McSlarrow Leaving As NCTA Chief on High Note

NCTA CEO Kyle McSlarrow’s decision Friday to leave this spring was the culmination of months of his considering what he wanted to do next, and now he’s looking to work as an executive on the operational end of a company, perhaps in the media or telecom sector, cable industry officials said. They said McSlarrow seemed to face no pressure to leave from members of NCTA, where his contract runs until 2012 and was extended for four years in 2008. Though he'd been considering leaving NCTA for some time, the decision came as some surprise to industry insiders and came two hours after he spoke to a panel about online video. (See separate report in this issue.)

McSlarrow joined NCTA as president and CEO in March 2005, so he'll be leaving around the six-year mark. Predecessor Robert Shapiro worked there for a similar amount of time. The group said it will form a search committee to find a replacement for McSlarrow. During the last search a committee also was formed and it hired an executive-search firm to find McSlarrow, said an NCTA spokesman. McSlarrow continued to have support as NCTA head from cable systems and programmers, and his decision to leave also seems to stem from his desire to have a different job with new challenges, industry officials said.

"Over the last several months, I have discussed with members of the NCTA Board my interest in transitioning to another role in our industry that would allow me to work more fully on business and operating activities,” McSlarrow said in a written statement. “Earlier this week, I informed the NCTA Board of my decision to begin exploring opportunities now, and we agreed on the spring of 2011 as the target for my departure.” He wasn’t available for an interview.

Statements of support for McSlarrow poured in from groups including the NAB, at loggerheads with cable over retransmission consent; from CEA, at odds with cable operators over gateway video devices; and from Comcast, in the process of buying control of NBC Universal. That deal doesn’t appear to have influenced McSlarrow’s decision to leave, industry officials said. McSlarrow has been an “invaluable source of guidance and innovative thinking as our industry has faced a time of rapid change and public policy debate,” Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said.

CEA President Gary Shapiro regrets that McSlarrow is leaving NCTA, Shapiro said in a statement late Friday. “Kyle is a straight shooter and always honest,” said Shapiro. His group wants FCC AllVid rules requiring all pay-TV providers to have gateway devices connect with a wide array of consumer electronics products, something NCTA and cable operators are concerned about. McSlarrow “also delivers,” Shapiro said. “He helped our nation smoothly transition to digital television by joining with me and then-NAB head David Rehr to create a multi-industry effort to make sure the American public understood the DTV transition. While we disagreed on some issues, he remained a paragon of decency, an increasingly rare phenomena in Washington.”