I grew up in New York City in the '80s, and it was the epicenter of hip-hop. There was no Internet. Cable television wasn't as broad. I would listen to the radio, hear cars pass by playing a song, or tape songs off of the radio. At that time, there was such an excitement around hip-hop music.

The CNN international is a different service - it is even more leftist and anti-American than CNN is. That's their business, that's fine, but it can't be getting any revenue. There is no cable network that I know of anywhere in the world other than in America that pays them for their products.

For all the manufactured 'Republican versus Democrat' drama that dominates today's cable news and political rhetoric, the most striking feature of our present-day democracy is not partisan divide - it's a corrupt system that protects incumbents from the consequences that real democracy brings.

I wanted to move between film and theater - I never felt like I fit into TV. And I'm very anti-TV, like, 'I'm never going to do TV,' but also, TV didn't want me either, so it was kind of perfect. And then, of course, cable happened, and suddenly it was like, 'Oh, I could do that kind of stuff.'

Because I'm seen on 'Oz', a lot of the urban cats in the city are like, 'Yo, I thought you'd be rolling in a Mercedes?' And I'm just like, 'Not at all!' This is cable money. There is a big difference between that and a network. But still I can't complain. It's better than doing a 9 to 5 any day.

'The Sopranos,' for instance, is arguably the best cable show of all time. They could have made a movie, but that show ended so perfectly, it would almost be a disadvantage to make a movie like that. Then again, if you made a 'Sopranos' movie, people would be lined around the block to go see it.

Our news is Fox News. It's a cable channel and has nothing to do, frankly, with the entertainment area of the company. It's the model of how this company was launched, and there are a lot of independent stations and Fox O&Os who have hugely successful news that our programming is the lead-in for.

TV is still a 'push' medium - we are broadcasting into any home or business with basic cable, and depending on what's happening in the world, we have a wider audience, from news junkies to very sporadic viewers. On TV, you want your reporting to be valuable to that entire audience and be relevant.

It was no accident that I made 'Hoop Dreams' because it concerned a sport that I loved and hoped would be my dream, however far-fetched that turned out to be. Because of the success of that film, Hollywood pigeonholed me as a sports biopic guy, which led to 'Prefontaine' and two cable sports films.

The only reason I'm ever in character as 'Larry The Cable Guy' is because that's what I'm hired to do. In my movies, obviously they hired 'Larry The Cable Guy' to be 'Larry The Cable Guy.' When I do my shows, I'm 'Larry The Cable Guy.' When I do Jay Leno, it's: 'Please welcome 'Larry The Cable Guy.'

I have more faith in doing something creative for a cable station or something like Yahoo or Google or Amazon. What Netflix did with 'House of Cards' and David Fincher was brilliant. That is inspiring to me. I think there is more chance for creativity in animation, it just hasn't happened there yet.

People like reality; I think it's always happened from the Roman times, when people used to go to a coliseum and watch people compete against each other. I think networks and cable channels find it an easier way of producing and putting things together, because people will watch it and it's cheaper.

Unsurprisingly, an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) - once a luxury for room-sized computer installations - is now a standard item both in home offices and all the networked tiers above, protecting servers and online service providers, Internet backbones, phone companies, and even cable TV networks.

I remember one night, my parents were out at a function of some kind and I had just gotten cable in my room. That was a big deal, and I saw 'Blue Velvet' on HBO. It blew my mind in a way that I don't think children's minds are supposed to be blown, but they probably shouldn't be watching 'Blue Velvet.'

Divestitures have long been the preferred remedy for horizontal mergers, where there's an overlap between the two companies. Airlines, for example, may have to sell routes or airport gates where the two airlines compete; cable operators may have to sell operations in cities where both companies operate.

When I was leaving NBC News to go to CNN, people would say, 'What?! Why would you possibly leave the 'Today Show' to go to cable?' If I would've listened to people, I would've been on a great platform, but I wouldn't have grown as a journalist. So far, most of the steps in my career have been really good.

We were probably the last people in the country to get a VCR and we didn't have cable. There wasn't any admiration of glamour, no, 'I want to look like them or have that lifestyle', because everyone in my town had the same lifestyle. So I didn't think, 'Ooh, a movie star's birthday!' I just thought, 'What?'

Most of the best writing, the most creative writing, the most interesting, the most out-of-the-box kind of stuff, is being done on cable, you know, and on the computer. I mean, whatever it is, Amazon or Netflix or something. Because they're just willing to take chances, you know, and there's a market for it.

The largest issue with search is that we learned about it when the web was young, when the universe was 'complete' - the entire web was searchable! Now our digital lives are utterly fractured - in apps, in walled gardens like Facebook, across clunky interfaces like those in automobiles or Comcast cable boxes.

I've never met a budget that I couldn't coax a few extra dollars from - and I'll bet that you can do the same. For instance, you're probably buying more minutes and more cable channels than you use. Oh, and how many black skinny jeans do I count in your closet? You have enough money, just the wrong priorities.

Americans hate their cable companies - for bumbling installers, on-again-off-again transmissions, peculiar channel selections, and indifferent customer service. The only thing cable subscribers hate more than the cable company is not being able to get what it delivers: multichannel selection and good reception.

Researchers looked at news programs on major broadcast and cable networks between 2008 and 2012 and found that of those labeled as domestic terrorists, 81% were identifiable as Muslims - this despite the fact that FBI reports from the period studied revealed that only 6% of domestic terrorist suspects were Muslim.

I've become very interested in the spectrum of political discourse as seen on the cable news channels that are conveniently right in a row on my cable provider's dial. I can flip from Fox to CNN to HLN to MSNBC, and I find myself at night flipping it back and forth through them, and it's something of an addiction.

As you do on any cable series, if they introduce you as the villain, then you better start working towards making him a really good guy, or if they introduce you as a really good guy, then you better start working towards being the villain. Your character has to go somewhere, or else they become very uninteresting.

What's amazing is that the Web enables you to build a kind of channel that wouldn't have made sense for cable, in the same way cable enabled you to build content that wouldn't have made sense for broadcast. You couldn't have done CNN with the broadcast networks; you couldn't have done MTV with the broadcast networks.

I didn't have cable television growing up; there were only six channels you could watch then. The only really good channel was channel 10, and they would play 'The Nanny Called Fran' every night for years. I've seen every episode 100 times. I would get my Grandma to make me leopard skin dresses on her sewing machine.

Some of the greatest shows in history - 'Seinfeld,' 'Everybody Loves Raymond' and 'House' - had puny starts but the benefit of schedule protection, increasingly scarce in today's DVR world. Cable nets can tolerate small ratings, building hits in progress like 'Breaking Bad,' or marathon their way to a 'Duck Dynasty.'

Evil comes in through the cable and through the Internet. We look forward to the advent of driverless cars. But they can be hacked. You could be riding along, and some 14-year-old in Romania takes over your car, so you end up running the lights and losing your brakes or, worse, listening to Eminem. What's the purpose?

The reason people talk about cable cutting is they imagine the price burden will get so high that people won't be able to pay it. They're missing something: that the actual price of the electronic package is going down. They've got their Internet, phone, TV, all of it. Now people are using more and more stuff for less.

New York's niche is content, and content is becoming more valuable. Just think about what is more valuable: MTV or the cable system that you use to get MTV? Howard Stern or the radio station you use to listen to him? Ultimately, technology becomes a commodity, and content - real, true branded content - becomes more valuable.

The territory has changed, and a lot of really good actors want to do cable series, but they don't necessarily want to do network TV and make the commitment of 22 episodes or whatever. They find that the liberties and the creative freedoms that you get in cable is more interesting to them than the censorship of a network show.

We have more tools at hand, literally, to make life easier and more productive than ever. We have Google, Wikipedia, iPads, iPhones, iTunes, YouTube, Netflix, and 600 cable channels. We can shop, pay bills, order food, and get nearly everything delivered, all of it with the touch of a finger on a device in the palm of our hand.

'On demand' is more than just a series of clicks on your still-too-complicated remote control. In fact, it is now the best way to describe what the cable industry - from programmers to content makers to distributors - imagine their world is. Services and content available to very demanding consumers, wherever, whenever, however.

I think probably one of the coolest things was when I went to play basketball at Rucker Park in Harlem. First of all, who would think that Larry the Cable Guy would go to Harlem to play basketball? And I was received like a rock star. It was amazing! There were people everywhere. There were guys walking by yelling, 'Git 'r done!'

When I did 'Ugly Betty' it was very similar to working on 'Mad Men' - great group of people in their own little world. But I don't really see a lot of difference. Of course, on the cable shows, you can tackle subjects and be more specific, because networks have to appeal to the masses, but that's constantly changing and evolving.

We try to make the name longer and longer every year. First, it was 'Larry the Cable Guy's Christmas Spectacular.' Then it was 'It's a Very Larry Christmas.' Now it's 'Larry the Cable Guy's Hula-palooza Christmas Luau.' I'll tell you what it is: It's funny. That's what it is. Who cares what the name of it is? It is a funny special.

I'm not really sure what I'd like to see people doing more of online, but what I'd like to see less of is the warning signs that not ratifying net neutrality is gonna cause two separate nets: one that the big dogs can afford to be on and the other a ghetto internet that no one goes on. Think FM vs AM radio, or cable vs broadcast TV.

Whether you are liberal or conservative, people seem to know the talking points for whatever the issue of the day is. Very rarely does it seem like these are opinions that people are coming up with themselves; it's like they watched the right cable news channel, and now they know what they are supposed to think, and they repeat that.

All generations think the present moment is the greatest but also have this fascination with before their time. I do the same thing. I see old British movies. I'm like, 'Man, I would love to be in London at that time.' But then I wouldn't be able to watch 'The Walking Dead,' I wouldn't have cable, and my pizza options would be limited.

Back in the late '90s, I put together a humorous newsmagazine program called 'The Awful Truth' for Bravo. We helped one guy get an organ transplant whose insurance company had refused to pay. I thought, if we could save a guy's life in a 10-minute segment on cable, what could we do if we devoted a whole movie to a whole bunch of people?

I think its going to be continually tougher on the big networks as more cable channels do really interesting television. The big networks have a choice to make: Do we try to be all things to all people and get the shows that will deliver 20 million viewers a week? Are we the McDonald's of television? Or are we going to try to be more specific?

In 1980s, I discovered 'Late Night with David Letterman.' It was on one of the 13 cable TV channels. They didn't have 25 late night talk show hosts trying to be the most outrageous. There was the likeable television genius Johnny Carson and his mad-genius counterpart Dave. There was nothing else crazy on TV every night, and there was no Internet.

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