Staci D. Kramer: You said in December that you were surprised by how online video advertising came to a standstill in Q4. Has that changed in the first half of ‘09?
Jeff Zucker: I think the two things that are still really valuable online are search and video. It clearly has slowed down. We’ll see where it comes back to. The thing in our world that people want, certainly, is video.

Do you feel comfortable with the idea that Hulu could be an agent for TV Everywhere, the idea that you’d be able to come in and see some things for free still but make the content like Bravo, most of which you don’t put online, available in real time?
I think all those things are on the table and certainly things we’d be looking at.

Does authentication make sense to you?
I think authentication does make sense. It’s got to make business sense to both sides but I don’t see any reason that we can’t get there.

You and Peter Chernin are widely credited with working together to make Hulu happen. How does Peter leaving and being replaced by Jon Miller on the board and Disney (NYSE: DIS) coming in change the mix at Hulu?
Peter Chernin has been a tremendous partner on Hulu. But with Jason Kilar and his entire team so fully entrenched now, I am confident we will move to the next phase of Hulu’s life. And having a fresh set of eyes from people like Jon Miller, who has terrific digital expertise, and the team from Disney, gives me great confidence in Hulu’s future.

How has knowing that something is going to online as an immediate aftermarket changed programming at NBC?
I don’t know that it’s changed programming. I think our programmers still think of their initial exploitation first, whether its broadcast or cable.

Is Saturday Night Live an exception?
Saturday Night Live is perhaps an exception with some of their digital shorts and some of that thinking. I think those folks are thinking about the afterlife more than anybody.

I shouldn’t have just said aftermarket because you also use it as a pre-market, to get attention for shows that are premiering.
(hesitates) That’s true. The only reason I hesitate is I’m not convinced that’s the right thing to do.

So you want to hold the cachet for the premiere?
I don’t think there’s a hard-and-fast rule here and I don’t think there’s an absolute right or wrong but I am not convinced and I have expressed that to the team.

Sean McManus (president of CBS News and Sports) said they don’t have rights to stream Super Bowls in 2010 and 2013 but they are talking to the NFL. He also said it’s a very real concern you only have four hours to make all of your money out of the Super Bowl and what are you doing if you put it on another medium.
I think events like those where you’re paying a huge rights fee and you’ve got to recoup it there, I think that would be the ultimate loss of analog dollars for digital currency.

This is a decision you faced with the Olympics—what goes online and when does it go.
We windowed everything. We didn’t stream our primetime coverage simultaneously, which would be akin to streaming the Super Bowl simultaneously.

Somebody would have to show you a really, really good model for how that would work.
I don’t think there is a model that exists right now that would show that. I wouldn’t want to devalue the price of the Olympics or the Super Bowl or whatever it is.

Is there something that isn’t streaming yet that you think should be?
We’ve been aggressive in this respect. Not off the top of my head.

Do you see value to streaming the Stanley Cup? (NBC airs some of the games but doesn’t own the streaming rights; CBC streamed the finals in Canada.)
Not really.

In terms of portability, is the availability on Hulu or NBC.com cutting into your iTunes revenue at all?
There’s no evidence of that. I think they are different experiences.

Do people want to take it with them?
I think people want the option of consuming the video in different ways. Some people want to be portable and some people want to watch at their computer screen. We’re comfortable with you experiencing our media in almost any way you want to as long as we get paid for it.

So how much do you have to get paid for it?
Isn’t that the question? What I don’t want to do is completely trade the analog dollars for the digital dimes. It’s a function of figuring out that graph of how much I need to get paid.

When you talked before about ad monetization, part of this is literally the technology to make money from ads and deliver them, and part of it is the pricing of it and how does it fit in. Do you feel you are close to the right sales strategy across platforms?
I feel we’ve done a very good job with regard to that. We’re still in the learning period of knowing exactly how to manage and price.

(Universal TV head) Jeff Gaspin made a change with JB Perrette’s job description (adding affiliate sales, content distribution strategy)...
That is a recognition that the way we roll out content now affects every window that we’re in. I don’t think you can separate the different distribution systems whether that’s network affiliate, cable affiliate, digital distribution, online distribution. The business has grown up in such silos; I don’t think that that’s possible anymore and I think JB’s role acknowledges that you have to look across all of the windows. It’s about crossing the silos with the windows. This world is just too complicated today to not look at it across every window and every silo.

Internationally, what can you do with NBC content? That’s another set of windows. The idea is that Hulu is going to go UK or go in other countries, of course, but how do you do that without obliterating the lucrative content with international?
That’s obviously something we’ve got to weigh and balance. All we’ve done is move the same headaches that we have here to that side of the pond.

Do we have to shorten the windows now internationally?
I don’t know that we have to but you have to question everything. Technology is changing everything.

You were early in with MSNBC. That certainly carved out new ground with news and information. Do you wish that is something NBC had done organically instead of doing it in partnership (with Microsoft)? If wishes were horses, I know…
Exactly. I don’t know that we could have. … MSNBC.com has worked out incredibly well.

As ahead of the curve as you were with MSNBC, you were behind with CNBC. You should have been Yahoo Finance.
You go back to what you asked me about the digital strategy. If you take MSNBC.com, CNBC.com and Weather.com, our position of leadership on the news and information side is incredibly strong. It’s too bad we waited so long to get there on the CNBC.com side but the strides we made in the last year have been tremendous. No question that had we got there earlier we would be in a much more prominent place.

News and information is something that we’re very focused on. We’ve been very aggressive in the broadcast media space, what we’ve done in the local media side. WNBC.com is gone, it’s now NBCNY.com. … We really changed the way people look at local television websites.

Why did you want to do it?
Because WNBC.com or WNBC4.com is an extension of the television station, it’s not a real scaled game. We don’t want to play just in that game. We want to play in the entire New York or Chicago or Los Angeles or whatever city you want to call it online media space and we can’t do that by just limiting ourselves to the call letters of our traditional analog TV station. ... It’s not a promo vehicle. We’re trying to run a business.

Are you starting to see revenue changes from that?
I think we will over time. It’s also part of how we’ve changed our strategy.

You’ve also changed your management structure (on the digital side). You inherited Beth (Comstock). She brought in George Kliavkoff as chief digital officer. You came at it from a small group, wide circle idea. Now you don’t have a chief digital officer. In some respects, you’re the chief digital officer.
I would say Salil (Mehta) has got that responsibility for us but your point is fair. What Beth and George did was center us at the time. Prior to them being here, we didn’t really have a strategy. And they got us going in that respect. Then, I moved from a federal construct to a state’s rights construct. Power went back to the states. I felt when we were holding it centrally, people were not paying attention to their bottom lines because the cost was all being held centrally. When you’re forced to look in the states’ rights way you pay a lot more attention to your cost structure.

So it’s not just about digital strategy, it’s about the cost structure.
I don’t know how you can separate them. Digital is still a business so I felt it was time our digital strategy had evolved to a point where it was able to go back into to the businesses and they should each run it as a business.

I don’t think that anyone here thinks it’s not a priority any more. We’ve done that part and it’s well enough embedded in each of the businesses that everybody understands the importance of it. I don’t think there’s any confusion here about how important digital is.