A panel of execs kicked off the Cable Television Public Affairs Association (CTPAA) FORUM conference in D.C. this morning. Before they took the stage, the group’s president, Mark Harrad of Time Warner Cable, revealed that CTPAA is disappearing. At least, the unwieldy acronym will bid adieu. The group will live on with a new name—Association of Cable Communicators (ACC)—that, he said, better reflects the full array of accountabilities of the industry's PR professionals today.

Back to the panel: It covered familiar ground, with moderator Mark Robichaux of Broadcasting & Cable covering the gamut of topics from a la carte to retransmission consent. This one quickly became the Robichaux and Willner Show, as the wittily dry reporter goaded always-quotable Insight Communications CEO Michael Willner, who delivered the best quips and most memorable insights. He started by giving props to bloggers, revealing that at the height of the company’s prolonged high-speed Internet outage last summer, they turned to blogs “to learn what we didn’t know about (our own network).” Of the rapid rise of blogs and other new-media outlets companies must pay attention to, he said, “If we’re not listening as much to our constituents as we are speaking to them, we’re only doing half our job.”

Willner on a la carte: “It sounds easy: Let people decide what (channels) they want. Let people pay for what (channels) they want. But the reality is that a la carte would hurt television, not help television.”

Willner on the frustrating fallacy that Cable is a monopoly: He noted that he sat in on a customer focus group in Peoria and witnessed an exchange something like this: Customer 1: “I’m sick of cable raising rates every year. They have no competition.” Customer 2: "Yeah, you’re right, cable has no competition. I’m going to go get a satellite dish.”

Willner on predicting the industry environment over the next few years: “You want me to predict the future? I thought MTV was a really crappy idea back in 1980.”