NCTA's Powell: Comcast/NBCU 'changes the dynamic inside the association'

Having the nation's largest MSO, Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA) on the member rolls of the National Cable Telecommunications Association (NCTA), is a great thing, organization President Michael Powell told a C-SPAN program. Comcast's ownership of NBCUniversal--one of the four major broadcast networks traditionally seen as somewhat adversarial to cable's interests--"changes the dynamics of the association," he said.

Those changes, though, seem to be "on net" more positive than negative, he said.

"You have the country's largest cable operator, also a significant programmer. It provides us no real alternative. We are an association that is now bound together, as we should have been anyway, but I think Comcast helps make that real glue."

Nothing can be certain about how the new relationship progresses until Comcast/NBCU "begin to propagate their interest," Powell said. That propagation will likely come from Powell's NCTA predecessor Kyle McSlarrow and former FCC Commission Meredith Attwell Baker, who recently joined Comcast as a lobbyist, following a path that former FCC Chairman Powell, himself, took--albeit with more circumspection.

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