At least twice during their convention here this week, the good people of cable television started their daily session several minutes past schedule.
But there was no late fee.
And when one of them returned my telephone call, from his cell phone somewhere on the McCormick Place floor, I neither kept him on hold for 23 minutes nor told him to wait at his company’s booth and I would meet him there “between 12 and 6.”
The good people of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, in other words, got a lesson in customer service from me, a fellow who last served customers directly when making submarine sandwiches in high school.
Whether they will learn from my seminar-by-example is an open question, given both cable’s sad history in that realm and the fact that it was competing with such tantalizing scheduled sessions as “The MO on VOD, SVOD, FVOD” and “Revenue Opportunities in Selling Broadband B2B.”
But let the record reflect that I, a longtime cable customer who has happily switched to satellite TV’s better technology and more vividly rendered pastures, made the effort.
I don’t bear a grudge and, indeed, genuinely wanted to see how the service I had jilted was doing. The answer I got was what anybody who’s being honest with themselves will admit is exactly what they want to hear about an ex: OK, but not too OK.
The NCTA comes to Chicago every other year in June, for a convention that’s not about selling one’s stuff so much as strutting it, if displaying a hot new signal filter can be said to count as a strut.
“This is really more of a show where middle and senior managers get to see what’s up and what’s cool,” said Bob McIntyre, chief technical officer for Scientific-Atlanta, a leading cable box manufacturer.
This year, that meant a convention floor packed with lots of high-definition television, the industry’s great new revenue-driving hope, and oodles of smarter, sleeker cable boxes, including, at last, many that will have TiVo-like digital video recorders (DVRs) built in so that cable can better compete with satellite TV.
Most of the big programmers were on hand. Some, like Viacom, were pushing new or re-named channels, like guy-centric Spike TV, a channel whose “Man Show” ethos Spike Lee would have been better advised to let pass without litigation.
The would-be big programmers were there, too, such as hopefuls The Sportsman Channel (huntin’ ‘n’ fishin’), HorseRacing TV (4-5 odds say you can figure the theme out) and JokeVision, whose programming concept is, no kidding, ordinary Americans telling jokes.
Michael Jackson, it was reported, was there at the same time I was, causing a buzz at the Urban Family Network, a black-themed channel that apparently wants the fading (literally) superstar to develop — cringe — family-friendly programming.
That I didn’t see him, I am sure, had nothing whatsoever to do with my long and enlightening chat with Playboy’s Playmate of the Year, who said an attendee had actually asked her to write on a photo of herself, “Thanks for the ride.”
No dumb bunny, she opted for her standard, demure “To: [cad’s name here].”
No, the real reason I missed Jackson was undoubtedly because I was so busy mulling over the words of wisdom uttered during the convention’s assemblage of Great Men of Media: Bill Gates (Microsoft), Richard Parsons (AOL Time Warner), Brian Roberts (Comcast) and Mel Karmazin (Viacom).
By “mulling,” what I mean is “trying to remember one compelling thing that they said.”
Parsons, my notebook reminds me, kept dissing clunky old dial-up AOL, no surprise given its albatross effect on his company’s stock.
Karmazin said CBS will again have its entire prime-time lineup going out in high definition, which is fantastic news for people who want to pay thousands of extra dollars to catch every filmic nuance of “The King of Queens.”
And Gates, who’s got a new software package he’s trying to sell to cable companies, pandered a little by saying, “Anybody who thinks cable’s at some plateau will be very surprised at what they see here.”
But it is fair to say that there was optimism at the convention, largely because of the coming new technology and because cable leads the valuable new broadband product category (they get $50 a month for Internet access out of me, for instance, despite my general desire to punish cable for years of neglect and worse).
“Last year at this time [cable] people weren’t feeling really good about themselves,” said famous rich guy Mark Cuban, the Dallas Mavericks owner and head of high-def channel HDNet.
Despite a hall that offered plenty of floor-hockey space compared with the go-go late 1990s, “The energy’s definitely back to the NCTA,” said Cuban, who manned his venture’s booth like any other salesman, albeit without the necktie. “People want to be here, as opposed to having to be here.”
There was even a (very) little controversy: Six people from Chicago Media Action stood outside in the rain Tuesday because Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell, who had just led a not-as-controversial-as-it-should-have-been loosening of media ownership restrictions, was speaking inside.
Leave it to the NCTA, of course, to have an official spend some 45 minutes talking one-on-one with Powell, in a near-full grand ballroom, and never once mention the media ownership rules change.
Instead we heard Powell sounding eager to get the analog TV spectrum back, when the digital conversion is complete, probably for wireless use.
And the rather amusing Powell related his famous father’s lament about having too much home technology: “I only need to talk to your sister one way, and I’ve got 15 ways to do it, and it’s costing me a fortune,” the FCC chairman said the Secretary of State told him.
To that end, some of the coming cable boxes will combine not only DVRs and cable tuners, but DVD players and cable modems, as well, and they’ll be able to route those signals wirelessly to the rest of the home.
That’s five current boxes combined into one of reasonable size (think small stereo receiver), a product compelling enough to even bring people back from satellite. The trick is convincing cable companies, which have spent billions in recent years to upgrade to broadband capability, to invest in making such technology available to consumers.
One more endearing Michael-and-his-pop anecdote: A&E cable had a life-size wax Colin Powell on hand to promote its “Biography” series, and it was taking digital photos of convention-goers with the mock statesman.
After getting my image snapped with Powell, I made a crack to the photo guys about it being the “next best thing to Michael,” which I thought of as a little NCTA in-joke.
One of them reached under the table and pulled out a snapshot, taken earlier that morning, of Powell the younger posing amusedly with his pantomime father.
Photos are nice, but the smart thing to give away would be gel-filled shoe inserts. Conventions are why the “comfort-shoe” category exists.
“Your dogs are barking by the end of the day,” said Andy Dale, CEO of the Outdoor Channel, which demonstrated its status compared with startup rival The Sportsman Channel by having whole stuffed game animals on display rather than the newcomer’s mere mounted heads.
Other tchotchkes, a staple of conventioneering, ranged from MTV2’s free CDs (one per customer, with choices including Pete Yorn and The Roots) to tote bags to T-shirts conventioneers won by spinning a giant wheel.
Not on public display was the industry’s Wheel of Channel Lineup changes, a game cable folk play in secret at such gatherings so that they can go home and — heh-heh — inflict entirely new channel assignments on their customers.
Just kidding.
I think.
