Comcast’s Musings on Multi-Screen at Seachange Summit
Colin Dixon, Senior Partner, Advisory
May 3, 2011
I had the good fortune to participate in a couple of conferences in New York last week. Today, I want to share with you a few things I learned at the Seachange International Summit entitled “Monetizing Multi-Screen Video.”
The first panel got the day off to good start with a discussion of OTT’s role in Multi-screen. Mark Hess, SVP of Advanced Business and Technology Development at Comcast, had some very interesting things to say. One of the charges that is constantly leveled at Comcast and other cable companies is how slow they move with technology and services. Mark gave the lie to that old saw when he revealed that they had made four releases of their iPad app since its release last November. He went even further saying that the iPad freed the company from the set-top box.
Even more revealing was Mark’s comment when asked by the moderator about the fight between content providers and operators over distribution within the home. Mark opined that “At the end of the day the consumer’s desire to get this content on any device will win out.” A sentiment I whole-heartedly agree with. He went on to say that multi-screen distribution was about adding value into the subscriber subscription. This is clearly the driving force behind Comcast’s own Xfinity broadband service.
The final comment from Mark I wanted to mention was in relation to broadband. I had a minor revelation about broadband and services (which you can read about here) and this comment helped spur the thought. When asked about Ultraviolet, he commented that it was better than “Slingbox eating all our upstream bandwidth.” What he meant by this comment was Comcast customers using Xfinity broadband to watch movies from the cloud stored in ultraviolet format was better than them using broadband to broadcast TV to themselves. But the thing I find really interesting is his use of the word “our” in this context. I hear this from operators all the time. The problem is it’s not their bandwidth. They parcel it up and sell it on to us in broadband subscriptions. That bandwidth is “our” bandwidth. We pay for it one subscription at a time.
Jessica Vascellaro, the panel moderator, asked a very interesting question about mid-way through the discussion: would any operator be providing content packages purely for OTT available out of their home market to anyone, not just existing subscribers? There was an awkward silence as the panel, which was comprised of 5 operators, all looked at their shoes. When someone finally spoke, the brave soul carefully skirted the question. No one else would answer the question either. This was a great pity as I’m sure everyone in the audience was keen to hear a forthright discussion of the topic.
On the same panel, Christine Mitchell, Group Head of Video Content at Vodafone Group, talked about a fascinating project the company is involved with in the developing world. The webbox is essentially a keyboard with a processor, mobile 3G SIM and a browser built to hook up to the TV. It is targeted at the developing world where wired connections are rare and the only screen available is the TV. Let’s hope they have great success with it.
This summarizes some of the thoughts from just the first panel at the Seachange event. There were many more discussions to stimulate the little grey cells at the summit. For example, you can read about my lunchtime conversation with Craig Moffet, Senior Analyst with Bernstein Research, moderated by Seachange President Yvette Kanouff here. I can highly recommend the summit so make sure you attend next year’s event if you get the chance.
Tomorrow, I’ll discuss some of things I learned at Light Reading’s “Cable next-Gen Video Strategies.”
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