B Y M I C H A L L E V - R A M

P H O T O I L L U S T R A T I O N B Y N A T H A N F A R I S S

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C O M C A S T H A S S P E N T T H E B E T T E R P A R T O F

A D E C A D E A L I E N A T I N G C U S T O M E R S ,

C O M P E T I T O R S , A N D R E G U L A T O R S . T H E

D E N O U E M E N T O F T H I S C A S E S T U D Y I N B A D

C U S T O M E R A N D C O R P O R A T E R E L A T I O N S ?

T H E F A I L E D M E R G E R W I T H T I M E W A R N E R

C A B L E . H E R E ’ S T H E I N S I D E S T O R Y O F A

C O M P A N Y M A N A G E M E N T S O S U R E O F V I C T O R Y

T H A T I T D R O V E N E A R L Y E V E R Y A L L Y I T

M I G H T H A V E H A D T O T H E O T H E R S I D E .

C O M C A S T C E O B R I A N R O B E R T S

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box of chocolates,” Brian Roberts tells the crowd. Avuncular and bespec-tacled, the 55-year-old CEO looks like he might begin dispensing some homespun Hollywood wisdom any second now to the cable-industry folk gathered in Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center in early May. But he is demonstrating a cool new piece of technology instead: a voice-activated remote designed for Com-cast’s Internet-connected set-top box, the X1. The moment he says the words aloud, a scene from the movie For-rest Gump pops onto the twin over-size screens on either side of him. The Siri-like remote, says the clearly tick-led CEO, is capable of understanding some 3 million voice commands, from asking a movie star’s age to finding a specific scene in a favorite movie—to breaking the ice, it seems.

“Show me the Comcast–Time War-ner Cable merger,” he says. Suddenly Vin Diesel is onscreen. His Fast and the Furious character shouts for someone to “Get down!”—then a house explodes. The audience erupts in laughter.

“That pretty much sums it up,” says Roberts. “So we really are moving on.”

“We’re moving on” is a phrase that Roberts has been saying a lot lately. He said it the day before, when Comcast announced its blowout first-quarter earnings (a 10% rise, to $2.06 billion), and he said it on April 24, when the company walked away from its failed $45 billion bid for TWC. It’s no won-der why. The experience was a trau-matic one for the company—or should have been.

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‘ ‘ L I F E I S L I K E A

T H E C A B L E G U Y S For over a decade these two execs have arguably been calling most of the shots at Comcast. Cohen in particular wears many hats, not only shepherding the cable company’s acquisitions but also acting as its chief diversity officer.

D AV I D L . C O H E N / S E N I O R E X E C U T I V E V I C E P R E S I D E N T O F C O M C A S T

B R I A N L . R O B E R T S / C H A I R M A N A N D C E O O F C O M C A S T

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FORTUNE.COM 53

Justice Department was one of the two government bodies tasked with evalu-ating the proposed merger’s effect on consumers and competition. The vast majority of comments were against the deal. By contrast, AT&T’s proposed merger with T-Mobile in 2011 elicited 40,526 comments before the parties abandoned the idea.

As it happens, Roberts couldn’t have picked a better movie scene in his Chi-cago talk to capture the deal’s implo-sion: It was fast and furious.

●●●

WHEN THE NOTION OF combining America’s No. 1 and No. 2 cable providers was first proposed on the day before Valentine’s in 2014, a number of politicians and nonprofit groups wrote letters of support to the FCC. Many extolled Comcast’s Internet Essentials program, which offers dis-counted connectivity to lower-income families and schools. A combined Comcast-TWC, they said, could extend these benefits to even more regions. But even such lofty goals seemed to pale in the face of an army of angry cable and broadband subscribers.

Comcast’s customer-service snafus were so legendary that they’d become a national meme, turning the more epic conversations with its customer-service reps into viral web phenoms and launch-ing countless blogs and message boards devoted to cathartic tirades about the company’s service. Comcast is one of only two brands to have “won” the “Worst Company in America” title twice from the Consumerist, a blog owned by Consumer Reports. (Comcast took the low honors in 2010 and again in 2014.) For the past several years the Philadel-phia company has also ranked near the very bottom of the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, an annual ranking of organizations across 43 industries. The latest report of the index placed Com-cast’s Xfinity Internet service 234th out of 236 companies, below airlines like

U.S. Airways and United and even the Internal Revenue Service. To be sure, Comcast’s peers don’t fare much better; Charter Communications, Time War-ner Cable, and other providers typically rank near the bottom of such surveys.

“You get some jockeying for positions, but for the most part these companies really don’t move,” says David VanAm-burg, managing director of the ACSI survey. Customers generally can’t do anything about it, he points out, because there are often so few alternatives—or in some cases just none.

Still, knowledgeable sources say, while consumers’ overwhelming dis-approval of the deal carried substan-tial weight with regulators, legions of corporate interests probably played an equal one. As numerous and pro-lific FCC filings show, these foes didn’t spare words (and legal resources) in arguing the ways the deal could thwart competition—and the ways they be-lieved Comcast had already unfairly harmed its rivals.

For years Comcast has been em-broiled in litigation and high-profile disputes with a dizzying list of cable programmers, including Discovery Communications, the NFL Network, and a Spanish-language station named Estrella TV, among others. Most of the disagreements have been over carriage-fee negotiations (the money Comcast pays the networks in exchange for the right to transmit their channels to cable TV subscribers). Some have also been squabbles over placement, or where each channel will be posi-tioned—a determining factor in their ratings and advertising revenue. In 2010 an independent sports network called the Tennis Channel filed a com-plaint with the FCC, alleging discrimi-nation. Comcast, claimed the Tennis Channel, had placed its channel in a sports tier available only to customers who pay an additional fee while at the same time giving the cable company’s affiliated sports networks preferential

It wasn’t just that the merger fizzled. Lots of proposed unions don’t end up being consummated. It was how it failed. The deal’s demise and the years leading up to it present a case study in corporate solipsism. Comcast, say many, has long acted like the company that never needed anybody—seeming to alienate networks on its cable system, Silicon Valley partners, and countless numbers of its own customers—to the point where it found itself with few allies when the merger was being reviewed. The Philadelphia company, indeed, might offer a rare lesson in whether having a reputation for good corporate community-ship actually matters in to-day’s hypercompetitive world.

More than two dozen interviews with industry insiders and a trail of government filings reveal a striking array of parties that were apparently hostile to both Comcast itself and to its proposed coupling with TWC—from programmers like the Tennis Channel to Netflix, whose CEO at one point told investors his main goal was to squelch the Comcast merger. Joining the ad hoc army against the deal were organi-zations as varied as Dish Network; the Writers Guild of America, West; and a fan site called the Harry Potter Alli-ance. So broad was the coalition that it made bedfellows of Tea Party TV talker Glenn Beck and über-liberal Minne-sota Senator Al Franken.

“I was a little lonely at first,” Franken tells Fortune. “But then others started stepping out. In the end, when word got out that things were turning against the deal, it all accelerated.”

The movement to stop the merger gained momentum in the final weeks of the government’s evaluation as more and more people and companies—even entire municipalities, such as the town of Moultonborough, N.H.—stepped forward to voice their opposition. In all, an unprecedented 300,800 comments were filed with the Federal Communi-cations Commission, which with the

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treatment in a much more popular channel lineup.

The FCC agreed with the Tennis Channel, ordering Comcast to pay a fine to the network and to give it equal placement. Comcast appealed and won. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals over-turned the FCC’s decision, conclud-ing that there was insufficient proof of discrimination. But Comcast’s victory would come back to bite it. When the Comcast-TWC deal emerged, the FCC sought out the Tennis Channel for its take on how such a merger could im-pact consumers. “[FCC chairman] Tom Wheeler really got his teeth into this,”

says Ken Solomon, CEO of the Tennis Channel, “and he quickly realized how tough these guys had been on all of us and how hard it was going to be to im-pose any conditions on a company like Comcast.” (A spokeswoman for Com-cast asserts that the company has never discriminated against any channel.)

Glenn Beck, the conservative creator of independent network TheBlaze, also made his voice heard, even asking his viewers to write to the FCC in opposi-tion to the deal. “I believe that busi-nesses should operate free of govern-ment intervention,” Beck wrote on his website when the merger debate was still in full force. “But these companies are government-sanctioned monopo-lies with the power to silence indepen-dent, competitive voices like TheBlaze if it furthers their business interests.”

Other larger channel sellers, such as the Walt Disney Co. and 21st Century Fox, didn’t publicly oppose the merger but met with regulators to try to per-suade them to block the deal, sources

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tell Fortune. Comcast, meanwhile, countered that many of these critics were self-serving. In a December filing with the FCC, the company called out a few specific channels for “attempt-ing to leverage the transaction-review process to obtain higher fees and terms they could not reasonably ex-pect in the competitive marketplace—which would ultimately raise rates for consumers.”

By the time this filing was issued, the coalition against the Comcast merger was in full swing. One of the most outspoken critics of the deal, satellite-TV provider Dish Network, sent the FCC a 266-page affidavit outlining 53 ways that a combined Comcast-TWC could “sabotage” com-petition. (The filing was one of nearly 70 submitted by the company over the course of the merger-evaluation process.) The myriad accusations and apprehensions mainly boiled down to this: Comcast had already shown it had the capacity and the incentive to

H E L L N O , W E W O N ’ T M E R G E As regulators evaluated the Comcast-TWC deal, consumers took to the FCC’s site—and good old grass-roots activism—to protest the merger.

Share of households with accessto two or more wireline Internet providers

20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

PROVIDER OPTIONS

78

79

80

81

82

83%

2009 ’10 ’11 ’12 ’13 2014

79.0%

82.1%

SHARE OF U.S.HOUSEHOLDS

WITH CABLE TV

tions flew every which way until at last, on Feb. 23—10 days after Comcast an-nounced its bid to merge with TWC—the parties came to an agreement that both sides called “mutually beneficial.”

But the truce was fleeting. Just a few weeks later Netflix was publicly lam-basting Comcast again. Netflix claimed in filings with the FCC that it was es-sentially bullied into signing the agree-ment with Comcast; the cable giant, in turn, called that claim preposterous. (Cue more he said/she said here.)

There was irony to all of it: Netflix, with its more than 57 million custom-ers, painted itself as the Silicon Valley underdog and defender of the web’s egalitarian ethos—and Comcast as the greedy gatekeeper of the Internet. Nei-ther image reflected the pure truth, but it sort of didn’t matter. Comcast’s repu-tation was already so bloodied that it was easy for the House of Cards–loving masses to think the cable giant was guilty of any number of high crimes and misdemeanors.

on the market, an estimated 61% of U.S. households still have just one or no high-speed ISP servicing their re-gion. This lack of choice doesn’t just affect consumers. Even as companies like Dish—more specifically, its stream-ing service Sling TV—represent a di-rect challenge to the traditional cable model, they also depend on its propri-etary pipes to seamlessly deliver their products to consumers.

Scads of companies rely on those pipes. But none more so than Net-flix, whose streaming-only shows hog an extraordinary one-third of Inter-net traffic. For weeks Netflix had been publicly feuding with Comcast over the broadband speeds the former was get-ting over the latter’s network. The “he said/she said” details over who alleg-edly did what to whom are difficult to sort out. (We tried, but couldn’t.) The one thing that was clear, however, was that legions of customers complained that their episodes of House of Cardswere disrupted midstream. The accusa-

discriminate against its competitors, Dish argued; allowing it to merge with TWC would only give it more power to squeeze out others in the industry.

“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquish-ing it,” began Dish’s lengthy December filing, quoting directly from George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984. Fur-ther down in the document, the com-pany again borrowed from pop culture to make its repetitive point: “Comcast is almost like the Hotel California of broadband, an establishment guests can check into but never leave.”

Comcast issued a lengthy reply, forcefully denying Dish’s allegations and accusing the satellite network of “blatantly seeking protection from the forces of fair competition that would benefit consumers.”

But the fact is, customers often do find themselves “locked” into Comcast because of a lack of alternatives for broadband service. While there is an explosion of video-watching options

SLIM PICKINGS While the past decade has seen an explosion of online video services, when it comes to the underlying broadband pipes, many Americans are still faced with very few options.

CUTTING THE CORDIt turns out breaking up isn’t so hard to do. As more and more customers cancel their cable-TV subscriptions, the number of “corded” households has gone down—a trend that’s unlikely to turn.

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COMCAST2014 REVENUE

BY SECTOR

$20.8 billion $11.3

$4.0 $3.7

$2.4 $2.0$25.4

2000 2005 2010 2015

COMCASTANNUAL LOBBYING

0

5

10

15

$20 MILLION

$4.7million

$17million

(As of April 20)

TIME WARNER CABLEWINDSTREAM DISH

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CABLEVISION

$0.5

$1.5$7.8

$0.5

COMCAST$17

MILLION

AT&T$14.2

GOOGLE$16.8

2014 LOBBYING SPENDING(selected companies)

VERIZON$13.3

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COMCAST BEGAN AS A1,200-subscriber cable provider in Tupelo, Miss. Brian Roberts’s father, Ralph Roberts, now 95 and Comcast’s chairman emeritus, acquired the opera-tor in 1963 and started growing it. The company gobbled up other mom-and-pop providers and then increasingly larger mouthfuls of mega-operators. By 2002, when the younger Roberts took over as chief executive, the company was bringing in $12 billion in annual revenue and had grown to dominate an expansive geographic area that includ-ed key markets like Atlanta, San Fran-cisco, and its corporate home, Philadel-phia. It had also entered the fledgling Internet business via a 2001 buyout of AT&T’s broadband division. But its new leader would propel the compa-ny into an era of even more explosive growth, attempting larger and larger acquisitions, like its failed 2004 bid for Disney, a $54 billion deal that would have made it the largest media compa-ny in the world, and then the successful $18 billion purchase of NBCUniversal in 2011.

For years the company’s strategy of buying up smaller cable providers was a nearly perfect formula for growth. Its appetite for other cable operators went virtually unchallenged, ironically because of the monopolistic nature of the industry. (Since each provider dominates different geographic re-gions, providers don’t actually com-pete with one another, which under antitrust law means that allowing two

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HOW COMCAST MAKES ITS BUNDLE NBCUniversal aside, Comcast still brings in the bulk of its revenue from TV subscriptions. But its Internet service is its fastest-growing business, representing revenue growth of over 10% in its most recent quarter.

MONEY TALKS Sure, plenty of companies—from Google to AT&T—spend mil-lions pushing their agendas in Washington. But for the past few years, Comcast has remained one of the biggest corporate lobbyists in the country.

C O M C A S T ’ S C U S T O M E R - S E R V I C E

S N A F U S W E R E S O L E G E N D A R Y T H A T

T H E Y ’ D B E C O M E A N A T I O N A L M E M E ,

T U R N I N G E P I C C O N V E R S A T I O N S

W I T H I T S R E P S I N T O V I R A L W E B

P H E N O M S .

of that neutrality philosophy that con-flicted, at least a bit, with the rationale behind its TWC merger.

One might assume that the approval of the new Internet rules would have helped Comcast’s case—as a more regulated body, it would now have the proper safeguards imposed on it, minimizing the risk that it would in-fringe upon the open Internet in any way. But the very vocal debate leading up to the decision—which at one point even caused the FCC’s aging website to crash—had the opposite effect on the companies’ bid to become one. All of a sudden, people across the country were acutely aware of who controlled their pipes and developed strong feelings about putting too much power into the hands of one gatekeeper.

After all, why would the government promote an open Internet and then turn around and consolidate more than 50% of the country’s broadband sub-scriptions under a single company?

It was a question that both Demo-crats and Republicans in Congress were increasingly asking. GOP lawmakers, in particular, might have been more inclined to oppose any heavy-handed regulation but were conflicted about greenlighting any deal that could limit the competitiveness of any market. “In almost every place a cable company op-erates, they operate with a tremendous amount of market power,” says Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). “We’ve allowed there to be little choice in most areas.”

By the time the Comcast-TWC merg-er imploded, politicians and elected officials on both sides of the aisle were

large players to combine forces doesn’t thwart competition.) Add in the mil-lions of dollars Comcast poured into Washington via lobbying and political donations, and the cable giant was all the more formidable.

With more than 100 full-time lob-byists in D.C., Comcast runs one of the largest and priciest lobbying ap-paratuses. In the first quarter of 2015 the company reported $4.7 million in such spending, making it the second-most-generous corporate lobbyist, ac-cording to the Center for Responsive Politics. (Search giant Google came in first, with $5.5 million.) Comcast’s spending has only grown over the years: In 2014 it shelled out a total of $17 million on lobbying efforts, rep-resenting a sevenfold increase since Roberts took over in 2002.

Comcast didn’t have just the money; it had power relationships too. While Roberts’s chumminess with the cur-rent administration has been well-documented (Google this: President Barack Obama, Brian Roberts, Martha’s Vineyard), the company’s real point per-son in D.C. has long been executive vice president David Cohen, a onetime chief of staff to Ed Rendell when Rendell was mayor of Philadelphia.

According to a person close to the company, Roberts once shared with a roomful of executives a favorite story about Cohen: Back in 2000 both men were part of a nonpartisan committee trying to woo the Republican National Convention to Philadelphia. One day, as Roberts was on his way to give an im-portant pitch to the party, he hit a nasty traffic jam. Desperate, he called Cohen, who was already at the meeting desti-nation—and, as it happens, sitting be-side the police chief. The chief quickly had a patrol car weave its way through the congested freeway and then escort Roberts with a motorcade to the meet-ing. The city of Philadelphia ended up landing the convention, which was held at the Comcast-owned First Union

Center and televised on the company’s cable network. The same year Roberts became CEO, Cohen—who, as an out-side attorney, had already worked on Comcast matters—was brought into the company fold.

Perhaps no episode quite captures Cohen’s high-profile network like the 2013 event he held in his suburban Philadelphia home to raise money for Democratic Senate candidates. There, President Obama joked, “The only thing I haven’t done in this house is have seder dinner.”

But by 2014 it was clear that even friendships with POTUS had their limits.

As regulatory bodies were mulling the Comcast-TWC merger, another crit-ical issue emerged: the FCC’s controver-sial net-neutrality proposal. The idea that all online content should be treated equally (and that Internet service pro-viders like Comcast be subject to more regulation) pitted technology com-panies and consumer groups against Comcast and its ISP peers. President Obama, meanwhile, sided with the net-neutrality camp, urging the FCC to craft the “strongest possible rules” governing Internet providers. Comcast soon is-sued a statement calling the President’s policy directive “a radical reversal that would harm investment and innova-tion,” adding that “such a radical re-versal of consistent contrary precedent should be taken up by the Congress,” not left up to administration regulators.

Later, Comcast would be more pub-licly supportive of net neutrality—and of the new rules passed in February 2015. But there was a logical extension g

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cheering. Attorney General Eric Holder, who stepped down from his post the same day Comcast walked away from the deal, declared, “The companies’ de-cision to abandon this deal is the best outcome for American consumers.”

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AMID ALL THE BATTLESand rancor and hits to reputation above, the company amassed an enviable fi-nancial record, the kind other compa-nies look to as a model. Over the past five years Comcast has more than dou-bled its operating profit (to $14.9 billion in 2014), nearly doubled its revenue (to $68.8 billion), and increased total shareholder return (up 278%) by more than twice the rate of the Nasdaq.

So why should it bother to change? The answer, surprisingly, has to do with those customers who used to have no-where else to turn. While the options for broadband providers remain lim-ited in many regions, there is an explo-sion of online content available at con-sumers’ fingertips.

And what consumers want, at least according to viewership trends, is to watch stuff online. Loads of it. Live TV viewing has decreased, and 40% of households now subscribe to an on-demand service such as Netflix and Amazon Prime. (The trend is evident in Comcast’s numbers: It lost 8,000 cable-TV subscribers last quarter.)

Comcast’s answer to the decline is X1, its Internet-connected platform that al-lows customers to view content on their television screens, laptops, and mobile devices. The company has issued 5 mil-

lion X1 boxes to date and says 25% of its triple-play customers (subscribers to bundled Internet, TV, and phone ser-vice) now use the product. It has gradu-ally added partners like Facebook and Nextdoor (a social network for neigh-borhoods), and recently announced inte-gration with home automation services like Google’s Nest. But the long-term goal is to develop it into a far-reaching platform that also lets customers access online content from multiple sources—even Comcast’s competitors.

“I think ultimately you want to give the consumers the best experience,” says Neil Smit, CEO of Comcast’s cable communications division, which in-cludes the company’s TV and broad-band services. “So if the consumer wants to have access to Netflix or Hulu, then we should give them a simple way of doing that.”

It’s hard to imagine a day when Comcast offers an integrated Netflix app on its set-top box. But making nice with its enemies could be the best strategy as it tries to curtail its losses on the cable-TV side.

It’s not only Comcast that’s having to rethink its content strategy. The shift to online consumption is breaking the entire cable-TV model. Programmers, who have relied on traditional chan-nel “bundles” (and the fees and ad dol-lars they generate) for decades, are also scrambling to come up with their own direct-to-consumer offerings while at the same time fighting the growing call for unbundling.

The growing alternatives for content consumption—both from Silicon Valley players and programmers like HBO and CBS—mean Comcast has to compete not only by developing equally compel-ling online services but also by keeping subscribers happy. Given its customer-service rap sheet, that’s no easy feat. “I can give you the coolest user interface in the world, but if you call and are put on hold, that’s detrimental to what we’re trying to do,” acknowledges Matt

Strauss, executive vice president of Comcast’s video products.

●●●

SOURCES CLOSE TO THEcompany say it is serious about turn-ing around its customer-service repu-tation—no, really this time. Although CEO Roberts has professed his commit-ment to improving Comcast’s image in the past, he now appears to be putting his money where his mouth is. The com-pany has already earmarked $300 mil-lion toward overhauling its customer experience. In early May, Comcast an-nounced that in addition to those al-ready allocated funds, it would invest in new call centers and hire an additional 5,500 customer-service workers over the next few years. Other new initiatives include an Uber-like app that lets cus-tomers track and rate technicians, and a $20 credit when a technician is late or doesn’t show up. (This latter policy has actually been in existence for years, but most customers don’t know about it; Comcast says the credit will now be automatically applied to customers’ ac-counts when a technician is tardy.)

The company knows it needs more than Band-Aids. It also unveiled that all 84,000 of its employees—including senior management—would partici-pate in customer experience training every year. Another internal shift: Its call service reps now use a new, home-grown tool called Einstein, a software system that gives them a more “holistic” view of a customer’s previous calls and complaints. (Because so many of Com-cast’s customers have been inherited from other providers, the software that its customer-service workers used has long been a patchwork, making it even more challenging to quickly diagnose problems over the phone.)

All of these initiatives fall under the purview of longtime exec Charlie Her-rin, the company’s newly appointed executive vice president of customer experience.

FEEDBACK michal_levram@timeinc.com

“Customer expectations are up there. They do have more choice, and they will vote with where the value and the services are,” Herrin, Comcast’s former head of product, tells Fortune. “It’s a massive challenge that’s changing rap-idly every day. Whether it’s Uber or Zappos or whomever you want to point to, [the consumers’] expectations are being reset all the time.”

According to Herrin, Comcast has already cut down on late appointments by 29% over the past three months and has shown an 18% improvement in how quickly phone calls are answered. His team meets weekly with Smit to update them on progress. When the topic turns to his company’s high-profile customer-service fails, Herrin seems genuinely fazed: “My reaction is, that’s not us. It can’t be us. We can’t let that happen. I take it very personally.”

The company says it got serious about fixing its customer-service image before it ever thought of merging with TWC. Asked whether his customers’ criticisms had anything to do with the merger’s failure, Roberts had this to say at a press event during the big Chicago cable expo: “You would have to ask the decision-makers, but I think irrespec-tive we have been on this journey for a while. Probably my own view, deep down, it didn’t. It wasn’t determinative.”

We’ll never know that for sure, of course. But if the company’s mean-girl rep wasn’t “determinative” in thwart-ing the merger, it has clearly become the target of Comcast’s top brass today—and this strategic refocusing for the cable giant may ultimately be more essential to its long-term success than a marriage with TWC ever would have been.

What may be the biggest irony in this case study in corporate relations is that Comcast’s legions of adversar-ies may have made the company that much stronger. The boys at Harvard will be studying this one for years.

Additional reporting by Tory Newmyer

C H A R L I E H E R R I N / E X E C U T I V E V I C E P R E S I D E N T O F C U S T O M E R E X P E R I E N C E , C O M C A S T

N E I L S M I T / C E O O F C O M C A S T ’ S C A B L E C O M M U N I C AT I O N S D I V I S I O N

T H E N O T- S O - N E W F R I E N D LY FA C E S O F C O M C A S T Over the next few years, Smit and Herrin—both longtime company execs—will have to deliver on challenging mandates: dominating the content market with Comcast’s X1 platform and fixing its customer-service rep, respectively. sm

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