Despite its bulk as a service provider and programmer, thanks to NBCUniversal, programming costs continue to be "a challenge" for Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA), the MSO's CFO Michael Angelakis said during a presentation Barclays Capital 2011 Global Communications, Media and Technology Conference today in New York City.
"I think you're going to see a continued increase in programming costs," Angelakis said. "We're doing our best to get more rights, more platforms, more utilization in different areas and also try to keep those costs as low as possible. It's a challenge and we'll have to move through it."
Angelakis said that Comcast was "toying with a few things" in the way of programming tiers but "the reality is that a lot of consumers want as much as they can possibly get" and tiers would necessarily exclude some content.
On another content angle, Angelakis also said that Comcast is looking at, but not currently adopting any usage- or consumption-based billing.
"We've deployed the information that people need to gauge how much they're using and if we ever wanted to go to usage-based billing or consumption-based billing we could possibly do that," he said. But, with 80 percent of its area covered by DOCSIS 3.0 "we feel really good about our capacity and our capability to continue to manage additional bandwidth needs."
For more:
- listen to the webcast
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