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Comcast’s near future plays

There’s a great feature piece on Comcast running on this week’s cover at Barrons. They present the current financials of the company and talk about the 98% upgraded network which is running quite an array of enhanced services. Most recently the dual-tuner HD DVR has been rolling out but the enhanced VOD service, something that has been touted in advance for some time sounds really killer.

Comcast’s brass is particularly excited about its aggressive rollout of video on demand. The company has begun to make thousands of hours of programming available for download, most of it at no extra charge to its digital-cable subscribers. Comcast customers already can choose from 4,000 hours of programs, including movies, television episodes, advertorials and original content. While there are pay movies — and Comcast officials note that pay-per-view’s popularity has jumped with the introduction of VOD — the real story here is the ability to go a step beyond the DVR and give viewers more flexibility about what they want to watch and when they can watch it.

…

“The idea is that a subscription to cable is no longer just a subscription to basic cable, plus premium and digital channels,” says Moffett. “It means access to a nearly unlimited library of movies and educational programming and episodes of television shows. This is not pay per view. This is a complete rethinking of the way customers buy video service.”

The company’s video-on-demand ambitions were a key factor in its $60 billion bid for Disney, which the leaders of Mousedom spurned as too low. If it had succeeded, Comcast could have had a stranglehold on family-oriented programming. (The company already owns a small group of cable channels, including E!, the Golf Channel, G4TechTV, the Style Network, the International Channel and Outdoor Life Network.) While Roberts contends that Comcast isn’t likely to attempt anything else on the scale of the Disney foray again, the company has been working diligently to generate a pool of differentiated programs. It recently gained access to the film libraries at MGM and Sony, which include 45,000 TV episodes and 7,500 feature films — according to Roberts, almost half the color movies ever made. The deal is part of the pending $2.9 billion acquisition of MGM by a group of investors led by Sony. Comcast invested $300 million in the transaction.

The company early next year will start offering a rotating roster of about 200 free films from the Sony and MGM libraries to video-on-demand customers each month. Also planned: VOD access to old TV favorites, such as The Three Stooges, The Partridge Family and Starsky & Hutch. The companies have also agreed to roll out three new cable channels, to capitalize on the rich library of films and television programs.

The other key piece from the article that I took away is that Comcast, like the recent Time Warner quadruple-play development, is considering a serious move into wireless. The real difference though is that they are thinking a combination of mobile on the road with a WiFi VOIP phone at home will come through in a single piece of hardware. Sounds excellent! It’s actually great to see large companies — not just the outlaws in VOIP going for it with public thinking like this. It’s this sort of product that will make the tech seemless — assuming the hardware allows it of course — for consumers which should stimulate demand. VOIP makes it pretty easy to move about with your number already, but having it across devices in an easy manner is just great.

Comcast continues to bet well on the future…

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Dvorak…. ah yes, I’ll bite

John Dvorak chums the water today with some serious Mac bait and I just can’t help but comment.

He initiates his silly rant stating that the Mac is stagnant, having maintained the market share rather than growing. I can’t argue that point actually, but I don’t even think it matters since there are plenty of people buying new macs as both new customers and as repeat customers. Dvorak starts to make a point that Apple has secured its niche but makes no actually point other than loud obnoxious forum users ruin it for everyone with their noise… right. I guess those jerks do ruin the fun, but I can’t really see how they make a damned bit of difference in mainstream views or in any outward marketing by Apple or anyone else.

Dvorak also points to Job’s division of attention through Pixar and the iPod and iTunes making a distraction and again not impacting Mac market share. I can’t say I disagree more… The iPod, while dual platform has led to quite a few switchers and has put the Apple brand in more people’s minds than ever before. Imagine what’s next that will capture our attention again and shake up the industry again and again? Where’s the PC side innovation? Oh that’s right, it’s cheaper faster, yet no simpler and still ridden with issues like viruses, worms and spam sent from your systems thanks to unattended security holes in the OS.

Comparing the PC to the Mac is a poor comparison. They are both computers, but I’ll gladly pay for style, ease of use and reliability. I don’t usually consider Mercedes and BMW in the same class of car as say a Ford or Chevy. Sure, many people won’t care about some of those details… that’s why Ford and Chevy outsell Mercedes and BMW. It’s not a volume game. It’s about the quality of the experience. It’s yours to choose.

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Dish plus Sirius

I just learned today that Dish Network offers Sirius as an add-on package. Seem like a great and actually logical combo when you consider the addition of Music Choice on DirecTV and many cable systems. I’ve been finding the programming much stronger on Sirius than I’ve heard in the past on Music Choice, for what it’s worth.

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More on Sirius in the car

As I mentioned previously, I had my first in-car Sirius experience today. I had to drive from NYC to outside Philadelphia, a trip I’ve made many times. In past mornings I’ve tuned into Howard Stern, and usually hang in until some obscenely long commercial break and then tune around or activate my iPod. I knew I had Sirius in the car today as I reserved it in advance with Hertz and I made the decision to fully test it en-route and chose not too even bring my iPod.

The trip was smooth…and fully digital, with EZ-Pass guiding me through the tolls and Sirius jamming good tunes to the car the whole way there and back. I only had one real drop out which was right about the Middletown water town on the NJ Turnpike and I hit it there and back so there’s some sort of dead zone there. I lost signal for probably between 3 and 5 seconds both times… There’s actually one additional dead zone and that’s the Holland Tunnel. I lost signal more quickly heading out of the city than I did on my return, perhaps due to the difference in decline, who knows. I’d suggest installing a repeater in there though and promoting the heck out of it to commuters! Verizon was first to do that for cellular and repeated the task underground on Amtrak. Those minutes you miss are a real bummer, and could be considerably longer and disappointing if you have substantial traffic as my fellow travelers coming into the city as I was leaving at 7am most certainly did.

audiovox_sirius.jpgThe unit in my car today was an Audiovox FM Modulator which worked well, but had really flimsy buttons and pretty lame display. Even though the music was consistent, I often had no or limited data (either artist or track info or a delay in displaying) something I have yet to see on my home unit. You might not be able to tell from the photos there, but there’s a small flip-out panel that gives you access to a micro-keypad for direct station access as well as memory presets. I’ve become familiar enough in the time I’ve been listening to know where I wanted to go. I doubt I would choose to purchase this device for myself in a future car, but I would definitely add it to my bill again with Hertz as Sirius is only $3 extra.

A recent post on DROXY got me thinking this could be utilized as a free add-in for a while – again strongly marketed to business travelers – to stimulate trial and push for new subscriptions. It’d be nice actually to see the price included for existing subscribers as well, but I doubt that would happen any time soon as Sirius is in a race to catch up with XM.

Recent number have Sirius at about 800,000 subscribers and XM at about 2 Million.

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Sirius to iPod

In light of yesterday’s post about the XM MyFI, the portable player and today’s announcement from Napster with unlimited downloading (via DRM of course – courtesy of the new MS Janus system)…

What if Sirius subscribers got access to digital downloads within iTunes as a subscription bonus – or actually paid for an additional tier of service. You could pretty easily match the station playlists to downloadable “albums” iTunes would host and sync right to an iPod.

I had my first in-car Sirius experience courtesy of Hertz and loved it. I did not miss my iPod (the shame!) and enjoyed surfing the stations as my moods changed. I’d love to see a program my iPod service that would enable bulk downloading to iPod for the times and places you can’t get Sirius (non-car based commuters), instead of buying a portable player if they even come out with one! Sirius is kind enough to include a streaming service to computer which I’ve been checking out when my wife wants to watch TV instead of listen to the music.

Think about Podcasting… you could directly extend the metaphor for the talk shows as well and time shift away quite easily. I’d think the content is being archived and served rather than played by CD… just another point of access for subscribers. Make it even easier for me to like you and extend my relationship with the company.

Hey Sirius…if you are actually reading this, I’d love to work with/for you. I’m local. 😉

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Music Choice via PCS

Given my recent interest in Satellite subscription radio I find this announcement to be pretty interesting, though for now I think I will continue to ride the free wave for cellular… With my Treo I can easily stream from Shoutcast using Pocket Tunes Deluxe for free. I’m not a sprint customer and this is not what I would consider compelling enough to interest me to switch, though it does speak to the network and what you might be using it for other than just making calls.

Music Choice Today is a new music streaming service that is expected to be launched soon by Sprint PCS. Through Music Choice Today, Sprint customers will be able to have unlimited music streaming for $5.99 a month. [Mobiletracker]

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Most Hated Advertising Techniques

Don’t miss this…

Advertising is an integral part of the Web user experience: people repeatedly encounter ads as they surf the Web, whether they’re visiting the biggest portals, established newspapers, or tiny personal sites. Most online advertising studies have focused on how successful ads are at driving traffic to the advertiser, using simple metrics such as clickthrough rates.

Unfortunately, most studies sorely neglect the user experience of online ads. As a result, sites that accept ads know little about how the ads affect their users and the degree to which problematic advertising tricks can undermine a site’s credibility. Likewise, advertisers don’t know if their reputations are degraded among the vast majority of users who don’t click their ads, but might well be annoyed by them.

Now, however, we have data to start addressing these questions. At my recent User Experience 2004 conference, John Boyd from Yahoo! and Christian Rohrer from eBay presented a large body of research on how users perceive online advertising. Here, I offer a few highlights from their presentation [ Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox]

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Road Runner getting more speed

I love reading that even more speed will be coming my way soon…

Road Runner said Tuesday that it will boost the download speed for its basic subscribers, who pay $45 a month, from 3mbps to 5mbps. Its premium customers, who pay $84.95 a month, will get a boost from 6mbps to 8mbps.

The move comes more than a year after Road Runner’s previous speed bump from 2mbps to 3mbps for its basic subscribers. [CNET News.com

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T-Mobile’s Pain

Nice thought piece by Jesse Kopelman at The Broadband daily on what T-Mobile might consider doing now that they are officially a sitant last in the major wireless game. Hard to argue the logic here… just a matter of how much pride needs to be swallowed in order to move on some of the ideas he suggests.

Unlike Sprint PCS, their daddy doesn’t need them to succeed (and may feel like disowning them about now). Unlike Nextel, they don’t have the high-margin customers everyone lusts for nor do they have the management team that routinely makes fools out of the industry, pundits, and FCC. Most importantly, Unlike Cingular and Verizon Wireless they don’t have 40 million customers paying to upgrade their network. To make matters worse, their data network is circa 2001 and they are a long way from being able to do any Verizon-like bragging about the quality of their voice network. [The Broadband Daily]

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“To Tivo” is Bad?

I don’t understand why Tivo would protest this, other than to generate publicity for themselves which, might very well be the point. Seems that to become part of the language is a great thing for branding … see Kleenex for Tissues and Coke for cola as examples.

However, the company has recently stepped up efforts to police just how its trademark is used in a sentence. Using TiVo as a verb, for instance – as in “to TiVo” or “I TiVoed ‘The Apprentice’ last night” – is forbidden.

The company has begun sending letters to news organizations whenever it sees the term misused. “We’ve gotten more aggressive,” said Kathryn Kelly, a TiVo spokeswoman. “It’s a much more talked-about subject now.”

Running a close second among uses the company frowns on is “TiVo-like.”

“We do aggressively protect our trademark,” Ms. Kelly said, adding that with competing digital video recorders entering the market, TiVo wants to keep its name from going the way of Xerox or Kleenex. [New York Times]

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PalmSource’s Paradigm Shift

Andrew wrote a great post today on the PalmSource move to linux. A recommended read for all. We’ve talked about the announcement the past few days and I have to say I agree with this commentary. PalmSource will certainly gain from the move – opening doors that would have previously remained closed. Time will tell for sure, but it look like the future will be an exciting one!

Without a doubt, one of the most important benefits of PalmSource’s decision to put the PalmOS on top of a Linux kernel is that it will have removed one of the single largest barriers to adoption of its software and its quest to see the PalmOS adopted by the widest number of licensees to power an even wider array of handheld devices. The barrier in question is the complete paranoia on the part of many manufacturers to ‘lock’ themselves to a proprietary operating system. By choosing Linux, a ‘free’ open source operating system, there is no doubt that PalmSource’s appeal will increase significantly among existing and prospective licensees particularly since many of them have already invested and experimented with Linux powered devices. [Treonauts]

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PalmSource going Linux

Mobile Pipeline reports that PalmSource is going Linux! There are still no devices running OS6 (powered by Be) so it should be interesting to see when this actually hits the market.

Palm OS developer PalmSource said Wednesday that it will create a Linux version of the Palm OS.

The company announced it is acquiring China MobileSoft Limited (CMS), which has been developing a version of the Linux operating system for mobile devices. In a statement, PalmSource said the acquisition indicates the direction in which it is moving.

“This is the next stage in our growth and a major milestone for the mobile phone industry,” PalmSource CEO David Nagel said in a statement. “We plan to offer the ease-of-use and flexibility that Palm OS is known for to all mobile phones. We believe the combination of PalmSource, CMS and Linux gives us the technological and market critical mass to compete with even the biggest proprietary operating system companies.”

PalmSource said in its statement that it “plans to implement Palm OS on top of Linux, bringing the benefits of Palm OS to the Linux community.” It said it will continue to offer its two versions of the Palm OS — version 5.x, known as Garnet, and version 6.x, known as Cobalt. [Mobile Pipeline]

The news directly from PalmSource is available here…

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Crazysoft offers Palm Software rentals

According to the Crazysoft newsletter and website, you can now rent any game from Crazysoft. This is a new spin for Palm software and should be interesting to see if anyone else follows… The policy at Crazysoft seems like a good one. You rent for a low price ($2.95) and unlimited access to the software as if it were a full purchased version. The only restriction is that it can only be run 50 times. You can re-rent the same title up to 5 times before it automatically becomes a full version.

By renting a game (2.95$) you will have:

  1. FULL ACCESS to the game. (Like the full version)
  2. NO TIME LIMITS! (Play whenever you wish)
  3. You may start 50 new games and then the rental code will expire.
  4. If you rent the same game for the 5th time then the rental version automatically becomes a FULL version.

I like demo software and have endured my share of long wait times on things I’ve for some reason just chosen not to purchase and this would force my hand a bit to see if I really wanted something or not after I had used it a bunch of times. It seems like a great idea for a small publisher, though the flip side is that since you need to pay to play (literally in this case) you might not be as likely to simply try something new.

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Cingular 3G

Cingular’s announcement of a real 3G network for North America is a serious canon fire across the other major carriers… This clearly declares that they want to big both the biggest and the baddest in town. T-Mobile has yet to even make a formal EDGE (2.5G) statement…

Cingular today announced its 3G plans, an expected announcement after the AT&T Wireless takeover (Cingular now has ample spectrum for advanced data services). The UMTS/HSDPA third generation network will offer average data speeds between 400-700 kilobits per second (Kbps), and bursts to several megabits per second on capable devices. Nokia, Motorola and LG should all have devices out for the new network by this time next year. [MobileTracker]

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TWCNYC Goes Voice

I am not sure if it’s actually a VOIP product, but Time Warner has officially launched their voice product here in NYC. It’s called Digital Phone – a shockingly boring name and costs $39.95/month. That’s less than Verizon, but more than options from Vonage or AT&T CallVantage.

Feature-wise, Digital Phone falls a bit short. Forwarding is one line, there’s no conference calling and no email announcing of voicemail or listening online. There’s also no call log, or way to click to call from the computer.

I’d say this is purely for people looking to save money on existing phone service – though willing to take a chance with their cable company rather than use the phone company since the service quality is unknown. Time Warner does have access to free media on TV, so I expect to see quite a bit of it while the tube is on. I actually learned about the product from a generic bill stuffer (you had to actually go to the main site and see if service is available in your area), but checked it out tonight after seeing a local market commercial on TBS.

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SBC Just wasting money

For a while I’ve been seeing SBC ads on network TV … I just caught one during the first quarter of the Eagles vs Giants game on FOX. What are they thinking?? This is far from an SBC market and their brand has next to no meaning for the MILLIONS of people watching. For kicks I checked my phone number as a potential residential customer on their site and as I expected:

You may live outside the SBC 13-state service territory: Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas or Wisconsin.

I am in NYC, so the only possible state possibly of interest is Connecticut in this region and I can’t imagine there are enough people there to make this a worthwhile ad spend…

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eReader goes RSS

I’ve been enjoying the content at eReader on my various Palms for a while now and am glad to see this addition. I love the link right to the shopping cart! I’ll still have to subscribe to the newsletter for now, since that’s where you get the weekly discount code. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time until that also makes its way to the RSS, though they’ll lose some sense of who they are communicating with since I’ve yet to see RSS get to personalized in the way email has been capable for years.

The folks at eReader have added an RSS feed so you can see all the new releases each week. They also include a link to add the book directly to your shopping cart. Excellent use of RSS. [Michael Gartenberg]