“How you behave toward others is the essential of living your life: Fred Dressler.”

Old Greenwich, Conn. — Everybody who talks about Fred Dressler has a story, Glenn Britt said. Some are strictly about business, about how Time Warner Cable’s top programming executive could get what he wanted in a contract, and was willing to stonewall, stall, do what it took to make sure his company got what it needed and anticipated future changes in the TV business.

But a lot of the stories are about friendship, about dealing with people the right way, about helping and mentoring, about times “where Fred reached out and did something special,” Britt said, recalling his longtime friend and colleague at a memorial to Dressler last Thursday. Dressler died on Christmas Eve of pancreatic cancer, less than a year into his retirement at age 66.

Britt, Time Warner Cable’s chairman and CEO, said his first Dressler story went back to 1981, when Glenn and Barbara Britt moved to Denver from New York after Time Inc. bought ATC, a cable company for which Dressler was trying to obtain a franchise in Denver. The Britts “were strangers in a strange land,” and Dressler “drew me into what he was doing and he drew me into a friendship. He didn’t have to do that but he did because that’s how Fred was.”

“Fred was different,” Britt said. “He always reached out, even when there was no particular reason.”

Cable seems to be one of those industries built on relationships. It was easy to see why that’s the case, looking around the room among the 400 or so people who came to hear Britt and others tell their stories about Dressler. Many were programmers and cable operators who, like Britt and Dressler, got started in the business decades ago and were still in it.

Another of those longtime friends and colleagues, Andy Heller, said Dressler had rules. “And the easiest rule to follow is it’s always better to make a friend than an enemy, so you should always try.”

Heller said “Freddy used to tell me that friendship is the only thing that we really get to control in our lives. And I think that that allowed him to be a wonderful friend and to teach others to be the same.”

“How you behave toward others is the essential of living your life,” Heller, the domestic distribution president at Turner Broadcasting, said was Dressler’s point.

“That’s why this room is filled with hundreds of people,” Heller said. “Despite the fact that many of you sat across the table from him and heard ‘no,’ or ‘yes but,’ a heck of a lot more often than you heard yes.”

Britt told another funny story, about a programming negotiation Dressler invited him to sit in on. He couldn’t recall who the vendor was, just that he’d been trying to get a meeting with the gatekeeper for months. Britt said what happened next was rather stunning. Dressler proceeded on a verbal “magical mystery tour” that Britt couldn’t follow, and that was probably equally baffling to the man who’d obtained the meeting. “But it was all really polite and wonderful.” At the end, Dressler told the man they really should schedule another session to continue the conversation. The man, presumably pleased, left. Dressler turned to Britt and said, “Of course I’m not going to see him again for six months.”

“That was classic Fred,” Britt said. “But he could also move very quickly if he wanted to.”

When negotiations got tough, and people got stressed, Dressler’s mantra, according to Britt, was: “It’s all about the process. Enjoy the process.”

Britt said he thought about that for years before he really understood what it meant. This problem too, shall pass, Dressler was saying, and then another one will come along that needs resolving. Enjoy solving problems.

Don’t overly exploit an advantage, Dressler told Britt, because there will come a time when you lack the upper hand. “Above all, it’s the people that count. Not the numbers, not the balance sheet.”

In the last months of his life, the love and support he received from far and wide, as testified by his friends and family, proved the soundness of that advice.

Insight Communications CEO Michael Willner looks ahead at running a small, or at least smaller, cable operator and sees the glass as half full.

Half full is right, as Insight will soon, if all goes as expected, be about half its current size of 1.36 million subscribers.

The other half (systems in Illinois and Indiana) are shifting over to Comcast later this year. Comcast exercised its option to sever the Insight Midwest joint venture in that way.

But there are reasons Willner could be seeing the glass as half empty, instead.

Insight will lose more than just top-10 cable operator status. It’s losing the buying clout that comes with being aligned with 24-million-subscriber Comcast. Basically, it’s dropping into National Cable Television Cooperative status.

That’s meant renegotiating programming contracts – talks that are in the late stages and could, Willner says, lead to channel drops.

Channel drops can mean subscriber losses. And Insight is rightly proud that it’s growing subscribers. Its third quarter report will include a gain of 21,100 basic customers (on a base of 1.36 million) at a time when Comcast just reported a quarterly decline of about 65,000 basic customers.

Comcast’s decline spooked investors worried about video competition, and depressed cable stocks. (Some analysts called the sell-off an over-reaction, as telco video numbers are rising but the third quarter actually saw soft sales of telco DSL-satellite-TV bundles.)

Insight tries to avoid “distractions” that could lead to subscriber drops, Willner said. And never acts like an arrogant incumbent, he said.

That’s one reason Insight recently added Big Ten Network to the systems it’s retaining. Calls from fans wanting the network spiked both before and after it launched and before Insight added it. (Another reason is BTN is part of the Fox Cable empire, with which Insight is negotiating.)

“You just don’t want to let things interfere with a well-oiled, humming machine,” Willner said a couple of different ways during an interview with him and COO Dinni Jain last Tuesday.

Jain said Willner and he are planning to run Insight for the next three, four, five years, “whatever it takes,” at its reduced size.

That’s even though Insight this past spring sought offers for “Insight Systems Group” – the 639,000 plus customers in Kentucky; Evansville, Ind.; and Columbus, Ohio, that stay in the fold.

“We were reviewing our strategic alternatives,” Willner said, disputing September reports that described it as an auction that was halted.

“We will continue to run the company, first and foremost,” Willner said. “And secondarily [will] consider strategic alternatives that may make some sense for our equity holders.”

With three decades in cable, Willner knows there are certain times – like now – that banks pull back from lending money for big acquisitions.

That gives him reason to believe Insight can sell out at a price Carlyle will accept a year or two or three from now.

More justification for a half-full view.

In the meantime, Willner last week was dealing a leadership card from a position of strength.

Insight wants people to know the subscriber gains and other positive results – including 14% revenue growth and 15% operating cash flow growth in the third quarter compared with the same period in 2006 – come from its “challenger” mentality and smart “blocking and tackling.”

Jain said with pride that top managers tells division chiefs to control the things that they can manage – such as new connections and disconnections, responsiveness to customer calls, recovering cash from non-paying customers – and not worry about operating cash flow, which is affected by corporate overhead decisions.

“We’re getting very close to the budget-less company,” Jain added. “In the districts, the amount of interaction and time they spend on the budget is next to nothing. Whereas it used to shut us down for three months.”

Keeping distractions to a minimum.

Willner – who also testified at a House subcommittee last week on behalf of his fellow small cable operators – said Carlyle also sees the glass as plenty full.

“They’re not anxious sellers,” he said.

With operating cash flow rising at a 16% clip year to date, Jain added, “it’s not exactly a ship that’s tanking.”

No, it’s not tanking. It’s getting smaller. But it’s growing, with a chance to keep growing.

If you’re emulating TV’s favorite OCD detective, Adrian Monk, don’t seek out his new favorite bottled water — it’s not on the market.

You probably wouldn’t be interested being like Monk unless you like Monk, the breakthrough basic-cable drama on USA. (Ignore the three Emmy Awards won by star Tony Shalhoub in the comedy category; it’s a drama. Is Columbo a comedy?)

And if you like Monk and Monk, there should be lots of red flags in the phrase “new favorite bottled water.”

For one thing, Monk doesn’t change his habits, tries to avoid trying new things and generally sticks to the program. A new bottled-water brand? Columbo will go Hugo Boss before that happens.

But that happened Friday night in the premiere episode of the new Monk season, in a scene with guest star Sarah Silverman playing demented fan Marcie Maven. A big deal is made of the fact that Monk’s new favorite water is Summit Creek, and that last year, it was Sierra Springs. Last year? Try several years, lady. And what’s Monk’s on-screen response to this exposition by Marcie Maven?

A shrug.

My response: a sellout.

Summit Creek water’s makers or bottlers or whatever they are must have bought that placement, the way Glad, Clorox, Buick and other advertisers have bought their way into Monk episodes and avoided DVR skippers, I surmised.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find Summit Creek bottled water online. There’s a gift catalog outfit called Summit Creek, but it doesn’t seem to sell water. That’s weird — there was a close-up on the bottle and everything in the scene, which seemed to be all about Summit Creek water.

Also, no listing of such a product on the Monk section of product-placement tracking site SeenON!, either, amid the Monk tchotchkey mugs and anti-bacterial wipes.

A publicist for the show checked with NBC Universal’s ad-sales unit and was told that it wasn’t a placement. She said the phrase “scripted genius” was included in the response to her query. The writers made the name up, she said.

My new theory: The writers have to drop in fake product placements every once in a while to keep you guessing when the real ones come along.

What’s yours?

There’s a way to enjoy the view from the 55^th-floor at Comcast’s under-construction headquarters in downtown Philly without getting vertigo. Check it out here.

The blogger, freelance photographer Albert Yee, got a tour on Aug. 7 of Philadelphia’s newest and biggest skyscraper. The views from the windowless 55^th floor are pretty spectacular. Having once joined in an interview with Comcast co-founder Ralph Roberts in his office and admiring the “Billy Penn” statue atop City Hall, I can attest that vista has nothing on what’s coming when the Comcast Center opens next spring. Or I can now that I’ve seen the Dragonballyee Web site.

According to a Wikipedia entry, Philadelphia City Hall is 548 feet tall including the William Penn statue. The Comcast Center will be 975 feet tall when completed at its location at 1701 John F. Kennedy Boulevard.

Vendors, prepare to be even more intimidated when you come calling on the country’s biggest cable operator.

One feature might look familiar to folks who’ve visited Comcast’s current executive offices on the upper floors of 1500 Market St. The photos of the “grand stairway” that leads into the building reminds me of the reception area at Comcast’s current HQ that links the 34^th and 35^th floors. A carryover motif? Probably not but we’re checking into it with Comcast.

So much for corporate palaces. Now for castles. For that I turn to an interview in Barron’s magazine that landed in a Google News compilation of stories on Cablevision Systems.

In it, Gifford Combs, managing director and portfolio manager of Dalton Investments (of Los Angeles), draws a distinction between what John Malone is up to these days and what Charles and James Dolan are doing. In his words, “two companies in the same industry, where one company is behaving properly and one company is behaving improperly.”

Malone’s Liberty Global, Combs says, is doing right by shareholders by following traditional Malone approaches: minimizing taxes, creating tracking stocks for different business lines and buying back stock as cash flow increases.

Combs adds: “Now contrast Liberty Global with another cable TV company, Cablevision, where the modus operandi of the Dolan family seems to be: how to steal the company at as low a price as possible by maximizing our position and using the asymmetries of information flow available to us versus the public.”

Instead of taking the company private at as low a price as possible, Combs says, the Dolans should put money back into the business, add debt where appropriate, buy back stock when possible and sell some assets over time. In five years, he says, Cablevision’s stock price could be 6 to 7 times what it is today, or $250-$300 a share.

Combs puts Malone in the category of a “benevolent ruler” dwelling in a shining castle on the hill. And he hopes the Dolans will “see the way of truth and righteousness” and be more like Malone.

On the other hand, Chuck Dolan got a big shout-out in USA Today from his old cable buddy John Rigas.

In an interview with USAT’s Leslie Cauley before heading off to the federal pokey, Rigas points out not many of his cable chieftain pals have made the trek to remote Coudersport, Pa., to visit him while he was out on appeal. A notable exception was Dolan pere. "I thought that was really nice," Rigas says.

Benevolent, one might even say.

When the Moxi Media Center guide would get shown during panel sessions at cable shows a few years ago, it really stood out for me.

The graphical way Moxi Menu toggled among scheduled shows and recorded content, what’s on-demand and what’s in high-definition, was a sharp contrast to the TV Guide-style grid-based guides cable viewers use to sift through the multi-hundred channel universe.

Forward-thinking Moxi came out at the January 2002 Consumer Electronics Show, promising to link disparate digital devices – from TV to music jukebox to Web surfer – and bearing cash from (then) AOL Time Warner, Cisco and Paul Allen’s Vulcan Ventures, and others.

Since then — fully under Vulcan’s wing as Digeo – it’s won a pair of technical Emmys, including one for the snazzy guide, and is currently hoping for a third.

Cable distribution has been slow, though, as is true for many set-top hawkers not named Motorola Broadband or Scientific Atlanta. Moxi now claims about 400,000 cable customers, with the biggest affiliates Vulcan-backed Charter and former Adelphia systems in Southern California (now Time Warner Cable’s) and Colorado Springs (Comcast’s).

The Adelphia changeover could be great, distribution-wise, as Digeo raises its presence with the top two cablers, with 37 million customers.

Or not.

As Forrester Research senior analyst Josh Bernoff pointed out, Comcast and Time Warner have invested heavily in developing their own advanced user interfaces.

Comcast's GuideWorks-made iguide, based on technology acquired from Gemstar-TV Guide, is in the MSO’s Motorola boxes. Time Warner is coming out with a new guide that traces development back to Mystro, the onetime networked-DVR experiment.

That combination of development tracks “is not necessarily compatible with some other box that has a different guide interface in it," Bernoff said.

Digeo CEO Mike Fidler says the company has an ace in the hole: customer satisfaction among ex-Adelphia customers who have Moxi boxes is very high. Also, the Colorado Springs system is the first cable operation to market a digital-video-recording system that works in multiple rooms.

"We think we offer a superior customer experience,” he says. “I can tell you that the customers believe that they get a superior experience."

Comcast and Time Warner will make their own choices going forward, Fidler concedes, and Moxi keeps talking to them. "As we've heard it they’re continuing to support us, still deploying us, and at this point have no intention to change."

Time Warner Cable and Comcast corporate communications officials say their companies continue to support and deploy Moxi boxes in Southern California and Colorado Springs.

There have been indications, though, such support might not last long.
 
One cable analyst, who asked not to be identified, said a Time Warner official reported Digeo boxes wouldn't be deployed on an ongoing basis. That came after a cable customer in the Carlsbad, Calif., area told Multichannel News that Time Warner customer-service representatives twice told him in recent weeks that Moxi boxes were going to be replaced by Motorola Broadband DVRs in the next couple of months. The reason: to avoid having incompatible guides deployed in the market, the customer said.

Under former Sony executive Fidler as CEO, Digeo is going to try to break beyond multichannel video distributors and appeal directly to consumers.

Fidler said he and COO Greg Gudorf, another former Sony executive (both joined the company in 2005), do intend to move into retail and will likely have more to say on the subject at January's CES in Las Vegas.

Cable remains "a very important part of our business," Fidler said. But Moxi needs to target consumers directly, give them a shot at the Moxi experience. "It's very difficult to do being in an enclosed operator environment."

Moxi faces some tough competition at retail, too, Bernoff pointed out. TiVo has been making noise about broadband integration and will be touting its Series 3 HD DVRs at CES. Apple Computer, of course, will draw attention by saying more about Steve Jobs’s interactive TV play, too.

"CES for me is going to be that product,” Bernoff said of new television interfaces that include Web content and high definition. “It's all over the place."

In cable, the best guide doesn’t always win. So here’s hoping if Digeo goes over the top and customers like the experience, they’ll have an opportunity to buy it.