Comcast Plans to Offer a Huge Menu of Films
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 …
Context & Ripple Effects
Brian Roberts takes the CES stage as the first cable chief ever to keynote it, and his pitch is that Comcast's pipe is the product: the company has already demoed a channel-bonding modem and aims for internet service reaching up to 160Mbps down sometime in 2008 (its 'big, fast future' CES plan). A huge on-demand film menu is the reason that bandwidth matters — movies sold through the cable box rather than rented from a store or downloaded piecemeal.
The timing is pointed. Comcast spent late 2007 under fire for throttling BitTorrent transfers — the same peer-to-peer pipes that carry unauthorized copies of the films it now wants to sell — and it sat out the 700 MHz wireless auction, keeping its bets on home and road viewing anchored to cable infrastructure rather than spectrum.
First-order effects
- Comcast subscribers gain a large library of films available on demand at home or on portable devices, making the cable box a direct competitor to DVD rental and digital download stores.
- Studios gain a new distribution window with cable-scale reach, but must price against the cheap (or free) P2P alternatives Comcast simultaneously restricts on its own network.
Second-order effects
- Satellite rival DirecTV — which settled its HDTV advertising lawsuit with Comcast only weeks earlier, in December 2007 — and telco entrants are pushed to match an on-demand catalog that depends on bandwidth they do not control.
- The BitTorrent throttling policy reads differently once Comcast sells the same content itself: net neutrality advocates gain a concrete example of a distributor favoring its own delivery channel, sharpening the regulatory argument.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, cable operators stop being linear-channel packagers and become on-demand platforms whose moat is raw bandwidth — shifting industry value from channel lineups toward pipes, rights deals, and set-top software.
- A successful cable VOD model would pressure Hollywood to treat operators as primary retail partners, reshaping release windows around whatever screen the subscriber is nearest.
The trend: Cable companies are repositioning from linear-TV distributors into bandwidth-backed on-demand entertainment platforms, with the operator's own network becoming both the storefront and the gatekeeper.