Posts Tagged: comcast

Comcast & Dreamworks: What This Means for Media Consumers

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Image via iptvbros.com

There’s been a ton of bustle in the media industry surrounding the recent acquisition of Dreamworks by network giant, Comcast (read more here). While this may not sound scary on the surface, it will most certainly affect you, the viewer, directly.

Let’s be straight here – Comcast purchased DreamWorks to expand their content through what’s called vertical integration. A Medium article we came across describes it perfectly as “the equivalent of the mall owning the stores and also the products sold within the stores.”

The problem with big media companies getting even bigger is that they begin too push out smaller, independent media. Just last year for example, Sesame Street was purchased by HBO in the never-ending battle to bring in and satisfy more cord-cutting subscribers to their service.

“In 2009, Comcast (a cable company) bought NBCUniversal (a cable network). Within that network, you can watch numerous TV shows… And that’s just on NBC. The full range of TV shows is much larger when you factor in all of the other TV networks that are under the NBCUniversal umbrella…

By merging the cable company with cable networks, that integrates two of the three vertical segments in the cable TV marketplace. In our earlier analogy, this would include the mall and the stores within the mall.

That’s news from 2009 though. The last remaining vertical segment is the TV shows. This is where DreamWorks comes in.”

With these 3 powerhouse vertical segments in works together, Comcast is stamping their name to the front of the streaming competition. This move could prevent other services like Netflix and Hulu from accessing more TV shows and movies for their catalogs, as Comcast continues to try to attract customers away from the competition and appear more valuable overall.

While Comcast can trace their own company’s successes to the fact that they offer multiple unique services under the same umbrella, in the end the consumer still has to pay for Internet to access any of it – a service that Comcast still owns… where’s the fairness in that?

What do you think about this acquisition, and the future of online media as a whole? We’re curious to hear from you in the comments below.

Comcast will Double my Speed – after I Visit The Comcast Store

Calling Comcast about my internet service is always an adventure, but today was especially interesting. I was getting less than my promised 20 Mbps download speed, even after upgrading to a DOCSIS 3 model like they told me to three weeks ago, and so I gave them a call. The really polite gentleman on the phone had me read the MAC address and serial number of the modem to him, and then told me that Comcast speeds would be doubling in a week or so. Good news, right?

Next, he told me I had to go visit the nearest Comcast store, and give them the same information I had just given him about my modem. I asked why, but never got an answer. When I finally persisted, explaining that the nearest store was all the way across the city, he told me he could just use the information I had given him over the phone, and that I didn’t really need to visit the store after all. WTF?

I’m sure this is a ploy by Corporate to get more people to the stores so that they can be talked into upgrading to some new DVR or service, but was it really necessary – or even a good idea? Had I not kept asking why I had to do this, I might have spent half a day just to become victim to a sales effort. Not cool.

Anyone else have this experience? Let us know in the comments.