Steve Ross (Time Warner CEO) - Visionary

Visionary

Steve Ross is often considered a man ahead of his time. Ross moved before many of his competitors to bet heavily on the worldwide potential of cable television, records, videos and other experiments. Some of his ideas were successful and others failed, but he definitively influenced the development of media and entertainment with his ideas. "If you're not a risk-taker," he once said, "you should get the hell out of business."

Ross’ early interest in cable television helped him envision narrowcasting – cable channels created for specific audiences – MTV and Nickelodeon were expressly launched and developed to serve young audiences. Today these two channels are still successful, and the cable television universe is now filled with hundreds of channels, specializing in many topics.

Other projects that Ross supported were not as successful as MTV and Nickelodeon, but certainly left a mark in television and helped shape the TV we are enjoying today. One important project was QUBE. Qube was launched in 1977 in Columbus, Ohio and was Ross’ vision of how television could become interactive. Although this trial was not successful, it was an important step for what became known as advanced television. In some ways, the Qube project failed because it was ahead of its time. QUBE led to further attempts by Warner to integrate more services to cable television. Prominent among these was the Full Service Network that was launched in 1994 in Orlando, Florida. Ross also supported Atari from 1977 to 1983, taking the first widely successful video game console to millions of homes around the world. For several year, Atari was a lucrative business for Warner Communications, but in 1983 it collapsed. Although many of Ross’ overly ambitious projects failed, some of these failures shaped future success in the video game and cable industries.