Business Week’s Jon Fine has this short piece about top cable operator Comcast and the company’s embrace of video-over-the-Internet, a surprising posture for a company entrenched in the industry’s modus operandi. Which is to say, cable operators are used to calling the shots and dictating terms to both video vendors and video viewers.
But Internet and technology giants such as Apple, Sony, Microsoft, Google are changing the rules of the game and programming providers such as Viacom, News Corp., NBC-Universal are finding news ways of bypassing cable’s traditional pipeline to the TV set. Comcast is not, however, going to fight the tide — it’s going to swim out into the ocean.
The company has big plans to turn its Fandango purchase into a web video central site called Fancast, which will guide users to TV shows and even allow them to route the content to DVRs. More importantly, however, the company, which is used to playing hardball in cable network carriage negotiations (indeed the ability to extract size-based concessions from programmers was one main motivation behind Comcast’s acquisition of top company AT&T Broadband a few years ago), might be turning into “a pussycat for anyone with content.”
BECAUSE OF ITS HEFT, COMCAST was imbued with a culture that encouraged executives to be fearsome when striking deals. But that may be changing as well, as the Internet threat seems to have turned Comcast into a pussycat for anyone with content. “We did our deal in 24 hours, I kid you not,” says Quincy Smith, president of CBS Interactive. Indeed, it looked like Comcast was ready to make a deal with anyone right after NBC and Fox announced on Mar. 22 that they would license their content to Yahoo, AOL, MSN, and MySpace.com. Gone are the days when Comcast could demand special concessions, like getting free use of TV shows for its video-on-demand service. “Comcast understands that good quality network content is what keeps people sticking around their site,” says NBC Digital President George Kliavkoff. “They need us.”
“Pussycat” is probably overstating it by a lot (unless your idea of a pussycat is, say, a bobcat or a leopard or a jaguar), but Comcast is no doubt entering a new, more flexible era as it makes sure that the this whole web video thing doesn’t pass it by. None of this is news — Comcast’s CEO Brian Roberts has, for at least the past year, been public and upfront about the company’s desire to stake its claim in the video-over-the-net world.
Cynthia Brumfield at 11:05 AM|Comments(0)
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