(mellow piano music) (upbeat instrumental music) - [Female Narrator] Wireless data, the internet, watching virtually every movie ever made on your phone, it all runs through the pipe that cable television proliferated.

Even in our now digital world, we still rely on a stream of cable running strong and true.

- [Robot] 54 degrees Fahrenheit.

- [Female Narrator] Along with the visionaries behind it, and the workers who laid it, cable pipe is the very lifeblood of the digital revolution.

- Cable television transformed communications in the United States.

- If you look at the cable investment, total dollars of investment putting into the ground, it is the largest, privately funded real estate project in the history of the United States with zero tax dollars.

- Colorado is really kind of the Mecca of the cable television industry, because there were so many companies way back when that got their start here.

- [Malone] Back then it was entrepreneurs and a cowboy attitude.

- Free spirited, open, competitive, willingness to take risk.

- Not blind risk.

They're just not afraid of failing.

- Bill Daniels was wow, bigger than life.

- He's the Godfather of the cable industry.

No question.

- Those pioneers attracted others to come to Colorado for the explosive growth to make cable what it is today.

- Cable has become the heartbeat of the home.

- Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google.

Without the cable industry and our broadband pipe they wouldn't be there.

- Think about your iPhone, your Roku, your connected device, all of those things connect wirelessly to the internet and over a billion of those connect to actually the cable industry's infrastructure.

- [Moran] And institutions like the cable center help keep us connected.

Having cable apps down the street, to large operators with Comcast and Charter.

All of these organizations really have made this industry thrive in Colorado.

It's really mind blowing to study the evolution from providing some additional TV channels to what we are now with connectivity.

- Completely changed the game on how information is sent to people.

- [Female Narrator] And the history of this cable and the pioneers who unfurled it, it is not finished yet.

Not by a long shot.

- [Male Announcer] This program was made possible by the History Colorado State Historical Fund.

- [Female Announcer] Supporting projects throughout the state to preserve, protect, and interpret Colorado's architectural and archeological treasures.

History Colorado State Historical Fund.

Create the future.

Honor the past.

- [Male Announcer] With additional funding provided in memory of Deanna E. La Camera and members like you.

With special thanks to the Denver Public Library, History Colorado, the Colorado Office of Film, Television, and Media, and to these organizations.

(upbeat instrumental music) (upbeat orchestral music) - Cable television has really only been around for 70 years and television, only a couple of decades before that.

- [Female Narrator] Until the late 1940s TV sets in the United States could really be counted in the thousands, and because they cost a small fortune, we're only found in the homes of the wealthy.

- The business model for television in the US is a commercial broadcast model.

What that meant is early on there were three commercial networks which developed.

CBS, NBC, and ABC.

Public television came along, which then developed into the fourth network.

That business model, being commercial, meant that for the investment that you made, you had to reach a larger audience, as large an audience as you can.

And what that meant is television focused on big cities.

That basically neglected rural areas or smaller cities.

- Television was very, very popular in the forties, but really was only available in large cities.

- [Female Narrator] As the sale of black and white TV sets mushroomed, rural appliance salesman had to figure out how to pick up programming from the big cities.

- The whole industry started in 1948, there abouts, and really simultaneously with three different entrepreneurs who came up with the idea that you could put an antenna up on a hill.

- On top of a mountain or some other tall tower or something to receive a distant TV station.

And then wire the community with cables and provide a service to the community by essentially retransmitting over the air broadcast channels.

- [Henthorn] This was a wildly entrepreneurial idea.

Very inventive to put that antenna up on the hill and take the signal down with coaxial cable.

Hence the name cable industry.

- Colorado, of Denver being the center, in the middle, so-called rural America, not the big cities, was a good, fertile ground for cable to develop.

- [Female Narrator] Appropriating broadcast signals from big cities might have been where the cable story ended, if it weren't for a man, who in 1952, had never even seen a television.

- [Older Man] Bill Daniels was often referred to as the father of the cable television business.

- [Daniels] If there's any reason they call me the father was because I would think I was the first guy who recognized it as being a hell of a potential business, and I brought the financial community in and worked at that to really make it a business rather than an extension of an appliance shop.

So I decided to explore the territory and I moved to the Rocky Mountain area.

(upbeat instrumental music) At this time I was 32 year old, had no college education.

I have seen television or the first time on my trip from Mexico up through Denver on the way to Casper.

- He was clearly the first promoter.

He was a broker and investor.

It was Murphy's Bar and that Saturday night fight, the credit for really introducing him to the business.

- Bill goes into the bar on Broadway, and for the first time sees a television set.

Television set happens to be broadcasting that night, the Wednesday night fight.

And he was a fight guy.

I mean, Bill fought as an amateur fighter, Golden Gloves Champion, New Mexico military.

So he was particularly interested in how it was delivered to the bar.

He immediately fell in love with cable television.

- [Daniels] Oh my God.

What an invention this is.

I couldn't get out of my mind, how to get that great invention to a small town when they had no TV stations.

- So when he got the Casper, he thought, okay, where's the TV?

I'm want one of those TVs.

Well, you can't get televisions in Casper.

- I thought there's gotta be a way that you can get television sin small towns.

I don't know what that way is, but there's gotta be a way.

So I went to work on the project and got it done.

- They would actually take the Denver signals and bicycle 'em up to Wyoming, and then they'd get, in effect, the Denver ABC, or CBS, or NBC channel.

- I think it was known as CATV Abel Cable.

A-B-E-L Cable.

With a little, funny guy.

I think that's what we were in '65, and thus was born, what we call, community antenna television.

- [Henthorn] And they were mom and pop operations all around the country.

- [Saeman] And the industry was incredibly small.

- [Female Narrator] One might think that the major networks would be peeved at having their signals hijacked by these cable upstarts.

But in fact, the networks liked it.

Reaching more eyeballs, meant more advertising revenue for the broadcasters.

Bill Daniels and his fellow pioneers saw a huge potential for laying cable nationwide.

One community at a time.

- The most impressive part of that is that every community got built.

It was independently financed.

It was independently owned.

And if you think about the franchising process, if you or I wanted to go franchise somewhere in the Midwest and we got a franchise, we had to then go build the system.

So in the early days, most of the people who were involved were in the construction side of the business.

You know, you'd win a franchise and you had to go build it.

- This particular type of structure, community antenna systems, lasted for many years.

When I joined TCI in 1969, we were doing extension of broadcast stations in Montana and Wyoming mainly, and then some in Colorado as we expanded.

The community antenna system structure lasted for probably 15 years or more.

- We're fortunate that all the pioneers and the people that moved the industry were by and large, very friendly and good people.

- Cable is different than other industries.

Once you receive a franchise and you build a cable system, you're the only one in the cable industry in that market geography.

So cable by the de facto aloneness made them cooperative in joint ventures, in public policies.

Cooperative, working people rather than bitter fights in the same market, like in other industries.

That created this comradeship in the cable industry, which is unique in the industry.

- Oh yes, we were all friends.

Once you had the franchise to build the economics didn't allow overbuilding.

And we all shared each other's problems and helped each other out.

It was a small, knit group of individuals that started this.

And as my father said, I don't understand why you're doing this 'cause nobody's gonna watch those damn things.

- Cable industry, obviously, was taking the broadcasters programming and going out and getting paid for it.

But at the same time, increasing the audience for the broadcasters who are carrying advertising and they could sell their advertising for more.

But over a period of time, the broadcasters were concerned about the fact that cable might be a sleeping gorilla.

They began to try to limit cable's possibilities.

- And we charged 7.50 a month for one channel.

Every 90 days, we'd send our then customers a poll and they'd pick what programs they wanted to watch, and the majority ruled.

If more people wanted to see, I Love Lucy, that's what we'd show.

(audience applauding) - Hello there, 50 million Americans.

Thank you for letting us come into your living room.

- That era, that beginning of CATV, was really a seat of your pants operation, and they were out there climbing the poles.

- In the early days, almost all of it was on utility poles and cable companies would have to negotiate pole attachment agreements with the owners of the poles, the telephone company, the power company, or in some cases, both.

And then pay rent to attach the cables to the polls.

- Early on television antennas used what we call twin lead, which was just two wires separated by a piece of plastic.

That worked pretty well, except the signal died out too easily, so the next development was coaxial cable, which could carry multiple stations.

- A lot of people look at the coaxial cable that comes out of the wall at their house as the co-ax that their grandmother had.

That cable, however, is really efficient in transmitting signals.

Incredibly efficient.

Then to some of the old timers in the industry, I thank them for making the selection 50 years ago around coaxial cable, because our ability to use science to get as much capacity through that cable is unbounded.

- It's called coaxial cable because it's a two conductor transmission line.

There's a wire in the middle with a plastic insulating material around the wire, and then there's a tubular shield, which is the second conductor over the insulation, and then some protective black jacketing.

So all the TV signals, and cable modem signals, and whatnot are inside of that coaxial cable.

Co-ax means if you look at it from the end, like this, you've got the center conductor here, the one in the middle, and then the outer one, from the end view, is around circle.

So if you think of these two circular conductors, they share a common axis, so coaxial cable.

- [Female Narrator] Co-ax cable is so integrated into everyday life that it has almost become invisible, but it is that cable that makes things visible, and audible, and purchasable.

Who could foresee that a simple cable had such infinite reach?

Especially when there were only three or four channels available.

- When you talked about who in the early days of the cable business was really out there promoting, you know, it was Bill.

He would say it just had an unlimited potential, and we used to joke about, you know, how many possible channels can there be?

- After Bill got the cable system launched in Casper, it became pretty evident to him that he needed to find a different place to do that.

Casper isn't readily available to LA, Washington, DC, Chicago, New York.

At 1965, Denver's a pretty small town.

- He would tell me early on, someday people are gonna walk around with little phones and they're gonna talk.

And you think yeah right, buddy, For sure!

But look what happened.

I mean, just think about what the cable industry enabled.

Bill Daniels did not have a college degree himself, but what he did have was an incredible drive and an amazing ability to work with people.

- His personality was a very convincing personality.

At times, fun.

And at times very intense.

He was a fellow who you could count on his word.

- I worked for Bill for 15 years and he had such a drive, and such a vision that I don't think he heard the word "No" very well.

So you would talk to him about how difficult something was gonna be to get done.

And he would look at you squarely and say, "What's your point?"

Meaning just get it done.

Which we did.

- I met Bill in 1964.

We hit it along famously.

He was a Navy guy.

I was a Marine.

I still had my crew cut haircut.

And he never asked me where I went to school or what kind of grades I have.

My first impression of Bill was I had never met an individual that was as dynamic, as commanding, as Bill Daniels.

I thought, holy cow!

I've met a lot of people in my life, but this guy is really something.

He and I agree that I will come and join him.

I come into Denver.

Bill was the first guy in the cable industry in Denver, Colorado, so you might say it's number one son.

- [Female Narrator] Among the men who originally innovated the cable industry was certainly Bob Magness.

- Bob Magness was a fellow who, with his wife, Betsy, was very influential in the business.

He started a company which eventually became the biggest company in the business.

And he did that through grit and a lot of hard work.

- Bob Magness was a really great, humble guy.

He had been in World War II and that's where a lot of the cable pioneers who started the industry came from.

World War II veterans who were looking for new businesses and a lot of them were engineers, so the whole idea of radio and all of that was stuff that they were familiar with.

- I've always been very interested in ranching.

In fact sold cattle to buy the first load of cable.

We built the system largely on the weekends at first, while I still I had another job.

And Betsy, of course, was our first office manager and our office was our kitchen.

And we had something over 600 customers before we, in fact, before we had an office.

- Oh, I remember TCI really started when I convinced Bob to move to Bozeman, Montana.

And Bob bought the Bozeman property, decided he wanted to expand, and did two things.

He put together a microwave company to interconnect systems and went on an acquisition binge.

- We sort of "Ma and Pa" 'ed it.

We weren't the first, but we stuck in there, added a little bit each year.

- He was a mentor.

He was a father figure.

He was a leader.

He covered all the bases.

You didn't work for Bob.

You worked with Bob.

Literally.

A story that was told about Bob there in Bozeman, Montana, and they had an outage, and Bob was out there with the technician, and the technician took a connector and cut it off and threw it out in a field.

And the guy came down from the pole.

Bob says, "You got a dollar?"

And a guy says, "Yeah?"

He said, "Well, give it to me."

And he handed Bob a silver dollar.

Bob threw it out in the field and he said, "That's just what you did to me."

"You just threw a dollar away."

(man chuckling) So, he was very close with a buck.

- And Bob could squeeze the last drop of blood out of you.

(men chuckling) He was one of the smartest financial guys.

He could read a financial statement quicker than anybody.

And he was a very, very talented negotiator.

- [Female Narrator] Like Bob Magnus, Bill Daniels was also a shrewd negotiator, a skill which was constantly tested by an array of businesses lined up against the cable companies.

- Here's the list of our enemies when we first started the business.

Just say for about three years.

ABC, NBC, CBS, the telephone companies, the theater owners, the movie producers, the local TV stations.

They really didn't like us, unless we extended their signal.

Then they loved us.

But if we rolled into their market, they were out to get us.

Most city councils thought we were crazy.

The power companies didn't like us because they thought we were gonna ruin their plants if we got on their poles.

The 95% of the Washington lawyers fought us because they represented broadcasters.

The lobbyist didn't like us.

The Congressman didn't like us.

The senators didn't like us.

Well, that's a pretty good list of enemies.

We formed the Cable TV Association after about three years, and the reason we did is we said, hey, we've got some problems.

We better get together.

We figured that if all of these people were trying to stop us, we must have something!

Or they couldn't care less about us.

(mellow rock music) - The characteristics of the early industry were survival, legislative threats.

Bill often said we had enemies all over.

The only one that was our friend was main street.

I would say that that lasted through the mid seventies.

Also very much a part of Bill's business was an investment banker, putting buyers and sellers together.

That ultimately moved into financing the cable system.

Ultimately moved us into mobile radios, cellular telephones, and other things.

Innovation was critical.

In 1965 Bill Daniels was chairman of the Cable Television Association Convention in Denver, Colorado.

A company out of Phoenix, Arizona, AMICO, introduced a 12 channel, transistorized amplifier.

And everybody at the convention is saying, 12 channels?

What are we going to do with 12 channels?

My gosh!

Unbelievable!

But it didn't take very long once the capacity was there for creative minds to start putting things on.

(upbeat rock music) - [Female Narrator] The explosive growth that Bill Daniels and the other cable cowboys generated would mean nothing if programming could not catch up with technology.

But the idea of creating programs rather than just hijacking them, had humble beginnings.

In 1969 the FCC required cable systems with more than 3,500 subscribers to offer public access facilities, as well as to distribute local origination content.

- It began with a little innovations, such as the Weather Channel, and the Weather Channel was really a barometer and a thermometer, and a rotating camera, which went back and forth.

That was the product.

- I remember one instance where local origination, was a camera on a fish bowl with a goldfish swimming around.

(upbeat instrumental music) - They also had a bingo games.

We'd distributed bingo cards to every single subscriber.

We would have a camera focused on the little balls that jump around.

That was the most we could do visually.

And we had people in the backgrounds saying, "Oh, ah!

That's mine!

Oh, I got that number."

We just made that up as we went along.

- Almost embarrassing to talk about today.

- But it satisfied the legal requirement at the time.

- Admittedly, it was pretty crude.

From the late 1940s through about the mid 1970s, that's what cable did.

Some cable operators got a bit more advanced with local origination programming and built TV studios and did local newscasts, and broadcast local high school games, or other sporting events, city council meetings, and that really served as the foundation for a lot of the original programming that the cable industry has provided over the decades.

And typically the cable companies in those days provided maybe upwards of 12 channels.

That was it.

- [Female Narrator] This 12 channel maximum would not last long.

Cable operators became programmers to fill empty hours on television.

And then they started originating channels because they could.

- The early pioneers and entrepreneurs said, "You know, this is really great."

We can create some channels.

There were a lot of fights about this.

Many of these wound up in the lap of the FCC in Washington about making rules about what cable could do in the end.

It was the public interest that was being served and public interest was to provide more television availability, so then this led to multichannel television.

- The cable operators were generating some of their own programming, but we needed a lot more.

- So we at Daniels and Associates in the late seventies, early eighties started programming a couple of movie channels.

Our Vice President of marketing at that point, Don Johnson, goes to Hollywood and starts to buy access to be able to show those older movies on a pay channel that we put into all of our cable systems.

We had two channels.

One was called Showcase One.

One was Showcase Two.

So we had guys sitting there, or gals sitting there, okay, it's eight o'clock.

We need to put in Gone With The Wind or whatever we were showing, so that's how we introduced pay television for the first time into our cable systems.

- We had this lab set up and literally when they would order a movie on their converter, we would have kids on roller skates, pull the movie out and go stick it in so that the movie would come into their home.

That's how we were trying to test out, until the technology was in place to do it all automated.

Would people buy?

Would people want this feature?

Malone knew they would.

- John Malone is a figure larger than life in our industry and really in the whole business environment in our country and in the world.

- Here are the names of some people who have changed the way that we live.

Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham bell, Henry Ford, John Malone.

Entertainment Weekly Magazine ranked Malone number one of the 101 most influential people in entertainment.

- TCI is involved in a joint venture.

They're gonna develop high speed internet.

Break that down for a layman, John.

What is that?

- He's a legend.

This large figure in cable who has made huge bets and he tends to win them.

(mellow instrumental music) - My dad was an electrical engineer and an inventor.

And I grew up at the dinner table with the talk was about stuff like that.

But the summer before I went to Yale, I fell in love.

And so when I got out of engineering school, Bell Labs was, if you're willing to study what we would like you to study, we'll pay all the expenses, right?

And you'll get a stipend.

Well, you know, I wanted to get married.

I don't have any money.

(chuckling) So I said, hey, Bell Labs, that's for me.

And of course I knew Bell Labs was a great institution.

You know, 4,200 PHDs.

I mean, it was where pretty much all the research in electronic technology had been going on.

So they sent me to Johns Hopkins for a Master's degree in an entirely new field called, Operations Research.

Which was essentially computer science, applied math.

And I liked it.

And they said, you know, would you like to go back for your doctorate?

And I said, you bet.

- [Female Narrator] 26 Year old, Dr. John Malone then found work at the famed McKinsey and Company consulting firm.

When asked to analyze the purchase of a pioneering cable equipment company, Gerald Electronics, Malone ended up running it.

Although he only stayed for a few years, it was his first step towards Telecommunications Inc, or TCI, and global domination of the cable industry.

- By then, I had gotten to know on a very friendly basis, the CEOs of the principle cable companies.

If I traveled, I would stay at their homes.

I was like the adopted son of the industry.

When it came time, you know, I had my pick of where did I want to go.

And I liked Magness.

And so I took the Magness, Bob and Betsy job, and you know, it was great.

- [Female Narrator] John Malone moved to TCI in 1973 at a make it or break it moment.

The company had sizeable bank loans restricting its ability to grow.

- And I knew we were having some financial trouble at the time, but because we only, not that Bob was a bad operator, but we'd spread so fast and so far on bank debt.

John, some of his family started work a few weeks later.

Bob announced that everyone goes to work for John.

Well, we didn't know him or anything we're getting into.

And it was just very, very different because now I reported to John and he was a Yale guy.

His demeanor was different.

I was nervous all the time around John, because he was so smart, for one thing, and just all business.

- For all of us the seventies was a real challenge.

The struggle.

The company was virtually bankrupt when I joined it in 1972.

These guys were already working there, Larry on the microwave side and JC on the cable side.

And the industry itself had gone through a boom and bust cycle at that point, owed a lot of money, made a lot of commitments.

Couldn't honor either, okay?

So it was a real struggle.

- When he first came on board we traveled around to a lot of our cable systems.

He did what he did very, very, very well.

He let me do what I did.

He's a super conservative guy.

He's easy to know.

Just an all around great guy.

- Bob had picked the right guy.

I think it's hard for an entrepreneur.

All of his money's tied up in the business.

To hand it over to someone and say, okay, you take the reins.

- I grew to admire John so much in his ability to solve issues and problems, whether they be financial or technical.

- And somehow we bootstrapped our way through the seventies and survived.

The company started to turn in 1978 when we were able to refinance and get the banks off of our back.

And then for a couple of years, we were doing creative financial deals, acquisitions using creative financing.

i.e.

paper, as opposed to cash.

- [Female Narrator] Ever the wizard, Malone conjured up a whole new way of evaluating a company's worth, EBITDA, which was essentially a way to evaluate a company's cash generating capabilities without factoring in certain expenses.

It showed how much money a company like TCI could bring in without considering how expensive it was to run.

With EBITDA, TCI's bottom line suddenly looked a lot better.

- EBITDA, the cash flow rather than earnings, and that changed the whole financing of cable industry's expansion.

And that was great foresight on John's part.

- And John said to me, we have one or two choices.

We can either get big or get out.

- And the one thing I knew for sure was if I could buy it, JC could deliver operating performance that was so certain that by the early eighties, banks were loaning us money to buy things on a hundred percent basis, just on trust that we would buy them and fix them.

And that really started the turnaround of TCI as a public company.

Through the eighties and into the nineties, we did over 200 acquisitions and we built what became the biggest cable TV company in the country.

- The combination of Betsy at Bob's side and John Malone on the firing line is just an unbeatable combination.

And they built the largest cable company in the world.

- Probably the most important ingredient has been the people.

Honestly, we still have quite a few of the same people that moved from Montana still on the payroll.

- And I joined TCI in 1969.

We had 56,000 cable subscribers and I think our revenues for the first year were $3 million.

The day I retired, we had 14 and a half million cable subscribers.

The revenues were about three... three and a half billion, I believe.

- [Female Narrator] As the industry grew, so did the competition, fueling something referred to as the Franchise Wars.

Cable companies that had been congenial for years were now viciously battling for every market in the country.

Over promising services to each city, just to get an edge at winning a franchise.

It was the Reagan era and the free market ruled, not the government.

- One of the challenges that the industry faced that was probably not amongst its finest days was the Franchise Wars because as the regulatory environment opened up the technology advanced and satellite became available.

Now we started looking at television markets that we had never before taken a look at.

- Because of the franchising process, you had opportunities across the United States.

Some of the bigger players in the cable business were picking the markets that they wanted to work on and to develop.

You know, who's going to build out Chicago or who's going to build out Denver?

Or who's going to build out Austin, Texas?

- Cable operators, typically each and every one of the major players, had a franchise procurement group whose job was to study markets, negotiate with city councils, and try to get the franchise.

And the typical decent size market would have 10 or 12 players that were in there trying to get that franchise.

We would maybe promise some things that after the battle was over, we said, why did we do that?

- The CEO guys would turn to each other and say, we're never gonna do that, are we?

You know, it was like, come on, give me a break.

This is all kind of crazy stuff.

In the sense that it was irrational.

- Through the whole eighties, the cable industry's investment was the single biggest infrastructure investment taking place in the US.

- And the cable industry continued this fantastic growth curve, wired up the communities with largely entertainment programming.

- I think we came through the Franchise Wars just fine.

The industry benefited from it, the customers benefited from it.

So I think it was just a part of the history that if you had to do it over, you'd wish it would have looked and felt a little bit different.

- [Female Narrator] On the heels of the wild west Franchise Wars, Congress passed the cable act in 1984 to bring some legislative order to the cable chaos.

Ultimately, the FCC took formal jurisdiction over the industry and competition and deregulation were established.

Cable had lobbied for fewer restrictions while Bill Daniels' old enemies, telephone companies, broadcasters, movie studios, and municipalities all wanted more regulation of cable's growth.

- Cable was an innovation that threatened, they felt, all of them.

The bill was a change in the 1934 Communications Act, which had never been changed in 50 years.

And here we are in '84 and we finally got it passed by a whisker.

It really freed up the cable industry in a way which allowed us to get financing that we hadn't been able to get as well before.

And that allowed us to get much more heavily into the big cities.

And one of the major drivers was the creation of programming.

(upbeat orchestral music) - [Female Narrator] When John Malone had taken the reins of Magness' nearly bankrupt TCI in 1973, the entire cable landscape had been undergoing a seismic shift.

Even though the foundation of TV delivery was still firmly planted in the ground, space-based technology was about to beam into the industry.

Soon consumers would have a constellation of channels.

Satellites were on the horizon.

- We actually filed for the first domestic satellite system.

- In 1977 or 78, TCI was so poor under our loan agreements that we weren't allowed to deploy satellite receivers.

So this big, new, technological and programming innovation, we were precluded per our loan agreements.

Couldn't spending any money on it.

- Right.

- Remember that?

- Right, I do.

- And so, I was so anxious to see how this would work, that we literally, as individuals, we went out, we bought a franchise from the company, Minot, North Dakota, and we built a system, and that was the first opportunity that we had to learn what we could do with this, how it could be exploited, what kind of technology it was, and so on.

We ultimately sold the system back into the company.

We merged that with HBO and that then became the dominant pay TV service distributed by satellite.

- [Older man] The satellite industry dynamically changed the cable industry.

Everything changed when they got satellite signals in.

The uniqueness of some of the cable programming became clear.

- 1972, the Federal Communications Commission decided that the industry could be a two-way communications competitor to the telecos.

Effectively required the industry to go into the deployment of two-way equipment and to do a certain amount of programming.

The end of the seventies was the deployment of satellite to tie all these cable systems together and create a large enough scale that programmers could start programming specifically for it.

Technology is developing and coming along, and enabling things that previously had not been possible.

- Denver is a wonderful satellite receiver or uplink site because it's in the middle of the country, and you can see a satellite arc that is longer in Denver than you can from either coast.

That's a bit geeky, I know, but the significance is, Colorado is a good place for satellite reception and uplinking.

(upbeat orchestral music) - [Female Narrator] The first pay TV satellite network was HBO, founded in 1972.

Just three years later satellite truly met content in real time.

It was a single, live, HBO broadcast that is credited with giving birth to the entire modern, satellite-driven, cable industry.

(upbeat techno music) - It was called The Thriller from Manila.

Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier in the Philippines, and that was the beginning of feeling what's possible with satellites.

- HBO was a struggling entity.

I mean, if you go back to what cable was in 1972, cable was distant signals, had 13 channels.

There was really no other real offering.

The critical decision to move HBO into satellite became significant in that it opened the door for, not only an economic delivery to every head in every country, but it became the pacesetter that led to other program offerings coming up on satellite as well.

- [Malone] And that changed everything because all of a sudden the satellite was creating scale that you had enough households that were cable subscribers and could be reached, and so programmers started to think about, you know, there's enough customers to serve here.

And the advertising revenue could be sufficient.

- There's two components, you have to create a program that's gonna be of interest to people, but in our industry, you also had to have access to eyeballs.

Cable operators, who strung the lines through the streets of cities, had eyeballs.

So the two had to go together or the business wouldn't be a success.

- Then you started to see services like MTV and Nickelodeon, and so on, start to proliferate.

And on our side, we saw the opportunity to help these people with their ideas, and so we started to invest.

And as people would come to us with ideas, if it was Bob Johnson with Black Entertainment Television, or John Hendricks' Discovery, or, one by one, we would tend to invest in these things, and typically we'd own 20% of these new businesses and we'd help them get going.

It helped us.

It gave us something to sell.

It helped them.

We gave them scale and distribution.

So it all worked great.

- It was about content.

And so when he supported Ted Turner and got started investing in content, no cable operator, that I knew of, was investing in content at the time, but it was his brilliance to know that eventually content was going to be what drove the business.

- I dedicate The News Channel for America, the Cable News Network.

- You know, that was a moment of pride for cable because now we could, you know, we could still share from those broadcast news channels and we could give you national news.

- People wanting to watch what they wanted to watch, when they want it to watch it.

He understood that decades before anybody else.

- [Female Narrator] Through the 1980s, the number of homes with cable grew exponentially in what's been referred to as the Zap Decade.

Remote controls and video cassette recorders combined with multi-channel satellite delivery of programming carried on cable networks now brought choice into living rooms.

With the push of a button viewers suddenly became their own programmers.

- The satellites changed the cable industry more than anything that I can think of, frankly.

It was a boom for the cable industry.

- I theorized a package called Sunday Night NFL.

People say, you're crazy!

We already have two NFL package on Sunday afternoon.

It's impossible.

But I said, no, Sunday night, besides 60 Minutes, there were not many program, much program for male.

And everybody laughed.

So that changed the whole history because it's still probably the highest rated Sunday night program, Sunday Night NFL.

- Was a co-founder of six separate cable channels.

One was the Food Network.

It's become a big deal and was something that nobody believed in at the time.

We were very, very successful.

We had Emeril Lagasse, bam, and take it up a notch.

- Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam!

And you take some peanuts and you go, bam!

- The eighties were a smoking time for the cable industry and its growth.

- And there was new research out talking about the truck chasers.

And they started labeling customers that liked cable.

And literally it was so popular at the time that if there was an installer in the block, people would chase the truck and say, hey, we want cable, so hence, truck chasers.

- [Female Narrator] The success of this multichannel satellite delivery of programming system was linked to the already installed cable grid.

Technicians and laborers had been pulling wire across the country since the late 1940s slowly building the infrastructure that made their bosses billionaires.

- It isn't until about 1980, that Bill Daniels really becomes a wealthy guy.

- And when he was building cable land, we literally were here having a meeting, and someone came in, looking in, and thought they were building a hotel.

(upbeat instrumental music) For many years it was used as sort of a meeting place for the cable industry, so we had parties here, a single apartment for Bill, and then the rest of it was just sort of a party house.

He was a 60 year old, single male living in 18,000 square feet.

As you can imagine it was a little much, but his biggest challenge he was very public about.

He was an alcoholic.

It was important for him to be pretty public about it.

And he was a big Betty Ford fan.

She probably deserves a lot of the credit 'cause he was very public about her drinking issues at the time.

He was one of the first business people who said, look, I've got a drinking problem and I'm dealing with it at Betty Ford, and he got that under control in the mid eighties.

He was married and divorced four times.

He was married to the business.

He definitely dated a lot, but he was, he was just Bill.

- [Female Narrator] Like most of corporate America at the time, the cable industry's leadership was filled by men who looked like Bill Daniels.

Women and people of color were not in the boardroom yet.

- When I think about the history of cable and those cable pioneers who started this industry, I do see, you know, across the board, white males in those roles.

And to me, that's consistent with the history of this country.

Cable wasn't unique in that.

It was very much how this country was operated in the forties, fifties, sixties.

The innovative spirit is still alive.

And to me, that's what ties me back to those pioneers from back in the day.

(mellow instrumental music) - The industry supported bringing minorities in and women.

That's a true statement, but changing cultures is a long-term process.

There's been a lot of hiring and inclusion of minorities at the bottom level, but if you walk through those corporate offices, there's still great opportunity.

There's no minorities, very few women on boards, noted a few exceptions.

The senior management ranks were predominantly white male.

- It's changing, but slowly.

It's mainly men in our engineering group.

I would say if I had to count the women in my role, I'd have to go national to really get up to all my fingers.

- Blacks for Soul and Television, BEST.

BEST was the organization that persuaded John Pastori, who was a Senator, had oversight and responsibility over the FCC.

Their advocacy persuaded him to name the first black commissioner to the FCC, and that was Ben Hooks.

Now that set a domino in motion in that the NCTA and the cable industry were in step with the changing times and actively sought to recruit African American to come on the staff.

I was one of 200 applicants and I got the job.

My coming in was a big deal at that time.

There were no African Americans here.

There were no minorities being elected to city government at that time.

So seeds did take a long time to germinate.

I know my colleagues on the staff were nervous about what role I would play.

Many of the issues that I was dealing with, even in those days, lack of minority presence on television, lack of minority presence in front of, or behind the camera, if you will, that that natural process would begin to open some doors.

I joined HBO in 1974.

Over a couple of years, begin to see the future of cable more than what cable really was at the time.

I had convinced the management there to set up regional offices.

I was in San Francisco first, and then I opened up the LA three years later, and then I opened up an office in Denver.

I later found out when I became the Vice President at HBO, that I was the first African American to become a Vice President, and time makes history.

- [Female Narrator] In the early 1980s, Don Anderson helped create the Kaitz Foundation.

In honor of Walter Kaitz, a respected leader of the California Cable and Telecommunications Association.

The Kaitz Foundation recruited minorities into the ever expanding cable business, and by the end of the 1990s, more than 65% of the Kaitz Foundation fellows and alumni were Vice Presidents, directors, or managers in the industry.

One of them was Rich Jennings.

- In the early nineties, the industry was recognizing a deficit of minorities in the leadership space within our industry.

I was a sales manager at Sears and I'm reading a business magazine and it says, hey, you know, you want to try something different, apply here, write this essay.

A month later, I got a letter back saying, hey, congratulations.

You're one of like, you know, 100 people from across the country that we want to bring into what they called an assessment day.

Think of, you know, a hundred young people all converging in Chicago, and for three days, you're gonna get put through tests.

They brought us all in.

They then brought executives in from some of the big operators at that time, so think Jones' Inner Cable, Time Warner Cable, Continental Cable, their executives and recruiters coming in, and basically for three days they monitored us.

They gave us case studies.

They gave us a situational opportunities and they looked to see how we performed.

At the end of the three days you got envelopes, and the envelopes represented an offer for interviewing for the companies that you were interested in.

So we all kind of had a little contest.

Well, how many did you get?

I got two envelopes.

Oh, I got three!

Oh, that's nothing!

I got five.

I think I got at least three envelopes and I got some great advice.

Another legacy name within the cable industry, two actually, who were mentors for me, Ruth Brumfield and Gail Greer.

And Gail Greer at the time was the group Vice President for time Warner Cable and she hired me, and the advice that I got from her and from Ruth was, Rich, we think you would make a great operator.

We know you've got a marketing degree.

We know that you are interested in marketing, but what we've observed with you is you'd make a great operator.

We'd like to see as a general manager and oh, by the way, you'll probably make more money that way.

And I told them, well, you should have led with that because, you know, I'm convinced.

And that was my entrance into the industry.

- I, along with several other women, we're fortunate to work for men in the industry who didn't see us as women.

They saw us as colleagues with potential and they gave us opportunities.

And that was important because this was very patriarchical and it was important to have men sponsor you, see your potential, give you opportunity because it was a very male dominated industry.

I think it still tends to be.

Change happens slowly.

While you were seeing a lot of female executives on the programming content side, you didn't see a lot of that on the operating side.

- There were more men in the engineering and finance areas, which were big in cable in the early days.

Those were just staffed by men.

There just weren't many women around.

- I ended up working at ATC in the early eighties and what a wonderful, wonderful experience.

And then got an opportunity to work for Glen Jones.

And at the time Ruth Warren was my boss and Ruth was probably one of the leading women in operations, and a wonderful mentor to me and to many men and women in the industry.

There weren't very many women in operations.

I can think of June Travis.

- [Sparkman] She's been chairman of the board at Daniel's, really outstanding.

There was Polly Dunn.

There was Yolanda Barco.

- It was a time in our history where women didn't get a lot of attention, and so when I joined Women In Cable and I heard about the Betsy Magness Leadership Institute, I thought way to go, ladies!

That we have named something after a woman.

- Betsy Magness was Bob Magness' wife, who did the bookkeeping and the customer service in the early days while Bob climbed the poles.

The reason he was able to do what he did was because of Betsy, and not enough women and wives were being recognized at the time.

The Women In Cable and Telecommunications Organization has created this network of women who have gone through the leadership training, now in its 25th year, and I was part of the first class.

- And that is the crown jewel for W.I.C.T.

and a program that many women aspire to attend because of the development that happens in that program and the connections.

From my first days, I heard about mentoring and I didn't know what that was all about.

And, you know, 20 years later, I can tell you that mentorship is a key component of the cable culture, and they encourage you to find a mentor, to be a mentor, and to share knowledge, share experiences, share connections, and that really is what helps with feeling like a part of the family.

Every couple of years, there's an industry survey to study compensation, mobility, promotions for women and minorities in the cable industry.

And this report is shared across the industry so that each company can then come up with their strategy for closing those gaps.

- [Female Narrator] But despite the data, the gaps remain.

By 2018, fewer than one out of five of the cable industry board members were people of color, and only about a quarter were women.

Well below the overall diversity of the country, and it persists.

The root causes for the inequities still linger.

- We talk about how to fix at the top and the bottom of the problem.

So the bottom of the problem is still on our watch, fewer and fewer young girls are interested in the sciences and technology, so we're trying to work that.

And then on the top side is the numbers show that if you have more of a 50-50 blend of women and men on boards of directors, you have better financial results, but it's still kind of an uphill battle.

(upbeat orchestral music) - [Female Narrator] While diversity in the industry has been lacking for decades, diversity of programming has grown exponentially.

As early as the late 1980s, cable's engineers realized that the fiber optic cable being used by the telephone industry had nearly unlimited capacity.

- An engineer by the name of Larry Lockwood calculated the theoretical capacity of a single strand of fiber, and it came out to approximately 3.3 million TV channels at one time on one single piece of fiber, so the fiber has got incredible capacity.

And that marked the birth of what's now called HFC or hybrid fiber co-ax networks.

They're still used today.

- It was pretty clear with optical fiber coming in that the phone companies were gonna put us out of business with optical fiber.

Were gonna overbuild us and we were gonna be obsolete technology.

But what really happened was our industry adapted to use optical fiber and deployed it much more aggressively than the phone companies did.

- And much more efficiently because we used still the co-ax and the fiber.

- So it was a hybrid, but we got out there, as an industry, much faster.

- When I first came to the cable industry, the one thing I never figured out when I was in the telco world was how much superior the cable plant was.

How much faster their product could be.

- People from outside of the industry who want to be part of the industry kind of snark on us that we're too chummy and too clubby.

Well, that's not intentional.

That's because the operators never have competed with one another.

They chased franchises city by city, town by town.

As a direct result, especially on the engineering side, they split the load of the work and they come together, and because they're not competitors, they say, well, here's what worked with that, and here's what didn't work.

So they're able to share the load of what needs to be learned and experienced and put into action.

I think that's pretty cool.

- [Female Narrator] One of the reasons that cable has stayed so relevant is the counter-intuitive decision to cooperate amongst cable providers rather than to compete.

To share the load of research and development costs, as well as their benefits.

- Cable Labs was founded in 1988 through a letter that John Malone sent to all of the CEOs of the cable operators at the time.

Each of the cable operators were much smaller and couldn't afford their own R and D spend to create the technologies the industry needed.

- I was approached by Dick Leghorn and he said, the industry is too proprietary.

We're really gonna go forward and be a national, or a global industry.

We need technical standards that are global.

We need vendors that are global and we need the scale.

And I totally agreed with all of that.

We got, essentially, the whole industry in North America to join.

Took a little cajoling from some of them, right?

(men chuckling) Maybe threats.

Was it non-profits supported by the cable industry.

Dick Green, when he came in, was just outstanding.

- A recruiter approached me and sent me some documents.

One of them was a letter written by John Malone and it was quite compelling.

- The letter really lays out what the future of the industry is going to look like five, ten, and fifteen years out.

It was quite shocking at how accurate John could be as far as predicting what that industry was gonna look like and what the transitions the industry was gonna be through.

- Dick came to the conclusion that the Boulder area, suburban Denver, was the most attractive to the young engineering community that we would attract.

- [Green] And they do all kinds of research and development, lab testing, specifications development.

- [McKinney] We had to develop a single standard.

A single specification.

- We called the specification DOCSIS.

Data over cable service interface specification.

DOCSIS.

And it got named in our laboratory.

The cable industry hated us because it wasn't a very good marketing choice, but it stuck, and we're very proud of DOCSIS.

- In layman's terms, just a standardized platform that could be used across the industry to roll out cable modems and the delivery of internet technology through our existing cable lines.

- We get funded as a percentage of the gross revenue of the major cable operators.

- There wasn't one company that could have funded all of that, but you have this place like Cable Labs where all the shared knowledge and innovation is occurring.

- Everybody comes together to invent, and then everybody shares that invention.

- [Abdoulah] Could you imagine trying to build an industry the way it was built without standardization.

It wouldn't have happened.

- DOCSIS became really the foundation for what is broadband today in the world.

- [Digeronimo] Just think of wifi or Bluetooth.

- [Computer] Here's something I found on the web.

- Those are all technical standards that are used so lots of different developers can ensure that their devices can connect to a network.

And Cable Labs allows us to do that globally.

- [Female Narrator] This international standardization would allow for a common distribution method into all subscribers homes, but these same subscribers were revolting over ever rising bills.

Prices for basic cable had gone up 50% in just eight years.

The United States Congress wanted to know why.

Once legislators realized how expensive cable bills had become, they rolled back subscription prices.

But at the same time, they also rolled back some of the restrictions that had kept cable companies from diversifying and competing.

Amidst a mountain of new legislation, cable bills may have gone down, but cable profits were way up.

- I started in 1993.

One of the first tasks that I was assigned was, hey, Rich, the Federal Government just came out with this new regulation.

My boss then, Scott Binder, who really was another one of my heroes and mentors in this business, handed me this thing.

Like, that was this thick and said, would you read this and come back and tell me what does it mean?

And what should we be doing?

So the craziness that occurred in the nineties was the reregulation of the industry.

That's actually what I sold myself on.

When I sat and I interviewed was, you guys just got some new legislation, you're getting ready to get into a highly competitive environment.

You don't know anything about competing because you've been a monopoly.

I can tell you what competition is about, and I can help you construct your business and really reorient your business around some of this legislation so that you can compete and continue to be successful.

- In '96, there was another legislative bill that opened things up and allowed telephone companies to get into the cable business, but also allowed the cable companies to get into the telephone business.

- [Malone] The traditional telephone companies became cellular companies and the cable companies became, effectively, the new telephone.

- The 15 years I spent at TCI, I feel like I got the MBA I never actually earned through the Malone School of Business.

In terms of being very independent thinking and very entrepreneurial in the way he thought, he was 10 steps ahead of everybody else.

He was thinking this way, as well as this way, as well as this way.

- He's a God in the cable industry.

Like, off the scale.

Incredibly smart.

- I remember being in the boardroom in a meeting where he was talking about digital and that we were gonna go from whatever it was, 70 channels to hundreds of channels.

And everybody was like, what?!

You know, I couldn't even wrap my mind around what he was thinking and saying.

- We recognized that there was gonna be a movement from analog to digital early on.

We had been so successful in stimulating the content community to come forward with ideas that now we're running out of channels.

It became clear to us that digital technology might have the answer to this.

And our first project was to develop a standard for digital compression of video signals.

It was called MPEG2.

And for the first time the cable industry, rather than the broadcast television industry, was controlling television technology in the country.

- It took two people a couple of days to install a cable modem in a home.

There were a lot of problems.

The business model looked daunting.

- I was at that time with Time Warner Cable when we installed our first internet customer.

I remember trying to solve for how many technicians it would take to install internet.

I remember the quandary of, man, what if a customer wants both video and internet?

How long would that take?

How many technicians do we need to send?

What do we equip them with?

How do we train our reps?

We knew there was something big going on, but they were scary because there was no blueprint.

- The infrastructure that was laid around the country on the telephone poles and underground ended up having an infinite capacity.

And that infinite capacity opened itself up for a lot of different things.

- The industry developed modems to be able to deliver the satellite services to the home, and it was incredible, the growth that that triggered in the cable industry.

- And the first implementation of it was in the satellite distribution that we all owned.

Primestar.

- [Romwell] Primestar.

Right.

- And so we launched it as a satellite direct to the consumer service, which unfortunately the government didn't think that that was a very good idea for us to compete.

That's where I, Al Gore called me Darth Vader.

- Yeah, that's right.

- Before the Senate.

'Cause he said, John's trying to take over everything with the satellite, right?

I know Senator Gore has referred to me in public as Darth Vader.

(audience chuckling) The cause of great humor, I guess, to a lot of my friends and employees.

My wife told me the other day that she found me to be more like the Wizard of Oz, credited with a lot more power and influence than I really wield.

So we were not able to go forward and evolve that business.

- [Female Narrator] Primestar was acquired by DirecTV in 1999 for 1.83 billion.

While Malone satellite plans were temporarily thwarted, his national, digital television center was a cable game-changer.

At a reported cost of $100 million, TCI's facility converted analog TV signals to compressed digital ones, vastly expanding the distribution market.

- We compressed about 12 To 15 to one, so in the space of one television channel, we could put 12.

And so that gave us enormous capacity.

- Somebody said, oh, you're gonna be able to have more channels.

I said, with existing technology and this compression, we can do at least 500 channels.

This was like a headline all of a sudden, you know?

- That facility houses critical operations, not only for Comcast, but for NBC, Universal, Telemundo.

We have production studios.

We have data center capabilities, transmission, broadcast.

It's a 24 by 7 secure facility that plays a critical role in delivering our video services.

- [Female Narrator] With hundreds of channels now available people needed a reason to pay for a premium network like HBO or its new competitors.

- So, I came up with the idea of exclusive programming from Hollywood, which was unheard of at that time.

You know, HBO and Showtime, they both had the same movies.

Negotiated the first exclusive deal with Universal Studios and Paramount, and after awhile I created, in 1994, a first run premium service to compete with HBO and Showtime, called Starz, because I can see the future coming with internet.

And at that time pay program didn't have internet rights, so I negotiated the internet rights and they were the major future.

But then unfortunately one of my successors sold those rights to a struggling company, called Netflix.

And that's how Netflix got started.

- [Robot] Sega Channel.

- We actually launched the Sega Channel that was, not only could you send things downstream in this network, you could bring them back upstream.

And so now you could play a game with your neighbor who lived next door or in the other part of the city, but this industry really recognized that it was something bigger than just television.

When we came up with this thing called video on demand and you actually didn't have to use your telephone to dial up and subscribe or get a movie to you, you could actually do it through your remote control.

We were celebrating big leaps in technology.

- The biggest thing that's happened since I've been in cable is high-speed data, slash broadband.

And at that time, this is with Viacom Cable, they were doing focus groups and people were saying things like, especially people who are finally able to use their broadband connection to speak to their family, halfway around the globe.

You know, saying things like you'll have to pry it out of my dead fingers.

- [Female Narrator] TCI was the biggest provider of broadband.

And by 1998, John Malone was entertaining many suitors courting the purchase of TCI.

But ultimately AT&T would win his corporate hand, leaving John Malone as AT&T's largest shareholder.

But there almost wasn't a TCI to sell.

Despite its giant stature in the industry, TCI faltered in the 1990s.

John Malone's dear friend and mentor, Bob Magness, who had founded the company and had brought Malone into it, was battling lymphoma.

He passed away in 1996.

By the time he was gone, TCI was in crisis.

- We've gone through some financial potholes, let's call it, but it was pretty clear that my attention had drifted away from the cable business.

We started to get a little over levered.

Our financial results started to get a little strained.

And I was sort of, you know, frankly depressed because of the loss of Bob.

So, I had to step in pretty draconian cost control measures to get TCI company back on the rails.

The stocks started to perform and TCI stock got up to an all time high.

And the AT&T guys, looking at what was happening, Mike Armstrong, he comes in and says, would we be willing to sell AT&T, our company, our core, US cable company?

I kind of looked in the mirror and I said, I don't know.

So I called up my son, who is a PhD in robotics, and I said, Ev, would you ever consider yourself wanting to, you know, basically run, or be in control of this thing that I have amassed over these years?

And it didn't take him 30 seconds to say hell no.

I like what I'm doing.

And I never wanted to be a suit, and so really not.

And so then I picked up the phone.

I said, I won't do it at a 30% premium, but I'll do it at a 40% premium.

And that's basically how we did it.

(upbeat instrumental music) - AT&T is buying the nation's second largest cable operator, TCI.

- Would be a blockbuster combination.

- Basically what you get with this package is everything.

- [Sparkman] A lot of the people in the company, when the company sold to AT&T they walked away millionaires.

I was very proud of that.

- It was an interesting time for all of us, especially the TCI people, because even though we were a large company, we acted small and decisions were made quickly.

And there was a lot of trial and error.

And this all changed when AT&T Broadband bought us.

- [Female Narrator] This 1998 all stock, $48 billion deal meant that TCI has wires would now be wrapped up with AT&T's financial clout, creating the holy grail of communications, telephone, television, and internet.

A triple play.

- The cable business when it was built, it was just a video delivery system, but it turned out that the way it was built was perfect for data delivery.

- One of the beautiful things about cable is that in that same network, you have a voice, video, and data revenue stream coming in on the same network.

I'd really like to know the date when all cable guys woke up one day and said, it's no longer video.

This is a broadband company.

And every one of us will have a different date in our mind of when that became clear to us, and it was probably in the 2010 timeframe when he said, you know, our commercials probably should lead with broadband.

The other thing I learned as well is nobody asked the question, what somebody's gonna use with all that capacity and speed.

You're limited by what you don't know.

- [Female Narrator] So-called broadband was probably not even a twinkle in Bill Daniels' pioneering eyes when he began stringing coaxial cable to telephone poles, but he and other cable cowboys, like John Malone, did realize that they would no longer be running just delivery services, that their business would one day be a two way data stream.

And it made them, and a lot of other cable innovators, very rich.

- [Jennings] A lot of people made a lot of money through this industry.

And I think what's unique is one, you've got an industry that can generate wealth, but two, you've got an industry where it's very local based.

- [Female Narrator] Denver area philanthropy in the cable business started even before the era of massive mergers and acquisitions.

For one, Bill Daniels was not just a cable pioneer.

He was a generous one.

- [Childears] He was gracious.

Just a kind man.

- Bill was so generous, he would give you the shirt off his back if it was the only shirt, you know, available.

When I moved out here, I was a kid.

He was nurturing, paternal.

He was philanthropic.

He believed in the Boy Scouts.

He believed in entrepreneurship.

- Later in life when he'd owned a basketball team, he purchased the Los Angeles Stars.

It was an American Basketball Association team.

He moved it to Salt Lake City and Bill's bankers called and said, you can't take it any further.

You're out of funds.

- He had season ticket money from all of the season ticket holders.

He was in some financial trouble himself, but eventually he paid back with interest all of those season ticket holders.

That gives you an idea of Bill Daniels.

- His style of helping the industry and helping individuals was really who he was, and it was consistent his whole life.

- When you put your life in perspective, you realize how little time there is to make it to something truly significant.

To some people, this might mean acquiring a lot of possessions.

To others, building up a business or owning property.

My personal belief, it's what you leave that others can benefit by and what you're able to teach the younger generation.

I believe if you live your life that way, you leave this world with a clear conscience and you might even have a smile on your face.

- When Bill Daniel's passed away he left just over a billion dollars to start the Daniels Fund.

Since he passed away in March of 2000, the foundation has given away more than $800 million.

And he set the foundation up to last in perpetuity.

And what that means is that we invest the money and we make grants with the interest income.

Daniels Fund also has two scholarship programs.

The largest program is the high school to college program, where we've had about 4,000 kids already go through that program.

Bill told us, find the kids who are gonna succeed, but base your selection on character, leadership, and service.

He didn't go to college, so I think he always saw that as an advantage for young people.

- And they offer scholarships for first-generation college students.

And my niece was actually one of the recipients, and that's why I'm familiar with them.

- I've made a lot of wealth in the business over these 50 years.

We love animals.

We've rebuilt the Dumb Friends League here in town.

We've built a facility at Yale for biomedical research and endowed 10 chairs in that space.

I've built a facility at Johns Hopkins University called Engineering and Medicine.

We just dedicated a facility up at Fort Collins in the vet school.

We invest in an effort to convert agriculture, from annual agriculture to perennial agriculture, so that you don't tear up the soils.

Our wealth's gonna go into our foundations when we're pushing up the posies.

Our kids are already taken care of.

- You can look at the philanthropy of the cable industry in a lot of ways.

The cable modem, which was developed by Cable Labs.

They gave that as a standard to the industry to develop the internet the way it is today.

- [Female Narrator] Of course, the cable industry hasn't given everything away.

- If you look at the income from most cable operators today, they have more income coming out of the broadband side than they do the video side.

- Broadband is really kind of where the technology has led us.

By no means has video left the picture.

It's our roots.

It's our heritage.

- Denver Cable used to be a really big thing.

Like, and then one by one consolidation, they started, everyone kind of moved East.

- Ultimately, TCI was consumed by AT&T Broadband, which was then consumed by Comcast.

So if you look at the pedigree of Comcast, that's kind of the lineage that you would see.

- [Female Narrator] Bill Daniels was a co-founder of ATC and helped his colleagues take the company public.

It was later acquired by Time Warner Cable.

Time Warner was then acquired by Charter, and Charter became the second largest cable company behind Comcast.

- Today, the cable industry is so much more than just cable.

- We are a video provider.

We provide voice, so we're a telephony provider.

We're an internet provider.

We provide home security.

We own a variety of cable networks.

We own a variety of broadcast networks.

We own movie studios.

- We're also involved in home healthcare, smart cities, tons of innovation that comes from that internet technology.

- There's probably no one else out there that's got as much fiber as the cable industry does.

- Fiber optics is now our fastest growing research space.

A single fiber can deliver 40 gigabytes, and we're on path to take that to terabytes.

But the challenge today, when deploying networks, it's not the cost of the cable.

The biggest expense to deploy a new kind of network technology is the labor costs to dig ditches.

- I essentially dug holes for cable in the very beginning.

It's really intensive.

It's really labor intensive.

There's no real tricks to it, and ultimately it's just time consuming.

That's why I think it's so expensive.

(mellow instrumental music) Slowly I worked my way to being a installer.

Nowadays, I'm out there every day, driving those big bucket trucks, working on the cable network itself.

- [Female Narrator] For decades cable has mostly been a white male dominated industry.

Diversity is a relatively recent asset.

- I faced some prejudice.

I really didn't put on a very masculine kind of look.

I started transitioning in the very beginning of 2019.

I went to my director and I go, I want to transition.

He was really compassionate and caring.

And then we really kind of worked out what to do.

I, myself, decided to come out, but these were 25 burly, bearded, cable guys.

And I go, hey, I'm trans.

I want my pronouns to be she, her, and this is my name from now on.

And that moment I almost passed out, and you know, I had my whole management behind me, backing me up on this.

But yeah, that's how I ended up coming out at Comcast.

I'm actually pretty happy to be a part of kind of shaping the roadmap.

We do a lot of good things, but there's still plenty of work to be done.

We may have started in cable.

That's where we were rooted, in distributing television.

But nowadays we look at everything as an opportunity.

- As far as where it's going, I don't have a clue.

I mean, I have been amazed and shocked at where we are and how we have changed things.

I look at the coffee can type amplifiers, which we used in the early days.

It's amazing what it is now versus what it was then.

- I think the industry has a bright future.

I feel like we have barely scratched the surface in terms of innovation.

The potential in gaming, in enterprise services, virtual reality, augmented reality.

I think we have tons to explore and innovate.

- Internet of Things is really this growth that we're gonna see in all these sensors, whether it's a rain sensor in your front yard, or your nest thermostat on your wall, and your smoke detector, and your baby camera watching, you know, your kids.

We're seeing just this absolute explosion of all these devices consumers are putting into their house.

- The day of having a wireless company and a fixed company is coming to an end.

It has to combine.

Now they're two different businesses, but they are destined to be together.

Because if you own a wireless business and don't own the wire line, you end up spending a lot of money.

- There are some in the industry that wonder whether the cable industry shouldn't change its name because they say, well, this idea of cable is kind of old.

Well, it is.

It goes back to the late 1940s.

- The physical nature of our industry is the cabling.

And that could be fiber cable.

It could be coaxial cable.

In many cases, it's a little bit of both to connect.

Even as people think about a mobile network, when you connect, let's say an iPhone in your home to a wifi router, that physical cable is what provides the high-speed connectivity.

- Even if you go wireless, as some point, those signals have to hit a point because wireless only takes you so far.

You know, you can't make a pure wireless call from here to New York.

At some point, that phone call is gonna have to hit a network to transition that data and that conversation to New York.

So these networks are important.

- One analyst once said the future of wireless is a lot more wires.

It's still cable.

It's still cable.

It's still the beauty of cable.

- We also are expanding our work in artificial intelligence.

Becomes almost like magic.

- [Female Narrator] Artificial intelligence is now a constant companion in the form of Alexa, and Siri, and Google Assistant, and other products that take vocal commands.

So now, with voice activated remote controls, is your cable eavesdropping on you?

- The cable industry, by and large, when it comes to privacy has been very conservative.

We don't listen to our customers.

Even if we have voice activation, you have to push the button to talk.

We're not listening all the time.

Others are taking a different approach, technologically.

These organizations are getting extremely powerful and they are exploiting artificial intelligence.

I think this is a very, very dangerous space and yes, it has created extremely profitable businesses.

But the question is, at what price?

- Just because we can doesn't mean we should.

That's the whole idea of the ethical implications of some of this technology.

Not all of it is necessarily a good thing for a humankind.

So I think as human beings using technology, you know, the whole robotics trend and drones, AI, and learning that what you see is not always what you think you see, and knowing the difference.

- [Female Narrator] One thing is certain though, the innovations will continue just as it began, rather cleverly, on hilltops.

- It's pretty amazing to go from the idea of this one co-ax cable to powering entire cities, industries.

- The technology progression has been absolutely amazing over that time.

- [Danger] That spirit of like, ingenuity.

- [Henthorn] That goes hand-in-hand with the boom of the internet and where we're at as a planet now.

- [Sparkman] If it weren't for cable, we would still be in the communication side, somewhat in the dark ages.

- [Romwell] The industry did a pretty good job of building out a state of the art, broadband infrastructure.

- And we still have the best pipe into the home.

In order to replace the pipe that we have into the homes, it would be hundreds of billions of dollars.

- [Digeronimo] It's an industry that just never gives up.

It's constantly reinvented itself.

- When I look back across the history of the cable industry, one of the lessons that I carry very close is don't be afraid.

Be bold.

- Have the confidence in yourself that if you can answer the why's, you can move ahead.

- I would say cable has an incredible legacy, maybe more so in Colorado than any place else.

- [Jennings] It is almost like a Mecca.

You do need to make a pilgrimage here and really understand the history of this industry.

- [Older Man] Cable's legacy is well beyond just technology.

Being able to provide people everywhere connection.

- I hope that the legacy is that by giving us these kind of capabilities, bringing the world to us through the internet, that we don't lose sight of what really matters, which is to be good, to be kind, to be in relationship with one another.

First and foremost, to be loving.

That we can take this technology, this platform that has given us so much, and do good with it.

That's what I hope our legacy is.

(upbeat pop music) (mellow piano music)