I’m just going to take it. That’s right, Comcast. This is me, waving my white flag. I’m not going to complain to you any more. Why did I even try in the first place? It’s like trying to erode Mount Rainier with licks. So from here on out, I’m just going to take it. All the outages, all the fees, all 20 levels of customer service. Who was I kidding, anyway? → Read More
Comcast announced this morning that it has appointed Neil Smit as the new President of Comcast Cable Communications. In his new role, Smit will be responsible for all business aspects of the company’s cable operations. He will report to Comcast COO Steve Burke.
Neil Smit joins Comcast from Charter Communications, where he served as CEO and Director for the past 4 years. Prior to joining Charter, Smit was the President of Time Warner’s America Online Access Business overseeing Internet access services, including America Online (AOL), CompuServe and Netscape ISPs. → Read More
Comcast is in discussions with partners to offer a music streaming service to its customers as an à la carte offering, we’ve heard from multiple sources. For an additional monthly charge of $5 or more, users will be able to stream on demand music online via a website and on their TV via their cable box.
For the last 18 months a Danish ISP called TDC has been offering customers in that country the ability to stream music online as part of their basic ISP packages ranging from $47 to $65 per month. From what we’ve heard from our friends in Denmark, the service is very popular.
The Comcast service would offer users the ability to stream music without any additional charges. Services like MySpace Music, Spotify and MOG (and the late iMeem) offer similar services today, but not through the cable box. → Read More
Some people don’t like Comcast and Time Warner’s TV Everywhere plan to bring cable TV to the Web. They are just paranoid.
Allow me to explain. In his 1964 Harper’s Magazine essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter argued that American politics has often been a stage for excessively conspiratorial and suspicious minds from both the left and the right. What disturbed Hofstadter most of all was the sanity of the paranoid. “It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that make the phenomenon significant,” he explained. By infecting normal people, Hoftstadter worried, the paranoid style had made conspiratorial fantasy a troublingly recurrent feature of American political culture.
Hofstadter is correct. From Andrew Jackson to Joseph McCarthy to contemporary Americans on both the left and the right, the paranoid style—with its obsessive targeting of the Roman Papacy or Russian communists or Wall Street bankers or Muslim terrorists—has replaced rational discussion with what Hoftstadter called “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy.”
As the Internet has become more and more of a central political issue in American life, so the paranoid style has, unfortunately, begun to infect our public discussion about technology and media. Much of this paranoia focuses on the supposed selfishly monopolistic intentions of mainstream media which, for many otherwise sane people, represents a deadly threat against the so-called “people’s Internet”.
Editor’s note: This guest post is by Andrew Keen, the author of Cult of the Amateur and an advisor to Arts and Labs, a collaboration between entertainment companies, software providers, telecommunications providers, artists and creators. → Read More
Do you have a Comcast DVR? I do. I also have a TiVo, which has had remote scheduling since 2005. I can almost schedule recordings remotely to my Comcast DVR. Not yet, but almost – it’s not available in Boston yet, apparently. If you have a Comcast DVR, check out www.comcast.net/mydvr/ to see if the service has been switched on in your area. → Read More
Whoever says the legal system in this country is broken, well, you’re right. Comcast was caught tampering with its customers’ packets two years ago. It bitched and moaned like nobody’s business, earning itself no friends. The Federal Communications Commission sanctioned the gigantic corporation in what amounted to a slap on the wrist. Big deal. A class action lawsuit was filed, which was just settled for $16 million. Comcast raked in $34.3 billion in revenue in 2008, meaning that this settlement amounts to four hours of revenue. That’s right: four hours. Take that, corporate America! → Read More
Comcast and General Electric announced early this morning that they agreed to form a joint venture that will be 51 percent owned by Comcast and 49 percent by GE. The joint venture, which will consist of the NBC Universal businesses and Comcast’s cable networks, regional sports networks and more, will be managed by the newly formed Comcast Entertainment Group (CEG).
GE will contribute to the joint venture NBCU’s businesses valued at $30 billion, including its cable networks, filmed entertainment, televised entertainment, theme parks, and unconsolidated investments, subject to $9.1 billion in debt. Comcast will put in its cable networks (including E!, Versus and the Golf Channel), its ten regional sports networks, and certain digital media properties, collectively valued at $7.25 billion. Comcast has also agreed to pay GE approximately $6.5 billion in cash. → Read More
I just had a visit from a courteous and helpful (really) Comcast guy that was quite illuminating. You see, a few months ago I had a new cable modem installed, since my old one was freezing up every few minutes. The guy who came then happened to have an extra modem in his van of the correct spec and installed it right away. Everything was fine until a week or two ago, when I started losing connection in the morning consistently and finding the internet moving at an unbelievably slow pace — we’re talking 1KB/s here, and I pay for the fattest pipe Comcast offers in the area.
So I called it in, and today the guy came and told me that the Terayon modem I’d just recently had installed was a piece of garbage. Uh, okay? → Read More
Sprint, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks (to name a few) continue to bet big on Clearwire’s WiMAX nationwide wireless network. The foursome have just pumped an additional $1.494 billion into Clearwire’s coffer, with another $50 million coming from Intel and $20 million from Eagle River Holdings. CHA-CHING. → Read More
Today at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts spoke on stage with Federated Media’s John Battelle. For the first part of the discussion, they talked about the usual stuff: the state of the industry, competition, and the like. The answers were pretty PR-friendly, as you’d expect. But a bit of a surprise came with Battelle asked about the role Twitter is playing with the company.
“It has changed the culture of our company,” Roberts said. Comcast has for a while now been using Twitter to scan for complaints and engage with customers. The idea was not his, but rather rose organically when someone in the company realized that a lot of public complaints were being sent over Twitter. → Read More
About a year ago, I had enough. I was so sick of putting up with Comcast’s ridiculous rates for terrible service that I decided to cancel everything but the Internet. Truth be told, I kept basic cable only because it was cheaper to keep it with my Internet package then to not keep it. But I never watched it. For all intents and purposes I was cable-free. Most importantly, that meant removing the cable box from my life as the filter between me and content on my television. I thought I would miss it. I did not. At all.
Fast forward to now: I recently moved, and luckily enough my apartment isn’t held captive under Comcast’s dominion. So I decided to try cable once again, just to see if it was as bad as I remembered it. My new service is substantially cheaper, so that’s nice, but all in all, the song remains the same. It’s absolute crap from an end user perspective. And yet we put up with it. → Read More
My God in Heaven! It’s been about four hours since the FCC announced its intention to add two more pillars to its idea of Net Neutrality: one, ISPs should not be allowed to wily nilly permit/disallow traffic on their networks (non-discrimination); and two, traffic management should be done is as transparent a manner as possible, so you don’t wind up with people discovering that their software is being tampered with, without their knowledge or consent, after the fact. I don’t know about yous guys (not a typo), but that seems pretty reasonable to me. And if you disagree, then you’re probably a high-ranking executive at Comcast. → Read More
Yesterday, cable behemoth, Comcast, announced plans to make its emerging On Demand Online service available to cable subscribers on their mobile devices in the near future. → Read More
Apparently Comcast is in dire financial straights. If America’s largest cable provider doesn’t raise the cable modem rental fee to $5 from $3, it will not be able to roll out the faster Internet service, DOCSIS 3.0, and the executives won’t be able to get new trousers. Sure, the provider had enough cash to build a massive skyscraper and an impressive HD video wall in Philadelphia, but if you want faster Internet, some folks are going to have to pay more. It’s probably a good idea to point out that you can save a lot of money by purchasing your own cable modem. → Read More
What’s the deal with Comcast, Verizon, and other ISPs petitioning the FCC to lower the definition of broadband? It’s all about money—broadband stimulus money—MG Siegler explains on G4′s Attack of the Show.
As the Obama administration looks to expand broadband access to rural and urban areas that are still under-served, the ISPs want to lower what constitutes broadband so that they can get some of the billions of dollars in stimulus money without shelling out as much to actually deliver the broadband access the stimulus package is designed to create.
Those phone and cable companies are tricky. Watch the video after the jump. → Read More
I do my fair share of complaining about poor service. And if you follow me on Twitter, you might say that I do more than my fair share. Here’s my issue: It’s not so much that your service sucks, it’s that you refuse to be held accountable for it sucking, and rarely, if ever, do anything about it. I’m looking at you, Comcast and AT&T. That’s why it’s so perplexingly wonderful when a company does the right thing, like Netflix.
Tonight, Netflix emailed a large number of its subscribers to apologize for a Xbox Live streaming outage that occurred yesterday. They’re offering to refund 2% of users’ monthly bills back to them, if they simply click on the link that was emailed. It’s not a lot of money, but what’s remarkable is that Netflix did this for most of us completely unprompted. → Read More
Do you have Comcast stock? Are you concerned with all the money the company has in its coffers? Yes, that sounds ludicrous, being concerned that a company has a lot of money on hand, but the fear is that Comcast could be ramping up for a big media buy, something no one wants to see. → Read More
There’s two ways to look at the story that many of the country’s biggest ISPs have refused government stimulus money for broadband infrastructure investment. One, the ISPs patently don’t need the money, and are more than capable of delivering broadband to as many Americans as possible with their own capital. Two, the ISPs could use the money, but they’d prefer not to accept it lest they be beholden to all sorts of government-imposed restrictions, one of which relates to net neutrality. → Read More
Comcast has just jumped on the iPhone bandwagon with the “Comcast Mobile App” — now available for free download from the iTunes App Store. → Read More
Well, I don’t think it’s a streach anymore to say that Comcast’s latest venture into online video is a off to a good start. CBS is the latest network to join the impressive lineup which also includes HBO and Cinemax as of yesterday. This netwoks is a big step for Comcast On Demand Online as CBS is the only major network not available on the free to everyone site, Hulu. But remember, Comcast On Demand Online will only be available to Comcast subs who currently pay for the stations. (e.g. if you can’t watch HBO on your TV, you can’t watch it online) → Read More
San Francisco, CA
