‘Dear Laura Martin: Capitalism Isn’t Dead, Love, Sean Hannity’

By Kent Gibbons and John Eggerton -- Multichannel News, 8/2/2010 12:01:00 AM

Laura Martin got a gift during her panel appearance at the Independent Show in Baltimore last Tuesday. It was a copy of Sean Hannity’s book, Conservative Victory, with a signed message from the author to the media analyst: “Dear Laura, Capitalism Isn’t Dead. Love, Sean.”

That’s what Corey McCarthy, chief financial officer of the National Cable Television Cooperative, said in presenting it. The reference was to comments the Needham & Co. analyst made in February 2009 at an NCTC event, when she remarked that “capitalism didn’t work” in terms of resetting the economy.

Anyway, Martin, who tends to go for bold statements, said she got a lot of complaints after those remarks about capitalism, and had something else to say now.

‘VIDEO IS DEAD’
“What’s dead this year is video,” she said. “It’s a very sad thing. The programmers are destroying the video business.”

Consumers are gravitating to Internet and mobile applications, she said, so operators should focus on mobile services, commercial services (because business customers pay higher margins) and modems.

“Take the cash flow, if there is any after the programmers get done with you, and what you need to do is protect the future,” she said.

Martin was bullish on the underlying business (as was copanelist David Joyce of Miller Tabak & Co.). She said if cable doesn’t get hit by damaging regulation from Washington, such as broadband being labeled a common- carrier service, then cablesale multiples should rise to 11 or 12 times annual cash flow in the next five years. Now cable systems privately sell for about 8 times cash flow.

“I think the industry has to go to war over Title II,” Martin said. Hannity and his book were on the scene because the Fox News Channel host was the lunchtime speaker Tuesday. “How many of you are hung over from last night?” he began. “That’s George Bush’s fault.”

He said he loved the NCTC’s entrepreneurial story (a cooperative started on a countertop in Lawrence, Kan.) and said “I think America can do better. I think your business can survive in a better atmosphere.” If government limited bureaucracy and regulation and cut taxes and stimulated the economy, he said, “if more people have more money in their pockets, that means more people will be able to buy cable and watch the Fox News Channel and watch me and our viewership will grow.”

Getting viewership to grow was the theme at other panels Tuesday afternoon, focused on “TV Everywhere,” or the movement among big cable and satellite operators to let consumers get access to programming online if they are also paying for it in their multichannel subscriptions.

Michael Quigley, Turner Broadcasting System’s vice president of business development and multiplatform distribution, talked about the new TV Everywhere service it launched for Verizon FiOS TV customers.

He said a big part of Turner’s TVE talks with distributors are how to make hit shows like TNT’s The Closer or Rizzoli & Isles available the next day on the TV video-on-demand platform. That gives consumers more options for watching what they want on their high-definition TV sets.

Turner also is working with distributors, he explained to the independent operators, to make shows quickly available to their online portals and Turner’s, in high-quality format. “We’re focusing on how to make a true HD experience on the online side.”

To help the operators understand the difference between TV Everywhere and “over-the-top” video providers, Avail-TVN chief technology officer Michael Kazmier said to think of TV Everywhere as “under the bottom” — an effort to keep subscribers by offering them more options, rather than losing them to overthe- top rivals.

“Hopefully that catches on and I can say in 15 or 20 years, ‘You know that under-the-bottom thing? That was me,’ ” he said.

Quigley and others speaking on TV Everywhere panels predicted authenticated services of that kind will be widespread by the end of 2011 — and that operators will need to offer them to be competitive with their multichannel
rivals.

SIZE DISCRIMINATION
On Monday, as the conference kicked off , American Cable Association chairman Steve Friedman called for an end to discrimination against smaller operators. Friedman said whether the issue is network neutrality, retransmission- consent reform, broadband reclassification or the Comcast- NBCU merger, the problem boils down to big versus small. “Our members — and your customers — routinely pay a disproportionate amount in the cost and impact of regulation and in the direct cost of broadcast and cable programming. And it’s just because we are smaller.”

The Independent Show combines the ACA and the NCTC, a collective programming buying consortium.

Sometimes capitalism needs a little encouragement to work right.

‘Rubicon’ Producer Crosses Over Into AMC Conspiracy
There’s a conspiracy going on at AMC — to get Rubicon renewed, fast.

Its leader is Henry Bromell, the executive producer, who hinted at the cabal during a panel discussion in New York last Wednesday, ahead of the spy drama’s Sunday-night premiere.

Addressing himself to Joel Stillerman, AMC’s head of original programming, Bromell at one point discussed the story arc as occurring over “six great years of television.”

At another point, asked by an audience member if the show addresses domestic spying, Bromell said “it does a little bit this season and in the future … Joel?”

Pretty clear who Bromell wants to conspire with.

Bromell shared the dais with three intelligence experts: former U.S. senator Bob Kerrey, former counter-terrorism agent (and current NBC analyst) Michael Sheehan and former CIA operations chief Jack Devine.

It was a relief to hear the experts say that a conspiracy inside the U.S. government would fail because of Congressional oversight, the adversarial political system and the aggressive press. The real threat, Sheehan said, is from “conspiracies against us” from outside.

“We are a target,” Kerrey conceded. “We are target No. 1.”

Season No. 1 of Rubicon unofficially began with sneak peeks on AMC and the first hour is on amc.tv.