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• Case | HBS Case Collection | April 2015 (Revised June 2020)

  Comcast Corporation (A)

  Sunil Gupta, Henry McGee, Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Margaret L. Rodriguez

  In March 2015, the U.S. television industry received a major wake-up call. HBO, a premium cable channel with over 30 million subscribers, had announced it would begin offering a standalone streaming service. This new service would allow customers to bypass the cable companies and get direct access to HBO's programming online. The announcement was followed closely by Brian Roberts, chief executive of the Comcast Corporation. Comcast was America's largest cable and internet service provider, having built a profitable business bundling television content and delivering it via cable networks to more than 20 million households. Broadcast and cable television was a $173 billion industry in the U.S., but the rise of on-demand and streaming services meant viewers had more options than ever before. What did developments such as HBO's new service mean for the future of Comcast, and for the industry overall?

  Keywords: cable television; HBO; industry evolution; Television Entertainment; Disruption; Business Model; Competitive Strategy; Media and Broadcasting Industry;

  Citation:

  Gupta, Sunil, Henry McGee, Felix Oberholzer-Gee, and Margaret L. Rodriguez. "Comcast Corporation (A)." Harvard Business School Case 715-457, April 2015. (Revised June 2020.)  View Details

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• Supplement | HBS Case Collection | June 2020

  Comcast Corporation (B)

  Sunil Gupta, Henry McGee and Felix Oberholzer-Gee

  The (B) case, set in the summer of 2020, highlights the concern of Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, as the streaming war intensifies. In a short period of time several new streaming services, such as Disney+, Apple TV+, Quibi, and HBO Max were launched and cable subscription declined significantly. This not only poses a challenge to Comcast but many streaming services are also likely to fail as consumers have more choices.

  Keywords: cable television; industry evolution; Television Entertainment; Disruption; Business Model; Competitive Strategy; Media and Broadcasting Industry;

  Citation:

  Gupta, Sunil, Henry McGee, and Felix Oberholzer-Gee. "Comcast Corporation (B)." Harvard Business School Supplement 720-481, June 2020.  View Details

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• Article | Law, Culture and the Humanities | June 2020

  Informing Dissent

  Hillary Greene and Dennis Yao

  The first part of this commentary argues that because the production of dissent depends on the availability of information, greater attention should focus on government restrictions on access to official information. At no time is this more important than when information is monopolized by the government. If not constrained, government’s monopoly control of information, combined with its incentives to shape support for its policies, may at some times and in some ways reduce dissent. In the second part of the commentary, a cost-benefit approach is proposed to analyze an individual’s incentives to produce speech and is then applied to assess the role social communities play vis-à-vis individual dissent. This analysis underscores the important and complex (sometimes encouraging, sometimes discouraging) role that communities play in the generation of dissent. Our analysis uses economic tools, often accompanied by an antitrust perspective, to better understand the implications of government information control and social pressures upon speech and dissent.

  Keywords: dissent; information monopoly; economics of speech; Freedom of Information Act (FOIA); self-censorship; social pressure; Information; Government and Politics; Spoken Communication; Society;

  Citation:

  Greene, Hillary, and Dennis Yao. "Informing Dissent." Law, Culture and the Humanities 16, no. 2 (June 2020): 200–212.  View Details

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