1. Comcast, the largest U.S. cable company, added a record number of high-speed Internet users and signed up more than twice as many phone subscribers as it did a year earlier by selling those two products in a package with subscription TV—the so-called triple play.
2. It is expanding in such markets as small business and adding a range of new products and services—from wireless calling to online entertainment to be a very different company in three to four years.
3. It is stepping up efforts to court small and midsize businesses—a market that could generate $3.8 billion in sales for Comcast by 2011, up from $660 million now.
4. To beef up mobile services, Comcast has begun to offer a wireless service called Pivot in select markets through a joint venture with Sprint Nextel.
5. Comcast’s wireless plans hopes to one-up existing wireless services by incorporating its own strong suit: TV. Comcast customers will be able to access local news clips. The service will also eventually let users retrieve home voice mails, view TV schedules, and control digital video recorders via cell phone.
6. Another area of growth: online services. (Traffic to all Comcast's sites has dropped 5% in the past year). Comcast hopes to reverse the decline, and compete with Google's YouTube and News Corp.'s MySpace for a bigger slice of the U.S. online video advertising market. Comcast reached an agreement with News Corp. and NBC to distribute their content and bought ticketing site Fandango. In December it launched GameInvasion.net, an online gaming destination. The company is also trying to lure traffic to user-generated video site Ziddio.com through partnerships with Facebook.com.
7. It will launch Fancast.com later this year, which will let consumers search, manage, and watch videos, games, and other content across a gamut of devices and channels, including TVs, PCs, and mobile phones. The site may also sell video-on-demand and DVDs.
Convergence is the soul of diversification?
[Click here for full story at: BUSINESSWEEK.COM]
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment