Random Notes…
* Triple Play? Hey, don’t’ overlook video… it be from whence we came and it be the main thing many look for… note those DBS analyst upgrades last week.
* $50 Credit: Ah, that’s where my note to Charter went! Absolutely nowhere at all last week. Nice rebate, though. Where do you suppose those lost emails and email accounts actually went?
* Moving Blank? Hold this date: 4/30. A Wed evening at the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan honoring, for the Museum of the Moving Image, the sometimes immobile Matthew C. Blank. Well, if you don’t have anything better to do…
* Sculling: Terry Elkes died last week. Bummer. He and Ken Gorman made a formidable pair. Both backed me once upon a time. Both did a lot for this industry. Terry, though, had a sad falling out with his one-time mentor, Ralph Baruch. And another time, after introducing me to some truly great wine, put me in a scull on Long Island Sound and was mildly surprised (and quite disappointed) when I didn’t drown. Terry and Ken created Apollo Partners… the logo was, of course, an upside down “V”… this was the era of “Veeeee-a-com” vs “V eye a com.” Terry once got truly angry with me… when the Czech/English press lord Robert Maxwell (no relation) walked off his mega-yacht off the Canary Islands, Terry—who had done deals with him at Viacom —commented to me that, “He must have had a heart attack.” I replied, “No way, he didn’t have a heart.”
* NAP-TEE: Or is it NATPE? I always forget. But it’s always a great place to be… and, speaking of Viacom, Bob Pittman —now a small market broadcaster—will follow the keynote ( NBCU‘s Jeff Zucker) on Tues. Guaranteed to be interesting (and a bit self-promoting).
* Pivotless: Too bad the Sprint deal is still born (more or less). The quad-play just might be for real… just take a close look at what AT&T is doing… this one is on track and, in my opinion, on the right track. Quite unlike their U-Verse offering. Anything anywhere anytime also means mobile.
* Political Season: It’ll probably last well past November. But in the meantime, a couple of points: (1) cable is a better targeting medium than broadcast—so, get out there and sell! (2) anybody notice that cable networks (such as one of the originals, CNN, and others such as MSNBC and Fox News) are actually leading the coverage? and (3) check out the best distance learning and cable-backed programming about politics from inside on C-SPAN as the Cable Center and DU and C-SPAN’s Steve Scully feature interactive discussions of students with real political insiders in its 18th “season”… tune in for Fox’s Britt Hume, former President Bush‘s campaign and White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, Vice President Walter Mondale, pollster Peter Hart and more.
* TiVo + Comcast: Some deployment. Not in my neighborhoods yet… and when it does get here… well, so long DirecTV? That might happen anyway. The satellite guy is changing out a lot of things… and failing to mention the changes to customers. When TiVo (yep, I like it; am used to it and think its navigation is simply the best) does come on Comcast, let’s hope it comes with all the broadband features, too. So far, no dice. Another schizophrenic cable move: closed navigation and tru2way. Go figure.
