Comcast has had talks with YouTube and other companies about adding user-produced videos to its video-on-demand service.
Comcast Takes a Look at Home Videos on TV [WSJ]
By PETER GRANT
November 4, 2006; Page A4
Individually produced videos, made popular on the Internet by sites such as YouTube, may start showing up more on television as part of an effort by Comcast Corp. to muscle into the business, according to people familiar with the matter.
Comcast, the country's largest cable-TV operator with more than 21 million subscribers, has had talks with some of the largest Web-video companies -- including YouTube Inc. and Revver Inc. -- about adding "user generated content" to its video-on-demand service, people with knowledge of the talks say. Comcast's plans include organizing the content or videos in video-on-demand genres and sponsoring contests for best content in each genre.
Philadelphia-based Comcast, the country's largest provider of high-speed Internet hookups, also is planning to add user content to its Web portal, Comcast.net. That site, which has already built up a vast library of music videos, movie trailers and other videos, currently streams as many as four million short videos a day.
Rather than doing a deal with an established Web video company, Comcast may develop its own service for soliciting and displaying user content. Comcast could announce its plans as early as the end of next month, people say. Revver acknowledged that it has had talks with Comcast. YouTube, which is being acquired by Google Inc., declined to comment.
Individuals have been getting their home videos on TV since the early 1990s on ABC's "America's Funniest Home Videos." More recently, Al Gore's Current TV, which is carried by a number of cable systems and satellite operators, has been featuring videos that individuals upload from Current's Web site. Numerous Internet and technology companies -- including Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. -- are working on ways to make it easier to move Web-based videos to the TV.
What's different about the Comcast offer is that the videos will be on its on-demand service, which gives viewers the ability to search through the content and choose the ones they want to watch. Comcast already is doing something like this with its "Dating on Demand" service, which enables viewers to choose among numerous videos taped by singles seeking romance.
Comcast's latest user-content initiative is being designed by Comcast's "interactive media" division, which it formed last December to stay in front of the changes taking place in the way TV programming and other content are being delivered. The division is also working on such things as a Web-based TV guide that will help Comcast subscribers sort through everything that's on TV and video-on-demand.
Comcast is stepping up these efforts because it's facing new competition from phone companies getting into the TV business, as well as from videos on the Internet, which are attracting a mushrooming audience, particularly viewers in their teens and twenties. Comcast last summer acquired thePlatform Inc., a Seattle-based Web video-technology company, and has invested in several other Internet video companies, including Revver and ViTrue Inc.
User content covers every imaginable subject. Included on YouTube Friday, for example, were a time-lapse video of a rotting pumpkin that attracted more than 779,000 views, a bunny that opened letters (180,000 views) and a man wearing 155 T-shirts at once (2.1 million views).
It's still a question whether user videos will be as popular on TV as they are on computers. Web-TV segments tend to be just a few minutes long, not the half-hour or hourlong shows people are used to watching on TV. Also, the quality of Internet videos typically is much lower than that of traditional TV. |
