SAN FRANCISCO--Cable companies get a lot of criticism from the Silicon Valley set for being some of the ultimate 20th century corporate dinosaurs. Or, as Web 2.0 Summit conference organizer John Battelle put it, "a dead duck."
So the head of Comcast, a company that's taken loads of heat from tech experts--for imposing bandwidth caps, poor customer service, and an alleged failure to innovate on both broadband speeds and the convergence between television and the Web--was an interesting choice to kick off the summit event here on Tuesday. But Comcast CEO Brian Roberts spun his company to the audience as springing from the same kind of entrepreneurial spirit that the Bay Area prides itself on.
He spoke of how he took over the reins of the company from his father, who according to legend was able to make an early strategic acquisition thanks to the winnings from a Tupelo, Miss., poker game the night before. "Similar to probably almost everyone in this room, (he) wanted to work for himself, wanted to start his own business."
He previewed new features for the Comcast video hub Fancast, which it launched slightly under two years ago at the Consumer Electronics Show. The new beta of Fancast, which will launch by year's end, will make new on-demand content available online, much of it unavailable in outlets like iTunes--and integrated with DVR boxes--to Comcast cable subscribers who already pay for HBO. About two dozen content providers have signed on board, and as Roberts scrolled through the preview, he noted that there were about a thousand movies available.
Comcast CEO Brian Roberts
(Credit: Comcast)Battelle, interviewing Roberts onstage, called it "video-on-demand on steroids."
The Associated Press, referencing a briefing this week with executives at Comcast's Philadelphia headquarters, helped fill in some of the details about the service, noting that it would include such popular cable shows as HBO's "Entourage" and AMC's "Mad Men" and for now is being called "On Demand Online."
The AP said Comcast subscribers can initially watch shows and movies only on their home computers after being verified by the cable system. Online viewing, at least in the beginning, will be restricted to those who get Internet service through Comcast, not through competitors like phone companies, the AP said.
Back at Web 2.0 Summit, Roberts also said that Comcast investments in broadband technology are, in part, what has facilitated the explosion in Web innovation.
"We're going to keep investing, because we believe there are great ideas in this room and in this country and in the world," Roberts said. "In the same way, it's unthinkable that a Google or a Yahoo or a Facebook or a Twitter would be happening if we hadn't made those investments (in broadband infrastructure) 15 years ago."
Battelle asked Roberts why he believes the U.S. lags behind in broadband technology advancements. Roberts replied, "I think that that's just not true."
(The audience laughed uncomfortably.)
"We have the same equipment (as other countries), the same wires, the same infrastructure, why is the adoption different is a different question. It's not the availability and I don't think it's the lack of speed," he continued. "You get to digital literacy, you get to what language it's in, do you have the right PC or a PC at all...I don't believe the infrastructure providers haven't done enough."
As for Net neutrality, an issue where Comcast has been a frequent villain after imposing bandwidth caps and interfering with peer-to-peer file-sharing software, Roberts was vague.
"We welcome that discussion, that scrutiny, and we're going to be an active participant," he said. "The few limited examples, including our own, that have gotten notoriety usually get dealt with in ten seconds, and changes get made, because this is new technology."
More recently, it's bubbled into the press that Comcast is in talks with General Electric to obtain a controlling stake in its NBC Universal property. Conveniently, GE chief Jeffrey Immelt was slated to speak later in the afternoon at Web 2.0 Summit.
"You and Jeff Immelt must have finished the NBC deal back in the green room," Battelle joked.
Roberts replied facetiously, "It's all done."
A class action lawsuit filed earlier this week targets Facebook and eight of the participants in Beacon, its ill-fated advertising product that shared information about third-party site activity with the social network. The set of 20 plaintiffs, mostly residents of Texas, filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Tuesday. Named as defendants are Facebook, as well as current or former Beacon participants Blockbuster, Fandango (owned by Comcast), Overstock.com, STA Travel, Zappos, Hotwire (owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp), and GameFly.
A Facebook representative told CNET News on Thursday that the company had not yet actually been served with the lawsuit, and that its legal team consequently did not have a formal statement at the time. STA Travel, Gamefly, and Overstock all declined to comment; none of the other defendants could be immediately reached.
"Until we're served, we're not being sued, so we don't have any comment," Overstock general counsel Mark Griffin told CNET News.
Beacon gained almost immediate notoriety when Facebook unveiled it as part of its Facebook Ads announcement last fall. Privacy advocates, most notably liberal activist group MoveOn.org, lambasted the program for not allowing users to disable it easily. Facebook has since modified the program and the controversy has wound down. But in the lawsuit, the plaintiffs point to the window of time before Facebook instituted the new controls--between November 7 and December 5 of last year--and claims that the social network still has access to a large amount of user data that was gathered in that period.
"If the user was not a member (of Facebook), Facebook still obtained the notification from the Facebook Beacon Activated Affiliate," the filing for Lane et al v. Facebook, Inc. read. "Information regarding user activities was sent in real time to a third party Web site--one which was not open or active in the user's browser, and one which, in many cases, the user may never even have visited or heard of."
There's one odd law that may make the plaintiffs' case stronger: the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988. The law was passed amid the fracas surrounding Robert Bork's controversial nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, when a journalist obtained Bork's movie rental record from a local video store and published it.
That's why there's already been a suit involving Beacon that specifically targeted Blockbuster for participating in such a program: a Texas woman filed suit against Blockbuster in April, claiming that the VPPA bars it from Beacon. Facebook was not named as a defendant in that suit, and though the plaintiff sought class action status for her case, she does not appear to have any involvement in this week's suit.
The defendants named in the suit don't encompass all of Facebook's original Beacon partners, but several of them could tie into VPPA protections: GameFly rents video games, Fandango sells movie tickets, Hotwire and STA deal with travel bookings, and Zappos and Overstock are both online retailers with a large scope (Overstock sells DVDs, for example). The suit also names the California Computer Crime Law and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act as grounds for the suit.
One of the plaintiffs, Sean Lane of Waltham, Mass., was immortalized in a Washington Post story about Beacon: He's the guy who bought his wife a diamond ring on Overstock.com, only to have her spot the purchase in a Facebook news feed, spoiling the surprise.
Guess he's still irritated.
Women's e-newsletter start-up DailyCandy seems like a better fit for Conde Nast than Comcast, but Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that the cable company has acquired it for $125 million. The blog wrote that Viacom had been in the running, too; a Viacom spokesman told CNET News.com on Tuesday evening that while the media conglomerate had been interested, it had never made a bid for DailyCandy and had dropped out in early June.
DailyCandy's demographic of trendy urban women is a niche that advertisers love, but it's still a higher price tag than many observers expected.
The company had already been acquired once, by former AOL exec Bob Pittman's Pilot Group investment firm. That was for about $3 million five years ago; DailyCandy now employs about 60 people and has published two books. It's the second e-newsletter that the Pilot Group has flipped this year, having sold the much younger "eco" publication Ideal Bite to Disney for around $15 million; the firm still owns a majority stake in slacker-dude list Thrillist.
Comcast has recently acquired Movies.com and contacts management company Plaxo.
This post was updated at 6:16 p.m. PT with comment from Viacom and 7:39 p.m. to clarify wording on the company's interest in DailyCandy.
Fandango, the movie-ticketing company owned by Comcast since 2007, announced on Monday that it has acquired Movies.com, a movie news and reviews aggregator. Movies.com had previously been owned by Disney's Walt Disney Internet Group.
Financial details were not disclosed.
The aim of the acquisition is to provide a one-stop movie hub for the Web, executives said.
"We are pleased to expand our rich-entertainment reach through this strategic addition of Movies.com," Chuck Davis, CEO of Fandango, said in a statement. The ticketing site currently sells admission to 15,000 theaters in the United States. "We'll be able to leverage our combined assets to offer millions of new moviegoers the best movie-related information available on the Web."
Citing ever-shadowy "sources," PaidContent reported Sunday that oft-maligned cable giant Comcast is in the process of acquiring television fandom site BuddyTV.com. No financial details were specified.
PaidContent blogger Joseph Weisenthal speculates that BuddyTV will be integrated in one way or another into Comcast's still-in-beta Fancast site, a Web video and community hub that it launched in August. Comcast, whose Comcast Interactive Media division has been attempting to craft an extensive Web 2.0-savvy social media strategy, also purchased movie ticket site Fandango in April.
BuddyTV representatives allegedly denied the allegation initially and then clammed up; we've sent an e-mail to see if they've changed their tune. Comcast reportedly is not commenting, but we're waiting to hear back on that one.
- prev
- 1
- next
