By Rachel Goldfarb, originally published on Next New Deal
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The Big Lock-In (Medium)
Roosevelt Institute Fellow Susan Crawford explains how Comcast is trying to dominate online video to the point where consumers wouldn't even see that other alternatives exist.
As TV viewing shifts from traditional TV sets to mobile devices and tablets, Comcast’s cloud-based Xfinity platform will be right there. Eventually, we’ll all have box-free set-top boxes: the network itself will include Xfinity’s navigation menus, instruct any device in the home how to download DVR recordings and stream live TV, and watch carefully for video viewing patterns — so as to better place ads.To get there, Comcast is licensing Xfinity for free to other cable distributors, set-top box makers, and computer-chip manufacturers, ensuring that its platform is widely adopted. Then, when it’s everywhere, it will be controlled remotely by its masters. Two years ago, Matt Zelesko, Senior Vice President at Time Warner Cable, said this free licensing would “drive collaboration across the [cable] industry.”
The payoff for Comcast and its collaborators? They’ll be able to ensure that their own video on demand services are easy to find but users can’t search simultaneously across Vudu, Netflix, or YouTube. They’ll control video navigation and, thus, the user experience — and the profits that flow from it. Program guides, DVR recordings, and “pretty much everything but the volume control” on Xfinity-obedient devices will be governed from the cloud, according to Rob Rockell, Vice President of Engineering for Comcast. This is a very big deal.
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