Comcast CEO on Cable Bundles: "You Can't Keep Raising the Price Forever"

"These things have a way of correcting and balancing out before something draconian happens," he said.

"You can't keep raising the price forever," Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said about the cable bundle on Wednesday. 

The cable network's business has been under a microscope for more than a month since Walt Disney, Viacom and others warned of slower growth. As a cable provider, Comcast has been dealing with the prospect of skinnier bundles, whereby consumers save money by buying smaller packages of channels.

"You're seeing that tension rise," said Roberts at the Goldman Sachs 24th Annual Communacopia Conference, noting that the high cost for content is leading to higher prices for consumers.

"These things have a way of correcting and balancing out before something draconian happens," he said, noting that Comcast isn't losing video customers as quickly as it had been.

"We had the best second quarter in nine years. It still was a loss, so we're not declaring victory," he said of the cable TV business.

Comcast has managed to discourage churn with improvements in the product, like with the "talking remote," a high-tech remote control that the company is sending out to its customers at the rate of 70,000 per week.

Even with over-the-top competition from Netflix and Amazon.com Roberts thinks, "Video over the Internet is more friend than foe," because Comcast not only supplies content to those competitors but also sells the necessary broadband access to the consumers.

Comcast has also been closing the "entitlement gap," whereby NBC had been getting less for advertising and in retransmission fees than CBS was getting, Roberts said. When Comcast bought NBCU, the flagship network was in first place in ratings and now it is in first place in the 18-49 demographic.

On the film front, Roberts noted the conglomerate is in the midst of "the best year in the history of Universal — maybe the best year in the history of Hollywood," giving much of the credit to improvements in marketing.