Comcast CEO Brian Roberts has always been a big fan of Google, and has in the past talked about turning his company into the Google of TV. Speaking this morning at Sanford C. Bernstein’s Strategic Decisions conference, Roberts again raised the idea, but this time he put more shape into the concept.
When asked how Comcast might monetize the tremendous information assets the company has via its set-top box data gathering functions, Roberts pointed to Google and said “I have a real live role model that I would like to go after in an interactive advertising experience.”
Roberts said all the “pieces are in place” at Comcast to create contextual video advertising the way Google has done that for text-based advertising. “How can we take and match a message to the viewer using a computer-like device and an intelligent network?”
Roberts talked as if some kind of technology development is already underway to do precisely that. Moreover, whatever technology that could be developed, Comcast might share with other television providers.
“Doesn’t mean we have to keep it proprietary for Comcast. Why can’t we take it to a broadcaster and say you can have that kind of capability yourself?”
Everybody wins with that kind of targeted, intelligent advertising. “It ought to be in everybody’s interest, particular the consumer, because it means that the advertising is going to be more valuable and we won’t have to raise your rate,” Roberts said. “Look at the wealth that was created by just having text information delivered more efficiently.”
Comcast is getting into the groove of developing new technological doo-dads — the company announced yesterday a patent-pending platform called PowerBoost that enables customers to temporarily receive doubled download speeds when needed and at no charge.
PowerBoost will be promoted to customers as a way of communicating that “we’ve got even better, faster, cooler” services, Roberts said. The ever-increasing speeds of Comcast’s broadband service will also support another goal of the company — bring video over the Internet to customers.
“Video over the internet is going to power broadband and is going to power the differentiation for cable over DBS,” Roberts said. “We are aggressively trying to come up with ways to have video over the Internet.”
Still, despite Comcast’s own focus on using the broadband platform for video delivery, Roberts isn’t worried about Internet bypass of cable’s traditional video aggregation services. He thinks that most people don’t want the hassle and unreliable quality of Internet-delivered video. “I don’t think most people want a haphazard experience when they watch television,” he said.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:57 AM | Print | Comments (1)
Nothing makes my eyes glaze over more than the phrase “universal service fund” (unless of course it’s “intercarrier compensation”), but today there is news that FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is readying a proposal that would levy USF taxes on VoIP providers. The $7+ billion fund is designed to provide subsidies for the delivery of phone service to low-income and rural areas and so far VoIP providers have not been required to pay into the fund.
What sounds kind of crazy is the percentage of revenue that the universal service funding formula would apply to — the funding mechanism gathers 10.9% of interstate or international revenue from carriers. In the case of VoIP, the FCC is thinking of applying this ratio to 64.9% of VoIP revenues.
So, on a $25 per month VoIP phone bill, the USF fee would be $1.80. Not an extraordinarily high amount, but enough to eat into the pricing competitive advantage of VoIP providers.
Martin is also proposing to raise the fees for wireless voice providers, which currently pay into the USF fund on up to 28.5% of their revenue. The new cap suggested by Martin is 37.1% of wireless customer revenue.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:10 AM | Print | Comments (0)
CNET’s Declan McCullagh has this piece about a pretty bold strategy undertaken by eBay to advocate in favor of net neutrality regulations. eBay CEO Meg Whitman sent out an email to eBay members urging them to send a message to their representatives supporting net neutrality, the first time the online shopping (and now VoIP) giant has asked its members to take a position in favor of a policy matter.
It’s also the first time that Whitman has sent out a mass email under her own name.
“Meg has been following the issue, and with legislation moving through the House and the Senate, felt that this was an appropriate time to reach out to the community to make sure Congress heard what the community thought about the telecommunications reform bill,” said Tod Cohen, eBay’s associate general counsel for global policy.
As Declan points out, eBay’s email came on the same day that the American Electronics Association, which bills itself as “the nation’s largest trade association with 2,500 member companies representing all segments of the high-tech industry,” came out in favor of net neutrality. The AeA statement endorses a set of principles to “guide” legislators, but stops short of endorsing any of the growing list of net neutrality bills introduced so far.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:41 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Business Week’s Ronald Grover has this piece on studio-backed web-based film delivery company Movielink, which shows how stubbornly myopic Hollywood can be. Movielink was founded in 2002 as an attempt by the studios to get ahead of the curve on possible illegitimate film distribution on the web — the studios saw what Napster could do to music and didn’t want to sit back and watch the same thing happen to movies.
But, as Grover’s piece documents, that’s where Hollywood’s forward-looking strategy ended. Movielink, which has been hunting for a buyer for at least a year, has lost some high-profile potential acquirers in Comcast, AT&T and Blockbuster, due mostly to the studios’ intrasigence in prohibiting changes in how films can be distributed.
One big sticking point: no films can be burned to DVDs. This requirement leaves Movielink with little appeal — customers have to watch films on their PCs or via home networked connections on their TVs. Carlo at TechDirt has this item about the Business Week article (with a great title “For Sale: One Crappy Movie Download Site”) in which he skewers Hollywood’s weird insistence on its short-term view of the video marketplace.
What’s amusing about the story is that the buyers recognize what’s apparent to pretty much everybody except the studios: that the sites suck. The sticking point in the potential deals has been buyers’ desire to remove some of the restrictions the studios put on movies, in particular the inability for consumers to burn movies to DVDs so they can watch them in their DVD players. This saga seems so typical of the entertainment industry’s attitude towards digital media — a blind insistence that it knows best and that its approach simply can’t be wrong. These would-be buyers realize that it’s the entertainment business that must adapt to consumers, not the other way around.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:25 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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