wco81
@attbi.com
| There's good news and bad news about Comcast taking over. Comcast has pledged to spend $400 million in the Bay Area to upgrade the networks out here, to roll out HDTV, VOD and cable modem services out as soon as they can and as widely as they can. And for those parts of the Bay Area which already has upgraded infrastructure, they'd roll out new services like HDTV and VOD in 6 months. Of course, cable company timetables are notoriously overoptimistic.
The bad part is that Comcast is notorious in the cable industry for increasing revenues per subscriber. That means price increases -- how else are they going to justify the capital expenditures?
As for HDTV, only offering HBO and Showtime is not nearly enough. They have the bandwidth that satellite doesn't have. They need to have all local network affiliates which are broadcasting an HDTV signal, the PBS channel, the new ESPN HDTV offering and so on. There will also be a temptation to charge a premium since HDTV owners skew to a high demographic -- which is probably why they're offering premium channels, since that will require subscriptions to those premium channels.
Another factor in making HDTV viable is a good timeshifting solution. Their set top boxes must interoperate with an affordable and convenient recording solution. Because people are only going to forego the convenience of Tivos and VCRs for so long to get HDTV content. Better yet would be set top boxes with PVRs integrated or at least have those boxes be purchaseable by customers to avoid the monthly rentals. |
