Comcast CTO Sees All Media Assets Migrating to the Cloud

"Life is not about having big hard drives and caches at homes,” Werner said. He contended that “persistent high-capacity broadband” is starting to change media use drastically. “Rather than owning assets, we'll own digital management rights,” he said. Referring to the DRM goals of such new industry standards groups as Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), which is backed by Comcast, Werner said they represent “the cave writings of where this ultimately will go.” He argued that these digital management rights will fully need to “replicate what we do with physical assets” eventually.

Showing off a Comcast commercial for an Xfinity TV application for the iPad, Werner called himself “a big fan of tablets right now.” Although he initially viewed the iPad “as a tweener,” he contended that the device and its offshoots are filling “a very unique gap in the video experience” because they offer “a great way to navigate,” watch, and even purchase video content. With nearly 15 million iPads sold last year after just nine months on the market, he noted that it’s “probably the fastest adopted consumer device” in history, outselling even the vaunted iPhone. Werner also predicted that tablets “will become the second biggest video platform” in the home, if they aren’t already.

IPads are already offering Comcast much greater efficiencies in product development than traditional digital cable set-top boxes ever could, Werner said. While the cable operator has about 300 software developers working on quality assurance solutions for its legacy digital set-tops, it has 10 software developers performing the same duties for its much newer iPad applications.

The new iPad developers’ group can churn out software product updates much more quickly than the much larger set-top group can, Werner said. While Comcast can churn out a new set-top guide every 18 months and then send it out to about 60 percent of its footprint, it took just five months for the company to create its first iPad app last year. Now, by leveraging a flexible, Web services platform, the operator is cranking out its fourth version of the iPad app.

"The cycles are getting shorter and shorter for development,” Werner said. “It’s the only way we can keep up with the [product] cycles that are important to us as we go forward.” He noted that Comcast has developed the “CPlatform,” which enables the cable operator’s backend systems to behave like Web services. As a result, Werner made it clear that Comcast will continue embracing the iPad and other connected tablet devices.

Comcast will start enabling subscribers to watch linear video content on their iPads later this year, Werner said on a later panel. The company now lets customers only view on-demand programs on the device. In his conference keynote address, Werner spent much of his time outlining 12 “up” and “down” trends in media that he believes will shape the rest of the decade. In addition to DRM and “cloud-based or Web-based development,” he named the “social/entertainment Web,” random access channel guides, just-in-time service bundling, and tablet-based consumption of entertainment as rising trends. On the down side, he identified the informational Web, traditional channel grid guides, “bound services,” and PC consumption of entertainment. Werner sees today’s MPEG-2 video content giving way to “fragmented MPEG-4” video streams and voice communications losing ground to short text messages and tweets.

Reversing a prediction he made two and a half years ago, Werner also argued that the growth of cable broadband may not level off after all. Instead, he said, broadband growth could continue because of voracious consumer demand for more data and video, the unchecked rise of tablets and other connected devices, and the explosive growth of rich software applications. “The corn maybe can grow to the sun, if you have a flat-rate billing environment and a network with enough capacity for consumers to use it,” he said.