comcast movie service, the disruptive models move beyond music
Comcast’s Fancast site
Back to business. The CES conference, brought to us by the Consumer Electronics Association, has been taking place all week in Las Vegas. It’s a gadget geek fest, no doubt. New products are rolled out to great fanfare…or not. I heard that one hit attraction was the Nemo-branded Blackbird gaming machine from HP. David Pogue has an overview of all the best new products he saw.
Meanwhile, yesterday Comcast announced its plans for grabbing a slice of the TV and Web cake.
“Comcast, the nation’s largest cable television company, will outline an ambitious plan Tuesday to set up two new paradigms for how people will watch movies and television shows in their homes or on the road.
The plan, which Brian L. Roberts, the chairman and chief executive of the Comcast Corporation, will describe in a keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, is aimed at making a nearly limitless supply of movies and television shows available on television, where Comcast subscribers could view them on demand, and through the Internet, where anyone with Web access could watch them. Although the television component is still at a nascent stage — Comcast’s existing video-on-demand service has about 300 titles, compared with the 6,000 it eventually hopes to offer — the Web portion is further along.”
The Web portion mentioned there is called Fancast. It’s a site that’s just OK. It seems that all the online TV content companies are sharing the same look and feel and the result is that it’s not a very rich or rewarding experience for the site viewer. On the other hand the argument could be had that these are just portals and it’s the content that drives the experience. Therefore the winner will be the company that provides the most content, the easiest end-user experience whether it’s streaming and downloading and the right price point. All of those points were ignored by the recording industry and look where that got us….