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LOUIS HAUKevin Hyman: President, Bright House Networks Tampa Bay
Q. Earlier this year, Advance/Newhouse took over the management of your cable operations from Time Warner and renamed it Bright House Networks. Have you noticed any differences in how the two companies manage the business?
There are some tangible things. We're much closer to the top of the corporation today. We have more dialogue on a regular basis back and forth with (Advance/Newhouse chairman and chief executive Robert Miron and president Steve Miron) than we had with the Time Warner experience. It's more of a collaborative atmosphere than it would have been with Time Warner. This is not a sidebar investment. They're keenly interested, but not in an interfering way.
Q. Knology Inc., the company that agreed to buy your Pinellas County rival Americast from Verizon, says it plans to offer phone service over its cable system. Does Bright House have any plans to do so as well?
From a technological standpoint, we're there. We did that back when we were under the Time Warner umbrella. We didn't go forward with it in a commercial launch for a number of reasons - in short, because we just didn't think it was the appropriate time or the appropriate place. It's fair to say that we are working much more intensely on (phone service) at this point in time, and it's a very bright blip on the radar screen. We're still evaluating the timing of when we might do something like this, the cost of what it might be.
Q. Growing competition from satellite TV services, such as Dish Network and DirecTV, doesn't appear to be having much impact on the prices of your cable TV packages. Why is this?
We are sensitive to the overall price-value relationship. We believe (customers look at) the price-value relationship of the overall packages and the portfolio of services that a customer can choose from. That's been our strategy, and we think it's been relatively successful. That's why we focus so much on developing these advanced platforms (such as video-on-demand and high-definition TV) to provide these choices for consumers. We think that's a compelling element in a competitive arena. It's not unconsumer-like to choose to pay more to get more.