Artifact Details

Title

Brodsky, Julian A. oral history

Catalog Number

102795135

Type

Document

Description

Julian Brodsky was born in south Philadelphia in 1933 and spent virtually his whole life and career in that city. He attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, had early jobs as an auditor and then as an accountant.

In 1963, he joined with two colleagues, Ralph Roberts and Dan Aaron, to buy a small 1200 subscriber cable TV franchise in Tupelo Mississippi. Over the following 50+ years, they grew their company, later named Comcast, into one of the largest cable/media companies in the world, valued at over $100B.

Julian served as CFO and chief deal maker for the company from the mid-1960’s to the mid-1990’s. This oral history is replete with engaging, often humorous stories of how they were able to acquire one cable franchise after another across the country, using aggressive financial tools and clever negotiating. By the late 1970’s, they had organically grown the company to about 250,000 subscribers. Then through a series of acquisitions they doubled their subscriber base to 500,000. With the purchase of Group W’s subscribers, they doubled to >1M. They doubled that again with the purchase of Storer Communications. Several multi-billion dollar deals followed, bringing their subscriber base to 7M by the mid-1990’s. Comcast became the largest cable corporation with the acquisition of a AT&T’s broadband business in 2002.

Comcast was able to expand beyond its basic cable business in the mid-2000’s when GE was forced to sell NBCUniversal in order to improve its liquidity. It’s first major international expansion occurred when Comcast was able to buy the UK’s media and cable giant, Sky, from Rupert Murdoch.

After stepping down from daily operations at Comcast, Mr. Brodsky became CEO of Comcast's new investment arm, Comcast Interactive Capital, in 1999.

Date

2019-09-17

Contributor

Brodsky, Julian A., Interviewee

Fralic, Chris, Interviewer

Hancock, Marguerite Gong, Interviewer

Weber, Marc, Interviewer

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Philadelphia, PA

Extent

63 p.

Format

PDF

Subject

Comcast; Sky; Storer; Group W; NBC; Murdoch, Rupert; Roberts, Ralph; Roberts, Brian; Aaron, Dan

Collection Title

CHM Oral History Collection

Credit