@ UBS Media Week: NBCU's Zucker: 'We're Really A Cable Company, Not A Broadcaster'
This story was written by David Kaplan.
[In progress]Opening his remarks at the UBS Global Media and Communications (PDF) conference with a distillation of NBC Universal's parts, Jeff Zucker, the company's president and CEO, saved the description as a broadcaster for lastbehind theme parks. Instead Zucker sought to emphasize NBCU's role as a cable company. As Zucker pointed out at least twice in the first few minutes of his presentation, cable supplies 60 percent of the company's revenues. On the traditional side, broadcastacross all the major networks, Zucker saidare seeing ratings down in double digits.
-- Fueled by cable: The cable part of the business will grow by double digits, even in the face of the toughest economy in our lifetimes, Zucker said in his lunchtime keynote. "We're trying to change the broadcast model. You have to have a steel stomach to do something of these changes. But I do feel strongly about the growth of the media industry. Just six years ago, the company was 90 percent reliant on advertisingtoday it's more like 50 percent."
-- Safety first: That's the kind of environment NBCU finds itself in. So don't expect a lot of investment in digital or foreign acquisitions Zucker says, at least not for the next 18 months. Commenting on the "safety first mode," Zucker's UBS interlocutor said, "That's music to a banker's ears."
-- Questions on the table: Looking at changing the broadcast model, Zucker said all questions are on the table. "Can we continue to program 22 hours of original programming a week? Can we program for seven days of every week? One of our competitors don't. And we're not just talking about primetime, we're looking at local, which has been the hardest hit sector, as well as sports. If we don't address this, we'll wind up like the newspaper industry. Or worse." More to come
By David Kaplan