Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) chief Jeff Bewkes said he doesn't see consumers trying to rein in their entertainment spending and said that demand is going to drive the price of broadband higher.
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Bewkes believes demand will drive up the price of broadband. |
"People always think, ‘shouldn't people be trying to get their TV bill down from $80 a month to $40 a month,'" he said in an interview with the Financial Times. "You can't deliver what everybody thinks is the new Internet for $30 to $70 a month. It's too expensive. We got rid of [Time Warner Cable] because of this."
Netfix (Nasdaq: NFLX), he pointed out, continues to gobble up bandwidth. Noting that the streaming service accounts for 35 percent of prime-time U.S. downstream traffic, Bewkes said: "You can't run the programming industry of the future over a two-lane road system."
Bewkes also said the TV Everywhere initiative continues to gather speed, rolling out faster than DVRs and VOD, and noting that HBOGo currently is streaming 98 programs to cable subscribers.
"It's all falling into the right place," Bewkes said.
However, he dismissed any potential threat to the pay-TV industry from Netflix, Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN).
"There's been a tremendous amount of wishful thinking going on," he said about Netflix, one of his favorite targets in the past. "They get $8 a month. The entire cable dial gets $100."
Referencing Apple and Amazon, he said: What power do they have over us? They have to have us on their devices."
For more:
- see this Financial Times article
- see FierceCable's take
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