Exclusive Interview: Comcast’s Matthew Strauss

PREMIUM: The senior VP and general manager of Comcast Interactive Services, Matthew Strauss, tells World Screen Newsflash how Comcast’s new generation of products and services is redefining the cable experience, boosting subscriptions and delighting subscribers.

Comcast, the largest cable operator in the U.S., has been a leader in on-demand. Its extensive Xfinity service allows subscribers to catch up on missed episodes of shows from all major TV networks, watch entire seasons of shows and see movies the same day they are released on DVD. As Matthew Strauss explains, this offering is available on TV, online, on the iPad, at home or on the go.

WS: What factors have contributed to Xfinity’s popularity?
STRAUSS: Customers inherently like more choice and more control. Xfinity has given us the ability to not only offer video on demand, but we have a scalable infrastructure to go from 10,000 to 30,000 choices or 30,000 to 100,000 choices in the future. Xfinity gives us the ability to offer faster broadband speeds and more HD networks. Last year we offered 3D channels, both linear and on demand. It’s also given us the ability to look outside the home and offer the Xfinity TV iPad app and Xfinitytv.com—we’re starting to untether the experience from just being in the home and giving customers the mobility to consume that video anywhere they want it.

WS: Xfinity has also helped Comcast increase its subscriber base and improve its image.
STRAUSS: There’s a word that I sometimes use that is not typically associated with cable, and that’s delight. I say that because when we launched our iPad app back in November, I remember I followed the Twitter feeds every night before I’d go to sleep, to see what our customers were saying about us. We really surprised our customers by offering them not only the possibility to watch favorite shows on demand anytime, anywhere, but also search on-demand menus, change channels on their TV sets and even schedule their DVRs remotely—through their iPad. There were others who were offering video on the iPad, so that wasn’t necessarily unique, but giving customers the ability to control their viewing experience using a tablet, that was different from what had been out there before. If you look at the remote control, it really hasn’t changed for 50 years, so to be able to approach the tablet and think of it as a way to reinvent the remote control, surprised people in a very positive way. As we continue to iterate these new types of products and services, customers are recalibrating what they think of cable, because this isn’t like your parents’ cable company, this is a whole new generation of products and services that are really going to redefine cable.

WS: What must a service like Xfinity offer to provide a better experience than over-the-top services?
STRAUSS: I think of OTTs slightly differently. I see them as offering a very targeted slice of a much broader pie. Our focus has really been on offering the most comprehensive library of content. We’ve spent years trying to amass a library. We have deals with every studio, every cable and broadcast network, so that we have a definitive offering that goes across the full spectrum of windows from theatrical release all the way to library content and everything in between. When we launched on-demand, eight or nine years ago, over 90 percent of the content was free. The OTT services are offering a very targeted slice of [content]: either prior-season TV content or library movies or a very specific segment of TV content. I don’t necessarily see that as a replacement to what we offer. And that’s just video, which is clearly an important piece, but it’s just one piece. We look at how video and Internet and telephony all work together in a very cohesive way so the customer actually gets an enhanced experience, whether it’s seeing your caller ID appear on your television or the ability to program your DVR using an iPhone. It’s tying all these different products and services together in addition to having a definitive content library. This is where customers will see the most value and the most convenience.

WS: How much innovation do your customers expect from Xfinity?
STRAUSS: I think of it more in terms of value. We continue to strive to add more value into our products and services. People obviously have a love affair with TV and video, but in many cases they don’t always realize how much better it could be. For example, ten years ago video on demand really didn’t exist, and today we just celebrated our 20 billionth program on demand. Ten years ago most people didn’t know what a DVR was, and today it’s in a third of all TV homes. The iPad didn’t exist 18 months ago, but we were able to create a new product out of it. Our iPad app has been downloaded about 2.6 million times since we offered it. We’re constantly thinking of ways to add more value. We recently introduced a few new products. One is Skype and video conferencing using the television. Another is our advanced cloud-based guide, next-generation Xfinity TV, which is going to open up a whole new door for us with respect to user interfaces, recommendation engines and social media. We’re continuing to find ways to innovate. But at its core, the innovation has to transcend itself into adding more value to our customers.

WS: How do you decide on which platforms you will make your services or your products available?
STRAUSS: We hold a fundamental belief that content should be available across all platforms, and a customer should have the ability to seamlessly access content, especially if they paid for it. If you look at our history, when websites and online video were really starting to proliferate, we put a flag in the sand, so to speak, and felt that this was an infrastructure that we wanted to build internally. We and CIM (Comcast Interactive Media) had a focused effort toward building out for the web. When tablets came on the scene, we felt strongly that we should have an experience for tablets. It started with the iPad because we really were enamored with the large screen and the ability to have a very visual and immersible experience. We now have our app available on Android and handsets and Honeycomb [Android 3.0] as well. You’ll continue to see us experiment. We announced a relationship with Samsung and we plan on offering an Xfinity TV app on Samsung Internet-connected televisions. We will likely experiment with game consoles as well, so we’re going to continue to broaden out into all these different touch points with a desire to make it easier for customers to find and access our content.

But there are a few things that are very important. First is security—the platform has to be secure to protect the content. We are also very focused on ensuring that advertising can be dynamically inserted and that there’s mea­surement so programmers can get the proper credit for the advertising. There is also branding. How does branding of the platform work? How does it reinforce that the content is part of a distributor’s offering? How does it reinforce the brand of the network? These are all things that get included as part of the evaluation. As new devices continue to come out into the market, we evaluate them closely, and if we think there is customer demand then you’ll likely see us go there.

WS: Programming is what drives all of this. What has been your strategy in securing content?
STRAUSS: There has been a bit of an evolution in the last eight years or so. As new platforms were starting to emerge several years ago, we typically were approaching them on a platform-by-platform basis, looking to get content for video on demand, looking to get content for websites. We were focused mostly on getting a fairly large amount of programming. Over time we’ve gotten more sophisticated and we don’t really discriminate against platforms. We really look to secure rights for all platforms. We are also much more focused on what’s the window, how is it being refreshed, how the advertising works. We’ve gotten much more focused on trying to think ahead as much as we can about the future and ensuring that we have secured the rights so that a customer can access this content on any device or any platform. You’re starting to see that manifestation—the iPad is probably a good example, where right now we have about 7,000 hours of content available for streaming on the iPad, and that content is available both in the home and out of the home. We’re actually the only distributor in the country that offers Showtime Anytime on VOD, online and even on the tablet. There’s quite a large library of programming that we’re offering. The rights for that content were secured before the iPad even existed
in some cases. We’re trying to think ahead about the evolution of where these platforms are going and showing that we are securing the rights to the best of our ability, so we can continue to create these new products and services and give customers the best experience.

WS: The process of securing rights nowadays is very complex.
STRAUSS: For the past five years that was my world. I learned a tremendous amount and I probably saw more change from a rights-negotiations standpoint in the past 12 months than I did during those entire five years. It’s also given me an appreciation for some of the challenges that the programmers deal with on their end. At the end of the day, there has to be collaboration between distributors and programmers for this to really work. We’ve been very focused on partnering with the networks to unlock the value because it’s beneficial to the distributor, the programmer and the entire ecosystem if this content can proliferate onto different devices.