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May Offer Services Outside Its Cable Footprint In Future
Comcast Corp. is looking to use the Internet to deliver video programming to customers anywhere in the country, the company's chief operating officer said last week. The move, if pursued, would mean the nation's largest cable operator would be marketing TV-like services to households served by other cable companies.
Chief operating officer Steve Burke, speaking at a Wall Street Journal conference on digital media last week in Carlsbad, Calif., said the Philadelphia-based company could open up the video services on its Comcast.net Web portal to viewers outside the 35 states in which it currently operates. Currently, multimedia features such as a streaming radio service and video mail are available only to Comcast cable customers.
While any Web surfer worldwide can already access Comcast.net, its premium content -- including two-to-three-minute videos and free streams of live National Hockey League games -- is only offered to Comcast customers that subscribe to one of its high-speed Internet packages.
Despite the fact that the best Comcast.net content is currently only available to paying customers, the portal was ranked as the 21st most-popular Web site in the United States, reaching 6,110 people for every 1 million Web surfers on average last week, according to Alexa.com.
If Comcast decides to offer the premium content to Web surfers nationwide, that traffic could increase significantly. Burke said...