Through the Wire
By Charles Paikert, with bureau reports. -- Multichannel News, 3/10/2002 7:00:00 PM
Working Class Hero
Attention all cable networks: Looking for on-air talent? You may not have to go any further than your lobby. At least that's what happened when Comcast SportsNet was looking for someone to review the wrestling movie Ready to Rumble a year and a half ago.
The network's assistant news director Mark Jordan had a brainstorm when he saw security guard Fred Bibbo yelling back at his black and white TV during a WWF match. He brought Bibbo up to New York for the press junket to interview star David Arquette and then review the movie. The personable 42-year old Bibbo, a security guard since 1989, proved to be a natural, and his blue-collar style clicked with the network's 3 million subscribers in the metro Philadelphia, Delaware and New Jersey areas.
Bibbo now interviews stars and reviews sports-themed movies — in his security guard's uniform — regularly for Comcast SportsNet and won a Mid-Atlantic Emmy last fall for his work. He travels to junkets all over the country, and was flown to a spring training camp in Florida two weeks ago to interview Dennis Quaid, who stars in the upcoming baseball movie The Rookie, which Bibbo calls "a good, feel-good movie."
He's still on the security beat, and likes it that way. "People like the idea of a working man interviewing movie stars, "Bibbo said. "They can relate to it."
Bolster Fires Back
Cable took a hit in two recently published books, Lawrence Lessig's The Future of Ideas and John Cassidy's Dot.con.
In the former, Stanford Law School professor Lessig speculates that cable operators will abuse their control of broadband connections to manipulate the quality of Internet sites to favor those they have a financial interest in.
Cassidy, meanwhile, takes CNBC and then-network head Bill Bolster to task for being too much of a cheerleader for speculative Internet stocks during the late 1990s boom, and quotes Bolster as saying: "We caught onto a Gulf War that's going to last forever."
Bolster, now head of CNBC International, replies that Cassidy didn't interview him, and that he used the Gulf War to analogize a "defining moment" for the network's news coverage. Just as the Gulf War boosted CNN's ratings and put it on the map, he said, the stock market boom a few years back brought unprecedented ratings and importance to CNBC. He also stressed that while the Gulf War would end, CNN's reputation for global coverage would not, just as the stock market slide hasn't diminished CNBC's focus on Wall Street. What's more, he made no apologies for the network's Internet reporting: "We covered the market as it unfolded, and asked questions when we had to."
Into the Lions Den?
Can two lonely, brave reporters survive being surrounded by hundreds of PR people? Ordinarily, the outcome would be in doubt, but tonight David Lieberman of USA Today and Steve Caulk of the Rocky Mountain News should come out unscathed: they're being honored at the Cable Television Public Affairs Association's Forum 2002 at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C., for excellence in covering cable.
So what do the winners of this year's Maxwell Media Awards given by The Cable Center and the University of Denver School of Communication think is cable's biggest PR challenge? "People being frustrated about all the promises that have been made about new technologies and upgrades," said Caulk.
"More openness," responded Lieberman. "Too often people are mystified by what's happening with their cable system."
Comcast's Funniest Videos
Who said executives at Comcast don't have a sense of humor? The MSO's suits at last week's Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing "Digital Conference" in Los Angeles brought down the house with a gag video featuring life on-demand.
It began with a low-level Comcast R&D engineer showing executive vice president of sales, marketing and customer service David Watson a reworked remote control that paused, rewound and fast-forwarded through life. So when Andy Addis, vice president of marketing and new products, entered Watson's office to run through his CTAM speech, all a bored Watson had to do was point the magical remote at Addis, hit fast-forward, and his 10-minute speech was reduced to 10 seconds.
Later, Watson enters a room to see vice president, digital television Mark Hess, eating a donut. But with Watson's remote, he can rewind the moment and eat the donut before Hess gets a chance. In the end, however, Addis discovers the remote and exacts the sweetest revenge imaginable to any veteran conference goer — he makes Watson listen to his droning speech over and over and over again.
Enron Strikes Out Again
In a short-lived deal with Blockbuster Entertainment, the infamous Houston company set up a partnership informally know as "Braveheart" to provide video-on-demand movie services.
But, explained former Enron CEO Jeffery Skilling to the Senate Commerce Committee two weeks ago, "it turns out we all — not just me but several million people — significantly overestimated the opportunities in the broadband business. There was plenty of backbone and capacity and fiber to get the movies out to the extremities of the network, but we couldn't get through the last mile."
Exactly whose "last mile" was he referring to? Skilling did not name any telephone company names, but when the 20-year deal was announced in July 2000, the companies said they planned to reach computers and TV sets through digital subscriber line providers. Looks like cable has the last laugh again.
