a lot of what we can do here is create better interface. so we shouldn't mix up technology and the content and business models. those are three different things. the technology all things ip can create a much better user interface and our goal is to get the video service that we sell on every single device in your home, which increasingly are ip devices that you buy, eventually most people will have a so-called smart tv which is capable of displaying the services without a set top and

some people are buying those today. but maybe you'll do it through a game machine, sony playstation. as long as there's blu-ray players. maybe you'll do it through that. roku boxes, never-ending list of of these things. but they're based around ip standards and we want to be on every one of them with the best interface we can. that's what the technology makes available. >> david, you were talking about business model and making money. and we were all talking behind the stage, i was talking about the hopper because i saw an ad for it. and david goes oh, you mean charlie? the hopper, you probably know what it is, a kangaroo logo, and it automatically skips over commercials. i remember the whole conversation with the dvr the fight in the industry. obviously it got adjudicated. everybody was happy. it turned out that -- people would sit at home and end up watching the commercials even though they had the ability to fast forward through them. the hopper doesn't just, hops right over them automatically.

is that technology something that can be stopped or does the industry have to find a way to make money when it comes to ads? >> well, the hopper, as charlie names it, it's -- i think it's charlie's way of kind of coming in and raising a flag and it's going to create a lot of tension. it's going to get all of our attention. i think that's probably a good thing. you know, the fact that we spend over $1 billion a year on content, we do that because we can get advertising. we have advertising support. and in the end, a technology like that could create real carnage for the industry. it hasn't -- he hasn't done it yet with the cable channels. i think it will become something that will be part of the negotiation. charlie is a distributor. he reached 14 million homes. in order to reach them, he needs our content.