Leading the TV Everywhere Charge

Marcien Jenckes, senior VP and general manager of video services, Comcast Cable

By George Winslow -- Broadcasting & Cable, 6/25/2012 12:01:00 AM

While many 2012 Next Wave leaders are rising stars within their companies, bound one day for top executive spots, Comcast’s Marcien Jenckes has, in many ways, already arrived. As the head of video services at the nation’s largest multichannel provider, he currently has oversight over operations that produced $19.6 billion in revenue for the MSO in 2011.

Jenckes’ appearance on this year’s list, however, highlights his emergence as an industry-wide leader in developing and deploying next-generation video products that are crucial not only for Comcast’s future, but for a wide array of outside programmers and broadcasters.

The most obvious example of those products is Comcast’s TV Everywhere efforts. Currently the MSO offers more than 125,000 titles on demand for its VOD, online and iPad applications and is aggressively rolling out new IP and cloud-based services, including its recently deployed X1 platform. That will both expand the amount of content available on a multitude of devices and radically improve the way consumers can access and experience that content with new apps and interactive applications.

In the short term, those efforts have helped slow the amount of subscribers Comcast has lost through the last six quarters, making it the only MSO to see that kind of improvement. “We have shown a significant reduction in sub losses and expect to be in a position where the company can start growing from a video sub perspective again,” Jenckes says.

But many of the new services Comcast is deploying also mark a fundamental transformation of the cable business. “I always like to say, we are moving from a construction company to a software company,” which will use new IP and software-based services to rapidly deploy new offerings and technologies, Jenckes says.

To speed that transition, Jenckes is himself one of a new breed of cable industry leaders hired from the online world. He arrived at Comcast in November 2010, after a variety of jobs at AOL and a stint as CEO of online syndication company Grab Networks. “Neil [Smit, president and CEO of Comcast Cable and executive VP of Comcast Corp.] has made a big effort to bring in talent from outside the cable industry to help change the way we think,” Jenckes says.