Why Comcast isn't worried about the Xbox One
For its 50th birthday, Comcast would like another half-century of television dominance — While the tech world's attention is firmly planted on the PlayStation 4, the Xbox One, and their bids to take over the living room, Comcast is having a party.
Context & Ripple Effects
Comcast's confidence at its 50th birthday rests on a decade-long record: it laid out a 'big, fast' broadband-and-content future back at CES 2008 alongside plans for a huge on-demand film menu, and it has spent that decade defending the pipe as aggressively as the bundle.
The most instructive precedent is the 2012 standoff over whether Xbox app traffic counts against Comcast's data caps — Comcast held the line then, and it shows why Microsoft's and Sony's 2013 living-room bids run through a gatekeeper they do not control. An earlier round of the same fight, with Netflix caught between the consoles and distributors, played out back in November 2008.
First-order effects
- Microsoft and Sony need pay-TV carriage and cooperative treatment from broadband operators to make the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 credible TV replacements, which puts Comcast in the position of deciding how hospitable its network is to rival interfaces.
Second-order effects
- Console makers facing an uncooperative dominant ISP have incentives to cut deals with smaller providers for better terms — metering exemptions, faster lanes — fragmenting the living-room market by carrier rather than by device.
Third-order effects
- If cap treatment becomes the lever that decides which devices get to be set-top-box replacements, the structural battleground shifts from hardware launches to open-internet rules and paid-priority arrangements, with the largest cable operators holding the default advantage.
The trend: The battle for the living room is being decided less by console hardware than by who controls the last mile, giving broadband incumbents like Comcast durable gatekeeper leverage over would-be disruptors.