Comcast to Compete with Microsoft Azure and other musings from Light Reading Conference
Colin Dixon, Senior Partner, Advisory
May 4, 2011
Yesterday, I talked about some of the interesting things I learned at the Seachange Multi-Screen conference in New York. Today, I’ll summarize a few of things I heard at the Light Reading “Cable Next-Gen Strategies” the day before at the Westin, Time Square.
Avner Ronan, CEO of Boxee, was first up at the conference and provided some insight into how Boxee, the service, was fairing. He said there are now 1.7m users watching video through the service and each session is lasting an average of 2 hours. Clearly the audience is watching a lot of long-form video. The Boxee box is now sold in 33 countries, which is a remarkable achievement (keeping in mind it has only been released for 6 months). He said there would be new firmware coming in May (2011, I assume) and an iPad app shortly thereafter. He also said the company had just completed a $16.5M series C round for fundraising which they were going to spend on product, content, and distribution.
Avner, true to form, couldn’t resist tilting at a few windmills. He said that MSOs should disrupt themselves (by launching OTT content packages for anyone to subscribe to, I assume) and that TV Everywhere wasn’t it. He also said that he had been talking with cable companies but that the conversation “is not a dialog, it's a monologue with me doing all the talking.” He also was pretty dismissive of standards in general saying that they “are a great way to travel to exotic places and have a meeting. They won't help unify the fragmented platforms.” He also made a prediction: in 2015 there will be an Internet show that is bigger than the biggest TV show and that consumers will have “bought it using a credit card to watch.” Good stuff!
We were treated to a great update from Anthony Wood, CEO of Roku. He said they had shipped over a 1 million boxes and that they are entering every major electronics store in the US. He thought this new distribution channel would help spur them on to selling a couple of million” this year. He also claimed that 30% of people that bought a Roku player cut or shaved cable. This was the company’s data, although keeping in mind that HBO/Cinemax lost 1.6 million subscribers, this year the number at least seems plausible. Finally, Anthony said that there are two hundred channels today but that they'll be at 1000 by the end of the year. This certainly sounds like a la carte PayTV to me!
Later in the day Alan Breznick, Senior Analyst with Light Reading, talked with Sree Kotay, Chief Software Architect at Comcast. I was quite surprised when Sree said that the company likes adaptive bitrate (ABR) video streaming because it allows the network to be dumb. According to him, ABR means that caching of video in the network doesn't need to be really intelligent. He went on to talk about an internal effort called “Codebig.” The software platform is being built to allow groups to programmatically leverage the Comcast network. Today this is purely an internal tool but they plan to open this up to external groups at sometime in the future. He said this would allow the company to better monetize their network. Could this mean Comcast is about to launch a “Cloud Computing” platform to compete with Microsoft Azure or are they building a video platform more akin to CDNs like Akamai?
Later in the discussion Sree was asked about standards. He said there was a problem when you take a standard and branch from it, you lose all the benefit of the standard - lots of people using it - but inherit all the problems. He said this was the problem they ran into with Tru2way. Luckily, since so few manufacturers adopted Tru2way, Comcast shouldn’t have to live with this problem for much longer!
Those are just a few of things you would have learned if you’d attended the conference. As usual, Light Reading did an excellent job moving the conversation along and keeping things interesting. If you get a chance to attend this conference next time I can strongly recommend it.
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