 Sunday, September 20, 1998 Rocky Mountain News – Business section Cable pioneer on fast forwardJones Intercable founder pushes cyber education By Rebecca Cantwell, Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer At an age when most people are retiring and ready to mull the past, Glenn Jones, 68, is riveted on the future. The cable television entrepreneur, who borrowed against his Volkswagen to buy his first system in Georgetown 31 years ago, built Jones Intercable, Inc. into one of the nation’s top 10 cable operators. After three decades helping to build the cable industry from his Denver base, Jones is selling control of Intercable, shedding his systems and their 1.4 million subscribers. In a $700 million agreement announced last month, Philadelphia-based Comcast Corp. will take control of the systems in a deal expected to close early next year. That will free Jones to channel his energies into other enterprises in his closely-held companies focused on programming and education. Long a believer in using television and computer technology for education, or "distance learning," Jones plans to pursue his vision of making all the world a classroom. He talked recently about his plans in an interview in his Arapahoe County corporate headquarters, in the expansive office he designed that is filled with eclectic paintings, rugs, sculpture and a baby grand piano. Question: Now that you’re selling your cable business, what will you concentrate on? Answer: We have a lot going on here. We just did a $100 million (private) offering for Jones International networks, and that includes the radio business with 12 different formats – the largest is country music. We have a country music video network and the product information network, which is advertorials…. We have Knowledge TV, the education-oriented network. That company is coming on very strong and I’m looking to getting more involved. Q: A lot of these business interests are going more global, aren’t they? A: Yes. In Knowledge TV we have 20 million viewers in China an hour a day and we syndicate our programming around the world. We’re very dedicated to education. We think that can be instrumental in driving the cost of education down so people can get a very high-quality degree more conveniently and we can still make money. Q: Is that business in its infancy or beyond? A: It is beyond infancy. But it has taken a real long time. We’re pioneers in this business of cyber education. Q: What have been the hardest things to figure out? A: What the market is. What the market wants. How to do it on a cost-efficient basis, how to acquire students and how to maintain the right relationship with students. And then to get them excited about education and to maintain close contact throughout the process so their experience is successful. Q: You talk about making Denver the "distance education capitol of the world." What will it take to make it happen? A: Quality is the cornerstone here as in no other kind of business. If you don’t have absolute quality, it could all turn out very badly. People will draw analogies to correspondence schools and you can’t let that happen. We’ve set up the Global Alliance for Transnational Education to assure quality across national boundaries and eventually rationalize global education in a database – so companies know what to do if someone shows up with a two-year degree from Ceylon in Ireland, so it’s related to known standards and someone can make a judgment. If distance education gets a bad name in any country, that’s bad. Q: Why is this so important to you at this stage of your life? A: I think education is the great hope of the world. All you need to do is go to the Vietnam Memorial or any number of graveyards or memorials – or go watch Saving Private Ryan – and the message is obvious. And I think that people who’ve been in the service and have the ability and the wherewithal to do something about it really owe it to try to do something. Q: So you think many conflicts are based on ignorance? A: Right, and we come at it with a heritage of communications and technology so we have that ability to fuse the technology with education which makes it travel globally. Your class can be composed, for example, of people from Germany, Japan, the U.S. and Mexico. And when you mix people up like that and they learn to respect each other and deal with each other, it develops ties and relationships that people stop and think about before they do stupid things like start wars, which is the world’s worst way to resolve any kind of issue. Q: But we’re seeing a tremendous rise in nationalism and xenophobia at the same time as the world grows more global. How do your classes address that? A; The world is becoming very global and very local at the same time. We don’t have courses that address that per se. But at the end of the day it all ends up with people reacting with people and seeing the strengths and the virtues of other people. It’s not something you cure overnight, it’s like chipping granite. But you have to start someplace. The wonderful thing about where we are today is if you fuse the technology and education, you create an entirely new product that travels at the speed of light into your living room. You don’t have to go to the education. It comes to you on your schedule at you convenience and oftentimes at your own pace. So you’re learning when you feel like learning. It’s very student-centered. Q: The amount of money being spent on computers and networks by companies based in this community to link people together is pretty dramatic. A: We look at it neurologically. You have a human mind – an electro-chemical device doing a hundred quadrillion functions a second, like the magnitude of a hundred trillion transistors. And when you contemplate what’s happening out there, you have these trillion of dollars going into high speed delivery, whether it’s fiber, satellites, computers, digital boxes. When you stand back and look, what’s the termination point? It’s the three-pound electro-chemical device called the human brain. When you get on the Internet, which is a main membrane of the neurology, you’re extending your mind to hundreds of thousands of databases around the world. You see how that connects when you start delivering education to people instead of requiring people to go to education. Information is a unique kind of asset, unlike a truck you can park in your garage, but not anyone else’s. Once the Library of Congress gets a book and it gets digitized, it can be in everyone’s garage all at once. Q: What you’re describing may sound to a lot of people like such a massive overload that it’s scary and intimidating. A: That’s where companies like us come in. We make it unscary and unintimidating. We make it friendly and usable and comfortable and cozy. Our cyber education, for example, is very accommodating. You can do it in your kitchen. If you get transferred to Akron, your kitchen is still your classroom. The distribution business is getting to be a huge business. The companies are becoming gargantuan in size and that’s probably good for putting together the infrastructure. The TCI/AT&T deal is going to be very good for all of us because it will accelerate the whole process and force others to accelerate. Q: The acceleration already seems pretty dramatic. A: And they will get more dramatic. The reason I like this new environment is imagination is king, it doesn’t matter how many trucks I have. Q: Is that an analogy for what you’re doing – shedding the business that is trucks, installers and repairers so you can put more energy on the brainpower part? A: I don’t want to say anything negative about that side of the business. But where we need to be in terms of who we are as people and our philosophical basis of the future, we’re more comfortable going forward in the content and education side of the business because we have a higher chance of replicating our success in those arenas. Q: Why is that? A: It requires imagination more than physical assets. More than trucks, more than capitol, it requires brainpower and imagination. That is the most powerful tool in this environment: ingenuity and creativity. And those have always been our best arenas as a company. If we can purify the formula, we should do better and better. We’re trying to make Denver the distance learning center of the world. That’s not a smokestack industry. The technology we’re using has no limitations in an era of limitations. The desktop computer uses about as much electricity as a light bulb. So we’re dealing with all the elements that are the big winners tomorrow, but we have to ride the high-speed distribution systems. And the trillions of dollars it takes to put that in place are being spent. Q: What are some of the other barriers – regulatory or government structures that aren’t right for the world we’re talking about. A: A lot of countries are concerned about letting their people have access to the Internet. If they don’t, they realize they’ll be a real backwater and their people will be peasants of the information age and they can’t let that happen. But these are technologies of freedom and it tends to democratize the world, so they’re torn. It’s a real problem if you’re trying to run a dictatorship. This is very empowering technology, but it moves power from governments to individuals. Q: What about big corporations trying to make a lot of money and looking for ways to charge for that access? A: When you make a phone call, you pay. I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong for charging a reasonable fee for these things. That’s the only way it pays for itself. It’s not free and we in this country have historically learned that to have the government do all this costs much more in the long run. Q: Who will make those rules? A: The marketplace. JONES INTERCABLE AND BEYOND (BOX) Comcast Corp., the nation’s fourth-largest U.S. cable television company announced [in August, 1998] that it is speeding up its purchase of control shares of Jones Intercable, Inc. A breakdown of the $700 million deal:
JONES EDUCATION COMPANIES (BOX) Glenn Jones is retaining those parts of his business involving education. Most are subsidiaries of Jones Education Co., which includes:
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