contures. the second thing there, has been a tendency so focus on the neocons much the way people focus on kissinger outside of context. i'm sure they loathe each other. i know barack obama dund -- doesn't like hillary clinton but i don't know how useful that is when thinking about the way that -- how ideology both enables and reflects action, and thinking about broad overlaps within the foreign policy establishment. i think that you can look at kissinger and look at the kind of irrational subjectivism of his will to power and see a resonance deeper in american culture, american exceptionalism to a great degree, and forward to the neocons, and the argument then, therefore, is that the neoconservativism is not an exception. if you expunge and distract the neoconserve differences from american history you don't have a virtuous republic. you still have what we have, just manifested in different case, and that's what was trying to get it's with kissinger's relation with the knowow -- neocon. >> i have one question. i am deeply troubled by many things you said. but i haven't read the book yet so the i'll go for low-hanging fruit. you made the comment that kissinger did certain things during his time of power and that obama is doing some certain things -- similar things now, which -- if i understood you correctly you were making an ethical parallel. that is such a specious argument. it doesn't get to the real issue, are either of their actions ethical? i just wanted to -- >> in terms of the -- >> to say, well, obama is doing similar stuff so -- >> no, no, kissinger -- okay. i think -- maybe i wasn't clear. so, kissinger was defending his action in cambodia by invoking what obama is doing today with the drone warfare program. >> that's a specious argue. >> but that is kissinger's argument. >> my neighbor beats his wife so i can beat -- so my husband can beat me. that is specious and we know better. >> it's not my argument. it's kissinger's argument. >> as for someone who so brilliant, it's amazing someone as nonbrilliant as me can see through it. [applause] >> we have books behind the register, and he is going to be signing right here. we'll form a line. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] you're watching "the communicators on c-span. "we have been talking with may can tear, new book about the development of digital television. the televisionaries. this is the second half of our conversation. in tayer we talk about the 25 years that digital tv has been in place. we talked about its development. we just started our conversation last week on what is next when it comes to watching video and let me start with a broad question. how do we watch video today? >> guest: well, first question to that question is, who is we? many of us -- that is increasing every day -- are watching in multiscreen world, and that has been one of the more exciting outcomes of the whole digital revolution. so it used to be there was a stationary screen and with hdtv that was a big screen in the living room. with the internet and wireless world, extending things, now you have tablets and smartphones and wi-fi all over the place, such that tv is not just a stationary, lean-back experience in the living room but very much of a mobile experience wherever you want to go, and it's not just tv. it's also video. this two terms have a lot of overlap. but the cable industry and the satellite tv industry did something very interesting. they've become a lot more pro-active over the years and it's called tv everywhere. and they were seeing that the internet was going to become a huge threat to their underlying business, and by the internet i mean the insurgents that are fighting the incumbents for control and shaping of the next generation of tv and video. that's google, youtube, facebook, instagram, twitter with vine and periscope, and netflix. and so in response, but certainly pro-actively, the established media companies created this environment called tv everywhere. what that means is if you're a subscriber to cable or satellite, and so you pay on average about $80 a month, instead of only being able to watch your content in your living room, you're also for no additional charge able to watch it on your tablet order smartphones on the go. so, tv everywhere has been rolling out. most of the major content providers have their version of it. there's a couple issues with it, but overall it's going very well. and meanwhile, you have thesephone na like cord-cutting and à la carte rolling out more and more every day, and it's -- i'd say tilt the most confusing but the most exciting time ever for the media and tv business. >> host: well in your chapter "today's media kingpins" you write the global tv video service market exceeded $220 billion in revenue in 2013. then you good through and you list some of the -- what you call the media kingpins, and you have as number one, comcast. >> guest: yes. that wasn't necessarily in order but in this case, at least in the u.s., you would have to list comcast at the top of the list. they still have the most subscribers, even though they were not successful in buying time warner cable. they were successful in acquiring nbc universal from ge in its entirety in two steps. first they bought 51%, then the remaining 49%. so they're not only the biggest distributor of content in the u.s. but they're also one of the biggest content companies through nbc universal. and they also are very adept with technology. they employ thousands of their own engineers in addition to working with some of the biggest technology companies like era, who bought general instruments, bought motorola, who acquired general instruments from google. yes, that's right, going bought motorola/gi, and arris bought that. so comcast develops its own technology and works with technology leaders like crisco and many -- cisco and many others. so you have to put comcast up there. it's a competitive market. people don't realize how competitive it is. you have to wonder if there's sufficient competition, especially in the high-speed internet area. >> host: you also list disney as a media kingpin, especially with regard to sports. >> guest: yes. disney is one of the content giants, and in particular they not only own espn, which is one of the five big sports broadcasters, the others being nbc sports, cbs sports, turner sports, and fox sports. but they also own disney and all the associated channels, which are incredibly valuable. so, bob iger has done an amazing job growing the entire disney business. >> host: what is the importance of sports to the cable industry to the satellite industry, but to the video industry? >> guest: well, sports is hugely important, not to everyone, so a lot of people highlight the channel bundling issue and the fact that they have to pay for espn even if they don't like sports or even if they don't watch espn, as a reason that they don't want to continue with such a big package. but in the book i have a chapter called "sports: the great divide" because for anyone that likes sports, it's perhaps the biggest reason why you wouldn't cut the cord with cable or satellite, and just go soley to the internet, because as i mentioned, there are five big media companies that have licensed the vast majority of the rights to sports events. and if you look at the sports food chain, nfl is probably at the top of the lest. certainly financially they're at the top of the list. their annual revenues are roughly $10 billion. the majority of that revenue comes from sports rights, from four of the five company is just mentioned. also, getting billions of dollars per year in sports tv rights are the nba and major league baseball and in terms of being every two years, is the olympics in the billions per bien annual, and then down the food chain but also very popular next hundreds of millions of revenue per year, are sports like golf and tennis and soccer, although outside the u.s., soccer is the most important. so, sports is one of the areas that is certainly growing on the internet, and if you look at mlb.tv, that's a very popular service that is completely over the internet for baseball lovers. for most people you really still need your cable or satellite provider if you like to watch a lot of sports, especially live sports. >> host: marc tayer when you were work topping rollout of digital tv 25 years ago, did anyone in your group have a concept of this tv everywhere and all the different ways that we can get video? >> guest: we had a big picture. we had a sense that we were at the forefront of a tectonic swift in the television business. but we certainly did not anticipate the specifics like tv everywhere and a smartphone where you could essentially watch hd on the go, or a tablet. those innovations from companies like apple, came much later. i used the metaphor that it felt like we were on a rocket and we weren't quite sure where we were going to land. so, it was very exciting and kept rolling out and kept changing, and it was just a lot of fun. >> host: just to go back a little bit. one of the people who crossed your path at gi was donald rumsfeld. >> guest: yes. that was another interesting phase of the rollercoaster corporate history of gi and motorola and then google and arris. the story behind that was that fortman little, who along with kkr was the leveraged buyout or private equity firm of the day -- in the late '80s, early '90s -- did a leveraged buy-out of general instruments. at the time it didn't seem to make any sense that lbr, leveraged buy-out companies, would buy a technology company because typically they like to boy companies with very reliable cash flows, and with a tech company you can get blindside into oblivion by a breakthrough, and -- but they bought it, and they then wanted to bring in their own ceo, and it was very interesting. when i interviewed mr. rumsfeld for my book, i wanted to do some fact checking with him, and i had assumed that it was republican party politics that had to do with why he suddenly became the gi0 general instruments and he corrected me in his way and said, no, it was the opposite. what happened was forceman. hat a powerful advisory board which included henry kissinger and george schultz and also bob strauss, the chairman of the democratic party, and he and resumesfeld were quite friendly, and bob strauss actually recommend the bring in donald rumsfeld to be on the advisory board, and later when they needed a ceo, he had been a ceo of merck, the pharmaceutical giant -- no, not merck. it was gd sorel, and he had quite a reputation as a ceo in the private sector, even though he had been the youngest secretary of defense before that. and so he had this unique public and private sector background. he had been on the cover of fortune magazine, or was ranked the most feared boss in america by "for." so all of a sudden in 1990, he stepped in as our new ceo. >> host: in fact he had something to do with the first hdtv broadcast at the u.s. capitol, correct? >> guest: that true. when we finished testing our digital hdtv prototype in the broadcaster's labs in d.c., we passed with flying colors, and the word was getting out that digital actually worked. this was digital hdtv. then our competitors were going into the labs next to test and they also were following us in developing digital systems. but we wanted to make a big p.r. splash, and so donald rumsfeld lined up a situation where our engineers would do an over the air broadcast in d.c. to the u.s. capitol building, where there were quite few senators and congressmen and fcc commissioners, all waiting there to see if this would really work and what it meant for the country. it was a very patriotic moment, actually. >> host: how did that test go? >> guest: it went flawlessly. it-they flipped the switch city and it went from standard definition to dive mission and there was an american flag, waving, in the brilliant colors and high resolution of hdtv, and i wasn't in the room at the time, i was back in san diego, but from everything i heard, a lot of jaws dropped and they felt that one of the biggest technology breakthroughs in decades had just been proven. >> host: in televisionaries you talk about something that has been ubiquitous in living rooms across the country, the set-top box. what is the future hoff the set-top box? >> guest: well, a lot of people like to criticize the set-top box, and anyone n many cases for good reason. without really understanding its role. its role is nothing more than to bring the digital content into the home. now, it does sort of act as a proxy for the gatekeeper role of the cable and satellite tv provider, so whether it's a creek tv box for orr time waner cable box, it's the box near your tv that converts the digital hd signals and if you're a paying describer then displays them on your tv set. so, that box is also very important because it incorporated the security and encryption technology that protect that content. you mentioned number earlier, that the global pay tv business is almost a quarter trillion dollars actually and the majority of the revenue is actually in the u.s. $150 billion annually. it's the security and encryption technology that protects the con dent on behalf of virtually all the content providers from hbo and showtime to espn and cnn. so, now we have a whole new generation of boxes that are using -- that are bringing in internet content, and those are roku boxes and apple tv boxes and products like that. and you even have tvs, smart tvs, without boxes, that can bring in content, but in many cases there are limitations if you don't have any box at all. >> host: so, with encryption and security, has it gotten tougher with more and more use of the internet in delivering signals? >> guest: well, the internet has its own versions of security and encryption. more in software. but as long as we're on the topic of encryption, let's go back again briefly 25 years, bus i wanted to make a point about general instruments. we were really the first company outside the military that dealt with the nsa. because we were encrypting tv signals. and in fact at the time we had a running joke that nsa stood for "no such agency" because no one was quite sure they even existed at the time in the late '80s. but they used to come visit us in san diego, and our security engineers would visit them in maryland, because they wanted to understand what we were doing with respect to encryption, especially in terms of trying to export it, because at the time, all encryption was on the u.s. munitions list as if it were a weapon, even though we were using it in consumer products. so, that was just an interesting anecdote of early dealings with the nsa, of course, now everyone knows they do in fact exist through the edward snowden scandal or incident, whatever you want to call it. but back to your question about the internet. it does have its own security. it's mostly in software. generally hardware security is more secure, and that's within the arrsy, who now owns gi, motorola technology, and cisco owns the scientific atlanta, and set-top books with hardware security, hardware combined with software. one of the things about the internet and on demand that makes it a little easier to deal with less hard wear security environment is to move to an on-demand world of content. so with vod or on-demand video, it's a point-to-point video stream as opposed to a broadcast of one to many. it's really that broadcast like the olympics or the super bowl where you're broadcasting it to millions of homes in the case of this year's super bowl, that was to 114 million people, audience, simultaneously, where you really need hardware security. >> host: marc tayer from page 322 of your book: the quid pro quo of the internet is consumers' implicit willingness to sacrifice privacy and security for convenience and efficiency. even as we rage at the nsa's overzealous data collection and surveillance, under the cloak of protecting us from terrorism, we rarely blink when it comes to intrusion by the masters of the internet, their electronic wands following our every move and squeezing more money out of our wallets. >> guest: you pulled out some pretty good tidbits there. i think that's very much the case, that whether consumers realize it or not, when they start to tap into the richness of the internet, they're to some extent and to a significant extent, agreeing to give up privacy. whether that is google looking at their viewing habits, or surfing habits in order to serve them better ads, and that's how it can be justified, or many other reasons that mostly have to do with advertising and ecommerce on timizeation. >> on timizeation so when people put a smart tv or an internet in their home, they not thinking about it. some boxes even have cameras and somewhere near that page in the book i said something about the cameras in sort of the new products and these are hd cameras, and that the living room is really the last bastion of privacy out there. and so people should think twice about what they're putting out into the world in that upstream over the internet. >> host: are the -- >> guest: having said that, think everyone has to make their own tradeoff, and in most cases the internet and all the richness of it is worth the tradeoff as long as we are all cognizant of the privacy quid pro quo. >> host: are the apple tvs, the google it wases, the recues compatible if a the comcast and charter and fios? irthey compatible? i'm not sure what you mean by compatible. they do allow bringing in some of the same content. but let me put it this way. this gets into the cord-cutting discussion and à la carte content. for a consumer who doesn't care much about sports, and in particular for a millenial, who are people born between 1980 and 2000 roughly, and also for people who don't really care about seeing the first viewing of a hot new tv series, cord-cutting can make a lot of sense. because you can get a lot of that content now through the internet, through netflix, through hulu, and it's the roku and apple tv boxes that bring the that content. but it's not a wholesale substitute and maybe not compatible for one of the cable or satellite tv boxes but is compatible in the since that the same subscriber, the same consumer household can have these two side-by-side. so you can have your satellite or cable box and watch espn live, you can also have your apple tv box or your roku box and watch netflix in their original series on your own schedule. so, in a sense, everything is getting better for the con courage the consumer has the best of both worlds, although if you want to be completely economical about it you have to look at how you might cut the cord and -- but when it comes to à la carte, let's be careful because that could end up being more expensive for the consumer. >> host: in your chapter called "through the electronic portals of our home." first of al, is it important who controls that pipe into the house or with mobile anymore it doesn't matter? >> guest: i think it is important. think it's important that it's the consumer that controls what comes over his or her pipe ultimately. i think that's sort of the philosophical ideal. i think what you mean is on the distribution side. who is controlling the internet pipe. what is important is that it's competitive and it's fast and that it's almost flawless for the consumer. but that gets into the whole network -- net neutrality debate where you don't want any one party controlling the bits coming over that pipe. in distinction from the cable or satellite pipe where it's that video service provider, whether it's dish or directv or verizon fios or charter, that has some control as a gatekeeper over what is control -- coming over the pipe to their subscribers. >> host: so, what is your opinion of the fcc's recent net neutrality decision? >> guest: it was a very complicated debate and discussion. i think it's going to work out for everyone. i think the hyperbole on both siteses was out of control. became so politicized. i think it's all going to work out. but i do feel that the fcc to some extent, took the country's eye us off the ball. i think the most important issue really is more competition and ongoing innovation for those broadband pipes. and the truth is, the net neutrality decision -- i'd like to explain a little about about it -- was more preventive than punitive. i think that michael powell, who had been the chairman of the fcc in 2002, really got it