Comcast Unit Develops iPhone App for Publishing Video Content
While plenty of people are using their iPhones and iPads to watch video, Comcast also thinks Apple's mobile devices can play a role in helping professional video get onto the Internet. — ThePlatform, a subsidiary of the cable giant …
Context & Ripple Effects
ThePlatform is the business-to-business side of Comcast: it sells the video management and publishing systems that professional content owners use to get programming online. This new iPhone app points the same toolchain at Apple's devices from the production end — iPhones and iPads, until now discussed mostly as screens for watching video, become capture and upload devices for professional footage.
That matters because of who controls the surrounding stack. Commentary circulating alongside this story, including Donald A. Norman's argument that Apple's tight integration of product, design, and service made it a media-distribution juggernaut, frames iOS as the platform everyone else must build on. An unconfirmed Gleacher & Company estimate pegging iTunes rentals at roughly one-tenth of Netflix's rental business shows how much room analysts saw in Apple's video ambitions — and a rumored Verizon-compatible iPhone, also still unconfirmed as of late December 2010, would widen the device base such publisher tools can serve.
First-order effects
- Professional video publishers working with ThePlatform gain an iOS path to shoot and push content straight onto the Internet, shortening the gap between capture and publication.
- For Comcast, the app extends revenue beyond the cable bundle: a B2B publishing tool sold to content owners does not depend on Xfinity subscriptions.
Second-order effects
- Rival online-video platform vendors face pressure to offer comparable mobile-native ingest or risk losing breaking-news and live-event workflows to ThePlatform.
- Apple captures upside without doing anything: every professional publisher adopting iOS tools deepens the device ecosystem that analysts credit for Apple's grip on digital media distribution.
Third-order effects
- If cable operators keep selling software infrastructure for Internet video at the same time they distribute it, the boundary between pipe owner and platform vendor continues to erode.
- A confirmed Verizon iPhone would make carrier-agnostic iOS publishing tools the default assumption for newsrooms and studios, further entrenching Apple's devices as shared industry infrastructure.
The trend: Cable operators are moving into the software toolchains of Internet video distribution, treating Apple's mobile devices as both the delivery screen and the production kit.