Earnings Call Excerpt
Here’s the entire text of the Q&A from Comcast’s (ticker: CMCSA) Q3 2005 conference call. The prepared remarks are here. We recognize that this transcript may contain inaccuracies - if you find any, please post a comment below and we’ll incorporate your corrections. And please note: this conference call transcript is a Seeking Alpha product, so feel free to link to it but reproduction is not permitted without the explicit permission of Seeking Alpha.
Q&A
Operator
Thank you, sir. Operator Instructions The first question is from Richard Greenfield from Fulcrum Global Partners. Please go ahead.
Q - Richard Greenfield
Hi, a couple of questions. When you think about your video programming deals, do they currently allow you to stream television to wireless phones, or do you have to go back and negotiate that? And then just in terms of your digital sub adds, you had 307,000 in the quarter, how many of those were the enhanced basic, and what's the related ARPU on those enhanced basic subscribers versus your existing digital subs? Thanks.
A - Brian Roberts,
Okay. Good question, John will hit number two. Let me take number one. On the video programming deals, being that we're not, we never were, in the wireless business, for the most part I don't believe our contracts would cover them. But that raises the broader question, and one of the reasons I think Sprint sought us out is our relationship with the content community and the opportunity to add value. And I think one of the things we talked about yesterday, for those that weren't at the Sprint announcement, is really the creation of a third screen, as a possibility. And you heard Dick Parsons talk about it on the Time Warner call, and you saw it with the iPod announcement with Desperate Housewives. Our view is, and really I think a lot of it can certainly also be attributed to our great success with 1 billion streams, as Steve mentioned, in ON DEMAND. The television business is changing, and just as the music business before it has changed and is changing. And we, all of us, see the opportunity to be very protective of digital rights management, to have the content community feel good and secure in what is happening to the content at all times, but to create new opportunities that will allow all the distributors and the rights holders to create new revenue and new business models for customers. And you see this, and I believe the dam is open. We're very excited by the iPod announcement, and I think you will see announcements following on. The movies that Steve talked about for ON DEMAND, and so we will go back very quickly now, and begin a conversation on how can we take snipets, maybe full-time channels, maybe custom-made content. And I'd give one last point on this, because I think it's a very interesting area, if you were to ask yourself, for $0.99 you can buy a song and download it, and for $1.99 you can download 30 seconds of a song, which would people like more? And it's kind of amazing, when you step back and think that ring tones account for $5 billion of revenue, and iTunes is 1/10th or less of that. So the consumer behavior is sometimes hard to foreguess, or predict. Secondly, the wonderful new business that that represents to the music industry, rather than just a straight cannibalization of an existing revenue, but the creation of something that a generation is in love with, such as ring tones, creates, to me, in my mind, the real promise of a video ring tone. Not the actual ring tone, obviously, but the idea of is there another set of applications that you people would pay a small premium for, or an incremental charge, or have a new advertising model, or a new business relationship that can occur on wireless devices as they evolve over the next 20 years that will enhance the relationship that we today enjoy, and if you look at what happened with ON DEMAND, when we started out, we didn't have any content, we now have 4,000 shows, lots of movies, and wonderful -- every single category and every relationship with the content company we have, they all talk about ON DEMAND. So we think this is the beginning of creating a technical platform which will quickly follow it on with a relationship with the content and distribution community.
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