Roberts Discusses Comcast's Cable Priorities

In a Wall Street Journal interview today, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts talked about the company's content and broadband service strategy, following its $300 million investment to support Sony's acquisition of MGM. So what are the priorities of Comcast, the largest U.S. cable operator? According to RobertsÉ "We've been saying for the last five years we wanted to turn Comcast into a new-products company. In the next couple months and years we're going to have digital-video recorders and voice-over-IP phones. We already have high-definition television and video on-demand. We're also already planning on the next suite of products: videophones, video chat, interactive television, Internet search capabilities and interactive advertising.'How about Comcast's commitment to IP telephone services?"We want to ... enable the whole network [for phone service] by 2006. I think in the long run, IP phones will be a great business.'And on cable's loss of competitive momentum versus DSL in the high-speed data business?'Market share has never been the principal metric that we judge ourselves by because we can't control somebody else's behavior. Our metric is how many net additions do we want to have and at what price and value per customer. Going into 2003, we said we could do 1.2 million net adds. In fact, we actually did 1.67 million net adds last year. This year, we said our goal was to do 1.5 to 1.6 [million] net adds, and to keep the same revenue per customer that we had last year. We're on track to meet or exceed that guidance.'WSJ subscribers may read the entire interview at http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109598311359726796,00.html