Through the Wire
by Kent Gibbons and Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 4/6/2009 2:00:00 AM
Cable Positive’s Next CEO: AIDS Activist Sean Strub
Sean O. Strub, the successor to Steve Villano as president and CEO of Cable Positive, is a longtime HIV/AIDS and corporate-responsibility activist who said he wants to build on the organization’s successes and raise its profile outside of cable.
“I think it maybe hasn’t gotten the credit it deserves for the work that it has done, outside of the cable industry,” Strub said at last week’s Cable Show in Washington, D.C. “Coming from the AIDS world, really understanding the impact [Cable Positive] has had, I will not be shy about letting the broader community know about it.”
Strub, 50, has been a writer, a publisher and historic-preservation entrepreneur, having restored a hotel in Milford, Pa., near the Delaware River with his partner. He founded POZ magazine in 1994, and in 1992 produced The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me, the David Drake-starring off-Broadway play that won an Obie Award.
In 1990, he ran as a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Congress from New York’s 22nd district, running as an openly (but incidentally) gay, HIV-positive man. He was defeated by a former member of Congress by fewer than 600 votes, according to a biography.
He said he’s spent the past few years doing his preservation work in Pennsylvania and some other projects, after being ill with the disease in the mid-1990s.
“For a while I’d been thinking of getting re-engaged in the work of the epidemic,” he said. “I’m really excited” about Cable Positive, he said.
“I don’t have a background in cable, but I think I’m learning fast and I’ve already found it a very friendly industry,” Strub said Wednesday, the day before Villano (who’s staying on until the end of June) introduced him on the show floor. “It’s really nice to start something new where people are so welcoming.”
The co-author of 1995’s Cracking the Closet (Harper Business) said he was impressed by the “extraordinary” multiplatform HIV/AIDS education campaign produced by 17 young people in the Motorola-funded Youth AIDS Media Institute University. They generated video public-service announcements, a Web site (NoLOLinHIV.org), a texting campaign and a print campaign, all in one week.
“I got HIV as a teenager,” Strub said, and back then (in the late 1970s) it wasn’t possible to use communication tools such as the YAMIU participants had in order to get and share information. He said that was an initiative he’d like to see expanded.
As someone who’s studied the subject, Strub said the cable industry is “quite advanced in its understanding and conception of and expression of socially responsible initiatives.” Cable Positive being an example of that.
Notebook: Count’s Up, U2, Remotes Rock
The Cable Show’s Washington, D.C., location helped juice convention attendance well beyond the expected 10,000 attendees. National Cable & Telecommunications Association CEO Kyle McSlarrow announced Friday that attendance topped 12,000 — surpassing the 2008 total. So if the show floor seemed crowded at times, it was.
Travel restrictions, especially among cable operators, was expected to depress the turnout by about 20% from last year’s total in New Orleans. But the Washington Convention Center was convenient to Capitol Hill, and McSlarrow reported more than 400 elected officials and staff members checked out the entertainment, telemedicine and widget displays at the Broadband Nation home-technology area.
“People were coming over [to see the display] because they heard about it. It was word of mouth,” convention co-chairman Michael Willner, CEO of Insight Communications, said Friday. “We’re very pleased. We actually exceeded last year’s numbers, which we never expected to do.”
Washington also has a base of cable employees from Comcast and Cox, among others, and being local made The Cable Show an option for them, an NCTA official noted.
As for cool stuff, Sanford Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett gave a shout-out to the U2 concert in high-definition 3-D shown at Broadband Nation.
“A gigantic HD screen offering 3-D enhanced content is a not-so-subtle reminder that there remain plenty of potential applications that capitalize on cable’s capacity advantage and that put additional distance between the cable plant and lower bandwidth alternatives,” Moffett said in an upbeat research note Friday from the convention.
The Wire dug demos of Panasonic’s Easy Touch — a prototype remote control that has no numbered buttons. It lets you change channels, type in an on-screen keyboard and access other features by sliding your thumbs around on the remote’s touch-sensitive pad. It also has a motion-sensing capability like the Nintendo Wii, so you can perform some actions by waving the remote around.
Panasonic (which also demoed Easy Touch at January’s Consumer Electronics Show) isn’t saying when it’ll be available commercially. Judging by the traffic at the vendor’s booth, the idea got two thumbs up from show-goers.
Panel Verbatim: 'I Agree With Mike’
Washington — What happens if Cablevision Systems wins its case before the U.S. Supreme Court, and a network DVR is ruled good to go?
Jim Chiddix, moderating a cable-technology panel session at The Cable Show, posed the question to several top cable operator execs, asking, “If Jim [Blackley from Cablevision] prevails at the Supreme Court, will you call up your set-top provider the next day and cancel your orders for DVRs?”
No one in the group wanted to bite.
“Mike?” Chiddix asked, attempting to elicit a comment from Time Warner Cable chief technical officer Mike LaJoie.
LaJoie responded: “You must mean Mike Lee.”
Mike Lee, the Rogers Communications chief strategy officer, paused then said: “I agree with Mike.”
Added Comcast CTO Tony Werner: “Ditto.”
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