“Comcast has been itching to get into on-demand video downloads and further details on its planned service are emerging,” Eric Bangeman reports for Ars Technica. “The service will reportedly launch by the end of October and will allow users to watch movies either on their PCs or on the family room TV via a set-top box. Pricing and system requirements (for PCs) are not yet known. Will it be enough to make a splash in the burgeoning movie download market?”
Bangeman reports, “In terms of encoding, Comcast will reportedly use two different methods, depending on the destination platform. For set-top boxes, the cable company will use something like MPEG-4. PCs will see the increasingly common Flash format, which has become the streaming video format of choice these days and has the advantage (from Comcast’s point of view) of being difficult to save locally. If Comcast goes the portable route, it will have to go with something along the lines of DRMed WMV. Other details, such as pricing and availability, have yet to be disclosed.”
“Net Neutrality proponents regularly express concerns about movie downloads and other bandwidth-intensive applications getting placed into a virtual express lane on the Internet superhighway, saying that it could ultimately lead to anti-competitive abuses. If Comcast does turn to uncapped delivery, plenty of eyes will be watching, but we suspect that Comcast will tread lightly. The company already offers its own lineup of services, such as VoIP, and there’s scant evidence that they’ve prioritized their own traffic and degraded others,” Bangeman reports. “Most cable Internet users have experienced slowdowns at different times of the day when their neighbors are all going online. That’s the nature of the beast with cable. From a customer service point of view, Comcast can’t afford to crimp everyone else’s pipe down to 1Mbps while someone down the street downloads Jackass 2. If they do offer some sort of temporary download speed increase, Comcast will want to keep that within whatever the local maximum is for the customer so as not to adversely affect other subscribers.”
Bangeman reports, “The chances of Comcast working a deal to get movies onto the iPod are about as good as the Yankees’ payroll ever dropping under $100 million. And it’s hard to make direct comparisons between Comcast and Apple because we don’t know things like what percentage of Comcast’s ISP subscribers have iPods or what percentage of the over 40 million iPods Apple is expected to sell this year are the video model. However, we do know that Comcast has some advantages that its competitors—including Verizon and AT&T as well as Apple—lack: a large audience and a built-in living room connection.”
Much more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Tommy Boy” for the heads up.]
Related articles:
Analyst: two major studios seen joining Apple’s iTunes Store – October 10, 2006
Target complains to studios about iTunes Store movie download prices – October 09, 2006
Report: Apple and Wal-Mart in discussions over iTunes Store alliance – September 29, 2006
Wal-Mart threatens retaliation against Hollywood studios if they sell movies via Apple’s iTunes – September 22, 2006
Disney’s remarkable 1st week iTunes movies sales should have studios clambering aboard Apple train – September 20, 2006
Disney sells 125,000 movie downloads via Apple’s iTunes Store in first week – September 19, 2006
Apple debuts iTunes 7 – September 12, 2006