• by adam , Shelly Palmer , April 13, 2006

The annual trade show and conference of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association was held in Atlanta earlier this week. Since this show sits squarely in the middle of media trade show season, there was not much new ground to cover. There were a few programming and technology announcements and some interesting improvements to existing products. And, of course there were pundit panels and a few back-slapping, "cable is still a great business" themed general sessions.

What interested me was a live SMS audience survey that was done during a general session entitled "Add Cable and Stir: A Recipe for Business Success." This session was moderated by former Federal Communications Commission chairman William Kennard, and the panelists included: Glenn Britt (Time Warner Cable), Mark Cuban (HDNet), Patrick Esser (Cox Communications), Tom Rutledge (Cablevision), Tony Vinciquerra (Fox Network Group), Michael Willner (Insight Communications) and David Zaslav (NBC Universal Cable). In case you are unfamiliar with the cable industry, these are big names! There were at least 1,500 professional cable industry types in the audience, and they were asked to vote on the following:

"What or who will be your biggest day-to-day competition in three years from today?"

Now remember, the audience is full of cable people (many of who do not know how to send a text message with a short message code, but that's for another column). They chose from five possibilities, and here are the results:

DirecTV--37 percent
AT&T--27 percent
Google--0 percent
Municipal Wi-Fi--10 percent
Something not yet invented--25 percent

It's not surprising that almost 40 percent of the cable industry audience thinks that satellite companies will still be their biggest competitors in three years. It's a little surprising that they give the telcos as much credit as they did--since it is physically impossible for the telcos to deploy and market that much television product in that amount of time. But what blew my mind was the 35 percent of the audience who thought that municipal Wi-Fi or something not yet invented was going to be the source of the biggest day-to-day competition in three years time. And, to that end --the idea that Google would not enter into their competitive equation.

I will let you draw your own conclusions from the above survey. It was not scientific, but it is instructive since the audience was heavily skewed cable-friendlys. From my perspective, the question left out the most important possible answer: "complexity." The contact provider (cable, satellite, telco or ISP) that will win is the group that provides the most comprehensive service bundle in the simplest form.

Whose offering is simpler and more comprehensive than cable's?

You tell me.