Posts Tagged ‘Comcast’

Glee: One of Hulu's most popular shows

In a short and to the point statement released mid-week, equity owners and Hulu senior management team announced that Hulu was no longer for sale:
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Comcast has long been branching out from just providing cable television by providing services like Internet access and digitial phone service, and they are now selling a home security product. XFINITY Home Security is now available in six markets and has plans to expand the service across the country. The service features web and iPhone apps that provide remote access to many of its features.
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The New York Times published an editorial urging regulators considering the merger conditions for Comcast and NBC Universal to forbid restrictions on online video. Highlights:

Television is undergoing a wrenching change. Companies like Netflix and Google TV are lining up to offer movies and TV online. Cable systems are developing online bundles as they add broadband customers but lose TV subscribers. Broadcast networks are still figuring out how to sell their shows online, and charging cable systems more as ad money moves to the Internet.

This is not the classic “horizontal merger” between two companies that do the same thing. Comcast produces little television and NBC does not own cable. The issue is that the merged company would own both a major producer of TV and movies and the dominant distributor of TV and movies in big media markets. It would have about a quarter of the multichannel market and about a fifth of broadband subscribers.

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In a bid to boost social media technology, Facebook and Amazon.com, along with other notable social media companies, have lined up behind notable Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers to create a $250 million fund for social startups.

The “sFund” will receive the bulk of it’s funding from KPCB, which has backed many highly successful startups, including Google, Amazon, and AOL. Other fund backers include social gaming publisher Zynga, Comcast, Liberty Media, and investment banking firm Allen & Company.

“We’re at the beginning of a new era for social Internet innovators who are re-imagining and re-inventing a Web of people and places, looking beyond documents and websites,” said KPCB partner John Doerr in a statement. “There’s never been a better time than now to start a new social venture.”

The sFund follows the model of KPCB’s iFund, a $200 million fund backing mobile app developers. iFund-backed mobile app maker Ngmoco was acquired for $403 million after just two short years.

Startups backed by the sFund will get more than cash. Amazon will provide Amazon Web Services services and support, Facebook is giving access to beta APIs and new Facebook programs, and Zynga will host business and technical development sessions.

Comcast-owned online-video-publishing outfit thePlatform announced that its mpx video-management system is out of beta and officially available.

Among the capabilities and features boasted by mpx: the ability to ingest video libraries using automated solutions including metadata adapters, feed readers, and watch folders; tracking reports; personalized views, shortcuts, and custom panels and commands; smart publish profiles to automate content delivery; dynamic or curated feeds; drag-and-drop ordering; lineup previews; a hosted transcoding service for file conversion; thumbnail and chapter creation; flexible CDN and storage services; the ability to set ad policies; content syndication through players, feeds, and connectors; content-access restrictions including geo-blocking, IP addresses, tokens, access keys, domains, and availability dates; and URL security, RTMPE, DRM, feed security, and playback security.

thePlatform is involved in cable operators’ TV Everywhere initiatives due to partnerships with its parent company, as well as Warner Cable, Cablevision Systems, Cox Communications, and Rogers Communications, and CEO Ian Blaine spoke with Broadcasting & Cable about how mpx will impact that process:

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Comcast Interactive Media announced the promotion of Bruce Budkofsky to senior director, national sales for mobile, social, and strategic partnerships, where he will oversee mobile sites and apps for properties including E! Online, G4tv.com, and Fandango.

Budkofsky has been with Fandango for the past five years, leading brand-building campaigns for advertisers including Visa, Sprint, Samsung, and Warner Bros. Prior to Fandango, he spent six-and-a-half years with The Weather Channel and weather.com.

CIM senior vice president of ad sales Scott Schiller said:

Comcast Interactive Media’s portfolio of popular mobile platforms gives partners direct access to engaged and active consumers seeking out mobile entertainment. Bruce’s talent, relationships, and creative leadership will leverage CIM’s mobile platform reach and visibility, taking partners to new heights.

Comcast’s Tunerfish, a social discovery channel for television and video content that launched earlier this month, has taken a hint from their early adaptors and updated the site with new social features based on user feedback. The new features make it much easier to discover content and engage in conversation on the site. Tunerfish has been on the rise since the service was introduced at TechCrunch Disrupt in May and the new social features should prove to be a great leap forward for the company.
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Comcast’s Tunerfish, a new social discovery engine that allows users to share what they are watching, went live yesterday and has announced that they are teaming up with HBO to promote the upcoming season premiere of True Blood. Tunerfish was announced last month at TechCrunch Disrupt and it’s finally ready to be put into action. The True Blood campaign, which has a fun Vampire-esque theme, should be just the thing Tunerfish needs to get the word out about their cool new service.
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This evening while watching the television I noticed an interesting advertisement show up: Comcast’s ad for their new “universal address book”. Immediately I thought that this must be part of the recent Plaxo acquisition. Sure enough after looking around I found the new Universal Address Book service site and it does indeed leverage Plaxo.

The goal is straight-forward: let everyone access their contacts and calendars from a central location. This is something that data portability is supposed to help accomplish. The one place where they can’t access all my contact information is from Facebook. I wrote about this issue earlier today. Facebook needs to open up their contact lists for this to work.

As I’ve been saying for a while now, the real battle for social networks is the race to our contact list. Unfortunately nobody has been able to accomplish this yet but Comcast is going to leverage Plaxo’s services, with the help of Joseph Smarr of course, to try to offer this service. Unfortunately Comcast couldn’t get the service to work for me.

Apparently I was one of the users being affected by some sort of email outage that I was unaware of. In the middle of my chat with a Comcast support person, the chat application crashed and my conversation was ended. Thankfully I was able to at least figure out a way to embed the following promotion presentation that was included on their site. We’ll see how long this stays live!

Once Comcast can resolve my email issues I will hopefully be able to try out a more thorough demo. It’s interesting to see how quickly Comcast has integrated Plaxo’s services into their own. I wonder how soon we can see these services directly integrated into our televisions rather than having to use the net to take advantage of this.