Louisville, CO, Dec. 14, 1994—The Board of Directors of Cable Television Laboratories Inc. (CableLabs®) has approved a $13.1 million budget for 1995 that authorizes CableLabs® management to raise the CableLabs® staffing level to 61 positions. There now are 50 staff members.

The budget breakdown is as follows: $9.5 million in operations; $2.9 million in the research and development project pool; $700,000 for capital equipment. The project pool is apportioned throughout the year for non-overhead projects. Funding is based upon approval by the CableLabs® project planning process, which is open to all staff. The 1994 budget was about $12.6 million.

"This new revenue level, and the board's authorization for hiring additional experts, will help CableLabs achieve its telecommunications and digital technology goals in 1995," said Dr. Richard R. Green, CableLabs® president and CEO. The Labs' two top priorities in 1995 are providing members with information about technologies that can enable cable operators to enter into new businesses such as the telecommunications business, and assisting members to deploy digital transmission and compression technology.

To be added to CableLabs' employee complement are three unfilled positions from 1994: an engineer for radio frequency and digitial signal processing, a video and telephony engineer and a vice president for network architecture and design development.

The new positions are a membership services representative, a director of operations engineering projects, two MPEG software engineers, three administrative assistants, and a senior advisor.

In addition to adopting a budget, the winter meeting also is used to choose board officers. Re-elected were: Chairman, Dr. John C. Malone, president and CEO of TCI; Treasurer, James Doolittle, president and COO of Time Warner Cable; and Secretary, Brian Roberts, president of Comcast.

These officers were named to the newly expanded CableLabs Executive Committee, along with incumbent members Joseph Gans, president of The Cable TV Co.; Richard Roberts, president and CEO of TeleCable Corp.; and William Schleyer, executive vice president with Continental Cablevision. Added to the Executive Committee were James Robbins, president and CEO of Cox Cable Communications and Colin Watson, president and CEO of Rogers Cablesystems Ltd.

Alex Best, senior vice president of engineering at Cox Cable, was re-elected chairman of the CableLabs Technical Advisory Committee.

Elected to two-year seats on the Board were Scott Chambers, executive vice president and COO of Chambers Communications Corp.; John Goddard, president and CEO of Viacom Cable; Trygve Myhren, president and CEO of The Providence Journal Co.; and Dan Pike, vice president, engineering of Prime Cable Corp.

CableLabs® is a research and development consortium of cable television system operators representing more than 85% of the cable subscribers in the United States, 70% of the subscribers in Canada, and between five and 10% of cable subscribers in Mexico. CableLabs® plans and funds research and development projects that will help cable companies take advantage of future opportunities and meet future challenges in the television industry. It also transfers relevant technologies to member companies and to the industry. In addition, CableLabs® acts as a clearinghouse to provide information on current and prospective technological developments that are of interest to the cable industry.

About CableLabs: Cable Television Laboratories (www.cablelabs.com) was founded in 1988 by members of the cable television industry. A non-profit research and development consortium, CableLabs delivers innovations that enable cable operators to be the providers of choice in their markets. Cable operators from around the world are members. CableLabs maintains additional web sites at www.cablenet.org.

CableLabs® is a registered trademark of Cable Television Laboratories, Inc. Other CableLabs marks are listed at http://www.cablelabs.com/certqual/trademarks. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.