The New York Times says that Comcast has some big plans brewing that will allow consumers to watch TV and movies over something called the “internet,” as well as offering the ability to remotely control their DVRs.
Comcast has set up a site called Fancast.com where viewers can watch more than 3,000 hours of television shows from NBC, Fox, CBS and MTV and where they will soon be able to remotely program the digital video recorders in their homes. The shows on Fancast are available free. Comcast has yet to say how it will price the rest of the content as its plan moves forward.
Also on Tuesday, Comcast will show off a technology called wideband that significantly reduces the amount of time it takes to download a movie from the Internet
. Mr. Roberts will take the stage with Ryan Seacrest, the television and radio host, to download the two-and-a-half-hour film “Batman Begins” in less than four minutes, rather than the six hours it would take using a standard broadband connection. Comcast plans to introduce wideband to millions of homes in select markets in 2008 before making it available in all of its areas.
Fancast is up and running, albeit in beta, and seems (at first glance) to be little more than Hulu with slightly different branding. What do you think?
Comcast Plans to Offer a Huge Menu of Films [New York Times]
Fancast
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“Comcast has yet to say how it will price the rest of the content as its plan moves forward.”
Let me guess! High?
Ha. You’re right, it’s Hulu. Same shows and episodes.
Wow. Comcastic innovation!
Hey! guess what, I found a way to watch videos at about a fourth the size of my laptop screen. Its called the “youtubes”!
On the plus side, you don’t have to worry about throttling when you download with them. I have Comcast (don’t judge) and am interested in how the remote programming of your DVR will work.
Yeesh… is there any gig, no matter how lame, that Ryan Seacrest won’t take. :-0 Yawn. I’ll stick with watching movies online with Netflix.
Do not care. Apparently at the same event they said 160MBps internet is coming. Let’s get that going pronto.
Well, I think it’s nice, so there!
But the MTM Show is not complete without the episode about Chuckles the Clown’s funeral. *fail*
@novelgirl: As his old days at C|Net told us, Ryan Seacrest will do anything if you give him a paycheck.
I heard about this recently from a friend that works on it at Comcast. I tried it out and was pretty pleased. But it needs some polishing. For example: I twice accidentally navigated away from the Simpsons episode I was watching and it was a real pain to fast-forward back to the point I left off.
But then again, who prefers to watch television on their computer?
Like I already do with my SlingBox for free?
Like I have been doing with my TiVo for two years already?
Not free, but beats the heck outta their Craptastic DVR!
Doesnt this prove that comcast CAN tell the difference between
torrent and other high use traffic? Or would they end up limiting
people to only watching 3 movies a month?
Great- Comcast will let me watch some more great movie and content programing like Howard the Duck or 6 minute Stupid Videos (including 1 minute of ads) just like On-Demand?
That is if Fancast doesn’t often suffer from Error 224 like On-Demand…
excellent, then they can cancel our accounts for using too munch bandwidth and slowing down the node
I bet this will be outrageously priced.
actually i think i like it so far. i got to watch project runway! almost every time i try to catch missed episodes on a network’s website there’s some sort of internal error. this could work for me, too bad i have directtv…
omg did i just say that??!!
@mdot: How’d you get a free slingbox?
. Mr. Roberts will take the stage with Ryan Seacrest, the television and radio host, to download the two-and-a-half-hour film “Batman Begins” in less than four minutes, rather than the six hours it would take using a standard broadband connection. Comcast plans to introduce wideband to millions of homes in select markets in 2008 before making it available in all of its areas.
That download time for that movie is bullshit. 4 minutes my goddamn ass.
@D3Anon: Maybe they mean it will be a 4 minute edit of the film?
HuLu said they were moving to a new a domain name. I guess we now know what it is.
But yet we still cannot purchase our own cable box.