Cablefax The Magazine - July 2012 - 12

2012 Top Ops Awards
MSO TECHNOLOGY EXECUTIVE OF THE YEAR
Sree Kotay
Comcast
Comcast's rise to our
Operator of the Year in
2012 is in no small part
because of the MSO's
leadership on the technology
front. So it's certainly
fitting that Sree Kotay-
a key tech strategist,
architect, futurist and
resident soothsayer at the
MSO-takes the deserved
honor as our Technology
Executive of the Year. Talk to Kotay, and you'll hear a lot
of acronyms and techspeak. As the chief software architect,
he loves to rattle off HTTP properties and QAM
dynamics. And don't get him started on the benefits of
an adaptive bit rate. But stay with him, and you'll also
get a peek into a constantly churning mind that thinks
roughly twice as much about the future as it does about
the past. " I'm always most proud of the thing I haven't
shipped yet, " Kotay says. " I like to live in the future. The
coolest stuff is the stuff we'll be doing over the next
6 months or 12 months. " Then, just as we're getting
excited-about to get the big scoop on that next app,
that next mobile play, that next super-duper marvel of
techno-awesomeness that will emerge from Philly, he
adds a caveat: " I can't tell you about it yet. "
Fine. We'll live. But Kotay clearly enjoys his existence
on the cutting edge of digital innovation-a perch made
even more sweet by his association with the most fi nancially
able and powerful MSO in all of cable. " We do feel
like a rising tide lifts all ships, and we have the biggest
boat, " he says. " It's good for us to be magnanimous and
inclusive. " That often involves letting in other MSOs on
its activities (within reason, of course) in a kind of camaraderie
that still harkens back to cable's earlier, more
collegial days.
One thing's for sure: Kotay's certainly enjoying the
ride lately, what with Comcast only recently re-focusing
its entire corporate culture on technology and how it
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can meet rising customer expectations to watch content
anywhere, on any device, at any... well, you know the
rest. " Comcast has always been a place that's been
very forward looking, " he says. " But in the last couple
of years, our vectors have been getting more and more
aligned. " Since Kotay joined Comcast in 2007, his
meticulous work and preparation within the company
has largely led up to the current mission to finally bring
together all those elements and apply them in the real
world, whether it's the Xfinity rollout or new efforts
around Comcast's cloud-based X-1 effort that was the
talk of the 2012 Cable Show. And it sounds like Kotay is
just getting started. " We want to make every customer
touch point to our services a first class citizen, " he says.
But at the same time, Kotay says it's important for
cable not to lose site of that hulking screen that doesn't
move but remains a focal point in most homes. " It's very
important to innovate on the television itself, " he says,
noting recent integrations of Pandora, Facebook and
other apps into Xfinity TV. " We're probably in the very,
very early days of that. But the television is the largest
screen in your house. It's the most social screen in your
house. " Still, he says it all fits together: " You're going to
have services. And you're going to have screens. And
they're not going to be the same thing. " In any event,
Comcast's lucky to have Kotay thinking about the future.
And so is everyone else. ✴
- Michael Grebb
Fast Facts
✦ In 2011 alone, Kotay helped Comcast launch 16 new products,
which is double the previous two years combined.
✦ Kotay has overseen the development and launch of three
new apps on the Apple platform with 19 releases, the rollout
of Skype videoconferencing on TV and mobile devices, and
the integration of Xfinity TV into the X-Box gaming console.
July 2012
CableFAX: The Magazine
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Cablefax The Magazine - July 2012

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