Charlie Rose Talks to Jeffrey Bewkes

You recently said that we're in a golden age for television and that the digital revolution is nothing to be afraid of. What did you mean?
I'm just reminding everyone that if you look at the television business ... TV viewing is up, time spent viewing is up, the number of channels and the quality is up—more than films, actually. And the programming investments are up, the profits are up. There's nothing in it that isn't up. And when you say, is it TV vs. the Internet? No, it's TV on the Internet.

Is the idea of free being replaced by a new economic model?
When us oldsters grew up, we lived in the tyranny of free TV. In the '60s, '70s, and '80s, we were all stuck with basically three choices, and all of them were mass, low-common-denominator programming. The programming was made not for you. The programming was made to sell you an advertisement. And so all the programming was the same. Because if you weren't running 30 million people in front of your show on CBS or ABC, you were losing money. And what happened when cable TV or, you know, now Internet TV came along, is it allowed you the freedom to choose what you wanted to watch and pay for. The most naked example is HBO. There is no advertising on HBO. It doesn't matter how big the audience on HBO is. We don't care if you watch on Sunday nights. That's not how we make money from you. We care that you want to subscribe for the month. We're trying to do things that are interesting.