Comcast is getting ready to launch ‘Watchable,’ a new digital video platform, to rival YouTube and Facebook, reports Business Insider. Comcast has signed deals with Vox, Buzzfeed, Mic, Vice, The Onion and NBC Sports, among others. According to Business Insider, the publishers are signing multi-year deals to upload their unlicensed, original video content for users to watch on demand.
When it first launches, Comcast customers with an X1 box can stream the new video platform. Currently, only a few million Comcast customers are using the X1 box, but it will replace older boxes with the X1 box in the next several years, creating a potential audience of tens of millions, reports digital Trends. YouTube has more than 1 billion users, watching hundreds of millions of yours on YouTube daily, by comparison.Eventually, Comcast will make ‘Watchable’ available for iOS and Android mobile devices. ‘Watchable’ will complement, not replace, Comcast’s current Xfinity TV Go app.What’s in it for Comcast? Sources close to the deal say that Comcast wants to become the digital-video ad leader.”Comcast is currently the largest seller of video ads in the United States,” one source told Business Insider. “As platforms shift to digital, Comcast doesn’t want to lose market share, but they’re losing it to YouTube and Facebook.”In addition, the ‘Watchable’ model is significantly cheaper than its current model, says Business Insider. Now, Comcast has to pay revenue to networks on a per-subscriber basis, but with the ‘Watchable’ model, Comcast won’t pay licensing fees. Instead, it will share advertising revenue with its partners – 70% of it, according to the Wall Street Journal, while Facebook and YouTube give 55% of their ad revenue to content creators.Why would media and entertainment organizations want to partner with Comcast? Business Insider says that ‘Watchable’ will give online-only brands the chance to get in front of a traditional TV audience while also giving them an additional revenue stream.Insider Take:Variety considers Comcast’s move defensive, saying the cable giant is a bit late to the party. It is merely stemming the bleeding as subscription TV declines while over-the-top (OTT) TV and other entertainment alternatives are increasing. Variety says Comcast is hedging, rather than introducing a sizable, new revenue stream.Whether or not Comcast is late to the party is irrelevant. The point is that Comcast knows it’s got a problem, and it has to find smart ways to replace revenue and retain or gain digital advertising market share. The question is will its efforts be sufficient to keep it from losing millions of customers in drives.’Watchable’ seems like a viable idea, but it will be unlikely to put a dent in YouTube’s market share. Other players, like Verizon, are rumored to be entering the market too, so ‘Watchable’ needs to offer unique content to draw viewers away from YouTube. We aren’t convinced that Comcast’s new Stream product will be successful either. This package needs some testing and tweaking, but it probably won’t save Comcast either.What we do like though is that Comcast is actively pursuing new products and partnerships to address the changing entertainment needs of its subscribers and prospective customers. The company isn’t sitting idly by, waiting for the next big thing to overtake it.Whatever Comcast does, we expect that the company and its product and service line-up will look dramatically different a year from now. And, as always, we’ll be watching and will keep you updated as we learn more.
