So it’s a good time to get some perspective on what he learned during the experience, and how he deals with the Web at his newish job at Turner’s TBS.

In some ways, O’Brien told fellow Time Warner employee Piers Morgan at the cable industry’s annual convention yesterday, things haven’t changed that much: In an ideal world, he’d like people to watch his show live, when it airs.

But he also knows it doesn’t work that way, at all. And he’s okay with that, and he’s learned to embrace YouTube, Tumblr, Twitter, etc.:

When I got started in the business in ’93, the obsesssion was: Never give anything away. Don’t tell anybody … you want it to be a surprise when they watch the show. You want to tease them, but get them to watch the show.

And what we have found is true is that this is a different generation. It works differently now. You can show them exactly what Will Ferrell did [on O'Brien's show], and get it out there, so there’s no “surprise” …

The days of, “I only want people to experience me at 11, on TBS” — those days are over. The audience is too fragmented, they’re too distracted, and a whole generation is growing up that doesn’t watch television that way.

You can watch the entire 22-minute interview, which moves along quite quickly, below. Thanks to the NCTA for the video.

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts kicked off the Cable Show yesterday in Las Vegas with a demonstration of a DOCSIS cable modem capable of download speeds of up to 150 megabits per second–25 times faster than current models. Appearing before the National Cable & Telecommunications Association convention in Las Vegas, Roberts watched as a 32-volume set of the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Merriam-Webster Visual Dictionary were downloaded in less than four minutes. Done with a conventional cable modem, at 3 mbps to 5 mbps, the same task would have taken considerably more than three hours. “If you look at what just happened–55 million words, 100,000 articles, more than 22,000 pictures, maps and more than 400 video clips,” Roberts said, “the same download on dial-up would have taken two weeks. It really is a whole new technical platform. With wideband, we’re going to unleash a whole new generation of video, voice and data services.”

Comcast hasn’t yet set a hard date to launch the service, but Roberts said it will likely arrive at market within the next few years. “That was real. Everything you saw was real. It’s near-term,” he said. “I think it is hopefully a reminder that we have an incredible future of innovation ahead. And personally, I think broadband penetration is going to go way higher than anybody ever imagined.”