Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast, gave a great keynote presentation at CES. He talked about the convergence of Cable TV with Internet access and even telephone service. He also talked about multi-platform services and a future service called Wide-Band that goes way beyond "broad-band" today. After hearing the Comcast keynote speech it looks like the Telephone /DSL providers are toast.
Wide Band takes the bandwidth dedicated to four cable TV channels and bonds them together into one stream that can deliver 100 megabits per second. Wide Band can download a full length motion picture in High Definition in about 4 minutes. High Speed DSL service would take 6 hours to download the same movie. This is truly amazing speed that will be available to millions of Comcast customers this year.
Video On Demand - Comcast is building a library of 1,000 high-definition movies and hundreds of channels of on-demand programming by end of 2008, and will eventually have more than 6,000 movies a month with more than 3,000 of them in HD.
Tru2Way DVR/DVD - Comcast and Panasonic jointly introduced AnyPlay, a portable combo tru2way DVR-DVD. It looks like a regular portable DVD player that you could take in the car or on an airplane, but it is also a DVR that works like a Tivo. It sits in your living room by the cable box and then undocks and becomes a portable DVD player with recorded TV shows or other content. pretty cool.
The Flight of the Conchords - The highlight of the Comcast keynote presentation was a cameo appearance by The Flight of the Conchords. I admit I had never heard of these guys, but came away impressed. I happened to be sitting in the front row, right in front of them on stage. I snapped a few pictures, and grabbed this video from YouTube. This is geek humor at its best. You sort of had to be there to get the context of their jokes. But if you read this blog about the convergence, multi-platform, and Tru2Way, you will catch the nuance in their jokes. Take a look at this video and have a good laugh.
