Comcast has opened up its On Demand Online beta—now dubbed Comcast/Fancast Xfinity TV—to all of its customers who subscribe to both the company's high-speed Internet and cable TV service. With the launch comes a handful of details that were not previously available, giving us insight into the company's plans for the service. One thing that's clear, however, is that Comcast is definitely treating this as a supplement to its cable TV service rather than a full embrace of the Internet as a content delivery medium.
The On Demand Online beta was launched this summer to just 5,000 customers. At that time, content from HBO and Cinemax was available as well as a handful of movies for a total of 750 hours of programming. The announcement comes hot on the heels of Comcast and Time Warner's "TV Everywhere" initiative—referred to as a set of broad principles "designed to serve as a framework to facilitate deployment of online television content in a way that is consumer friendly, pro-competitive."
As of Tuesday, however, every Comcast customer who subscribes to both Internet and cable (referred to as a "dual play" customer) can now access the premium online content, either through fancast.com or comcast.com. In order to access XFinity TV, users must download a software client and log in with their Comcast credentials so that they can be authenticated in the system as a paying subscriber. After that, content from various premium channels will be accessible to them online, but only if their subscriber level allows it.
For example, if you are a dual-play subscriber but you don't pay extra for HBO, you won't get it online either. If you do pay extra for HBO, then you will also get HBO's content online. Regular users who are not dual-play customers (or even those who are not Comcast customers at all) will continue to have the same experience on Fancast.com—which is really just a re-skin of Hulu—as they did before.
As part of the expansion of the beta, almost 30 cable networks have contributed content for a total of about 2,000 hours of programming—Comcast said repeatedly during its announcement that it expects the offerings to continue growing over time. Unsurprisingly, the Xfinity TV content will be limited to US viewers only, and the content will be ad-supported (the number and frequency of ads will depend upon the content providers, Comcast said).
The company revealed during its question and answer session that it doesn't see Xfinity TV as the antithesis of Hulu—after all, the company uses Hulu content on its main Fancast page—but rather a complement. "Hulu is a great site with a lot of great, free, mostly broadcast content," Comcast said. "Comcast Xfinity TV has a lot of great authenticated cable content and hopefully will continue to grow."
That's the key point here: authenticated cable content. The cable companies are desperately trying to hold onto their subscriber audience and are offering this as a way to add revenue on top of it—not replace cable subscribers with Internet-only users. There were numerous questions during the Q&A that prodded Comcast on whether those who don't subscribe to Comcast's cable service would be able to get access, but the company danced around those questions by simply stating that it's doing its own part to bring content to customers, and that the programmers (such as HBO or Cinemax) may eventually offer the content on their site to whomever they please.
Despite the restrictions, Comcast's dual-play subscribers are undoubtedly going to be pleased with the offerings. Plenty of content is already available from channels like HBO, Cinemax, Starz, History, E!, Style, G4, Travel Channel, Discovery, TLC, Animal Planet, TBS, and TNT, plus numerous movies (new and old). Heck, there will even be "adult" content coming in the near future—Comcast said that content from Cinemax will be available as soon as the company can implement its parental controls sometime near the end of January or mid-February.
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