Tom Freston

speaker

113 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 6 Feb

Tom Freston’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

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Bloomberg Talks · Tom Freston, Principal of Firefly3 and former CEO of Viacom, on his book, “Unplugged: Adventures from MTV to Timbuktu” · 6 Feb 2026 podcast

Well, I was having a staff meeting.

I was in the early 90s and someone slipped me a piece of paper that HBO is announcing they're going to have a comedy channel.

And they were at the time the big players.

I mean, they were on pay TV.

They had Robin Williams and George Carlin.

They did all these big comedy specials that, oh, they're getting into our business.

And if they're going to start with a comedy channel, they'll do a music channel and a kids channel kind of.

eroding our Nickelodeon and MTV business so we decided in that meeting like let's announce our own comedy channel we didn't really have a comedy channel or even an idea for one but we thought we announced we could be in every news article that was ever written about theirs and uh you know so we we kind of announced that we were doing one we came up with a format quickly which was sort of TV comedy an extension of

what our Nick at Night brand was.

And so that was how we got into the business.

We had a war with HBO for a couple of years and then we ended up merging and forming Comedy Central.

And the thing that really pushed Comedy Central into public consciousness was South Park.

And South Park was a cartoon.

It started as one of the guys at MTV found Matt and Trey and had them do a little six minute thing as a Christmas card that he sent out to his friends.

And it got wide acclaim.

And then we saw and we said, well, let's make a TV series out of this and we've done it.

And now it's like no Christmas card in history has ever paid off like South Park.

I think they're in their 25th or 26th season.

And those guys are geniuses.

The other thing I'd say about Comedy Central is, it's interesting to me, we always had a great eye for new and emerging talent.

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