Cable giant Comcast unwilling to lose users into the network video

Recently, the United States’ largest cable network operator and media giant Comcast Corporation officially launched an online video service. It will compete for users through high-quality short videos, and Google’s YouTube, as well as copyright video sites such as Netflix.

Obviously, in the face of the impact of online video, Comcast chose to enter the market of competitors, rather than stick to the original "old" business.

Comcast is the largest cable television service provider in the United States. It also provides broadband access and digital telephone services. It is the second largest network access provider in the United States after AT&T.

According to CNBC, a financial news website, on Tuesday, Comcast introduced a video service "Watchable" (Chinese meaning "substantial" and "watchable"). This service will focus on high-quality short videos produced by professional teams, which are higher quality videos than YouTube users. Comcast hopes to gain a share of the video advertising market in the United States through this service.

Comcast has a large number of businesses. In addition to a client software, this video service will also launch a stand-alone website. It will also be embedded in the X1 set-top box of Comcast's cable TV business and enter thousands of thousands of companies at the same time. Households.

In video content, Comcast has acquired more than 30 online video production partners, including Internet news site BuzzFeed, Vox Media, Vice Media, Machinima, sports camera maker GoPro, and video production agency Maker Studios.

According to reports, in the United States, Comcast's X1 TV set-top box already has 10 million subscribers, and it is also growing at a rate of 30,000 per day. This will enable Comcast's video service to quickly enter the living room entertainment market.

US media pointed out that according to Comcast’s vision, it does not believe that current cable customers will abandon cable TV and rely solely on online video to obtain living room entertainment, and online video will become an additional entertainment method to help Conca Stearns receives incremental advertising revenue.

Comcast also said that on the large-screen TVs in the living room, consumers still cannot see some high-quality short videos produced by the Internet media, and the launch of this service will also bring new revenue opportunities to these video production media. .

Comcast said that in the online video market, there are already Google Youtube, Vimeo and other service providers, and social networking Facebook also began to force in the field of Internet users original video, plans to challenge Youtube's monopoly dominance, but Comcast services There are differences with competitors, mainly focusing on short video content produced by professional teams.

In fact, Youtube focuses on the original short video of netizens, and Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, etc., mainly provide full-length video of the movie and TV series. There is a gap in the market for high quality short videos with copyright.

In addition, rivals such as Netflix and Amazon hope to completely replace traditional cable and satellite TV services, and Comcast hopes that online video will become a complementary product.

According to reports, Comcast will share video advertising revenue with video production agencies. At present, video services such as Youtube and Facebook also adopt an advertising sharing model to encourage production agencies to launch high-quality videos. Comcast has not yet announced an advertising split, but it is expected to provide a generous share in order to attract the celebrity production team on the Youtube platform.

It has become an industry trend for consumers to abandon cable television. In the past many years, subscribers of cable and satellite TV have been losing. At the same time, there are more and more users of monthly video services such as Netflix and Amazon. A previous poll showed that one-third of U.S. households have already purchased paid monthly video services and watched movies or TV shows on the Internet.

With the loss of cable TV users, Comcast has also begun its transformation and its dependence on broadband access services has increased. This time entering the video service shows that Comcast is not willing to become a simple “online pipeline” but to tap the online advertising market through content services.

In addition, Comcast also owns the well-known American NBC TV station (affiliated to NBC Universal), which also has a lot of high-quality TV content. It is not known whether Comcast’s video service will integrate NBC’s programs at the same time.

Competition in the U.S. online video market is intensifying. On Monday, Facebook announced that it would allow buyers of video ads to buy ads in a format similar to traditional TV ratings. In addition, Google also launched a new advertising precise positioning service.

It is expected that Comcast will also use a large number of set-top boxes to target home audiences and improve the effectiveness of video advertising.