Press about Fancast

MCN seems to think so....

Inside the cable giant’s plan to marry television and the Internet
by Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 8/18/2008

The vision Comcast has for the future of TV isn’t locked up somewhere inside its brand-new, glass-encased headquarters in downtown Philadelphia. The rough cut of the cable company’s ideas are already playing out on the Internet, at Fancast.com.

Fancast, launched in January after two years of development, is supposed to be the first step toward totally personalized television. It’s TV that knows precisely what you want to watch and instantly serves it up anywhere at any time.

Continue reading "Can Comcast Deliver TV 2.0? " »

Today, the Net has almost as many television viewing options as your cable company. But how do you find stuff that's worth watching? Here are our choices for must-stream TV.

By Melissa J. Perenson, PC World

Watching the boob tube once meant having to consume your entertainment in front of an actual television. But these days, if you miss an episode of Grey's Anatomy or Heroes and forgot to set the DVR, no problem: You can catch up online for free with streaming video supplied by the Hollywood networks and studios themselves.

Television entertainment has busted out of the television and onto computer screens everywhere. Think of it as the rebirth of television, delivered via a new, interactive medium that gives viewers more choice over what they watch--and when, where, and how they watch it.

Thanks to the explosive growth of YouTube and social networking sites like MySpace, video permeates all aspects of Web life. And though short-form user-generated and professional video has a fairly lengthy history on the Web, a perfect storm of conditions has driven the growth of the Internet's emergence as a means of distributing high-quality television entertainment.

Continue reading at PC World

Cable Company Sees High Engagement Since Fancast's Official Launch
By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 3/23/2008

Two months after Fancast’s official launch, Comcast is pleasantly surprised — claiming the entertainment portal has proven to be far stickier than expected.

Comcast declined to provide figures on monthly visitors or page views to Fancast, which hosts a smorgasbord of more than 20,000 videos at any given time.

But in February, according to the company, Fancast blew away internal forecasts. Unique visitors topped expectations by 125% — and actual page views were 500% anticipated traffic for Fancast.

“We have very avid users,” Fancast general manager Alix Cottrell said. “The majority of them are high-speed data subscribers and their normal propensity is to view online videos.”

Continue reading "Comcast A Fan Of Its View Finder" »

PJStar.com, Steve Tarter, Sunday, March 16, 2008

You need to be a digital cable customer to get the full range of HD offerings, including the VOD collection, but if you go to fancast.com, Comcast has a batch of TV shows for you to watch online - for free.

The beauty of this site (that Comcast rolled out in January) is that you (or some knowledgeable teenager) can hook up the computer to your big-screen TV and, voila, you have access to a whole bunch of shows - for nothing.

You don't have to be a Comcast customer. All you need is a high-speed Internet connection.

What kind of selection, you might ask? I counted more than 200 different titles with many programs available for each. There's recent stuff like "Las Vegas," "Family Guy" and "Prison Break," or you can go back in time for "Alias Smith and Jones," "Land of the Giants" or "The Dick Van Dyke Show."

You'll find all sorts of gems like "The Motel" episode of "The Bob Newhart Show" from 1973 where Bob goes to Peoria and meets a pretty girl who turns out to be a hooker.

If you sample "Hawaii Five-O," don't forget that the striking Hawaiian beauty pictured in the opening show credits (and who played small parts in several episodes) is Lynne Kimoto, a Bradley University graduate voted homecoming queen during her stay on the Hilltop.
http://www.pjstar.com/stories/031608/STE_BG22UD3G.004.php

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Athima Chansanchai, March 12, 2008

If you think you can get rid of your TV and live by your computer alone, you may be right.

Comcast recently launched Fancast, a site that wants to be your be-all and end-all when it comes to finding out what's on TV, news about that show and being able to watch it (or others in a continually expanding library).

On it, you'll find a video player that lets you watch streaming episodes of current shows like "30 Rock" and "Psych" as well as oldies but goodies like "Remington Steele" (yes, way before he was 007, Pierce Brosnan was a con man with an encyclopedic knowledge of movies that applied to every case) and "Firefly."

Warning: Pull up the site on Internet Explorer. It's glitchy on Firefox.

The site also has this going for it: Type in a show you like, and it'll pull up info on it -- where to find it on TV, or on demand, or on DVD or at the movies. For instance, I'm a sucker for "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century." It was a childhood indulgence. So I type that in and, voila, it pulls up episodes I can watch right there and then (caution: it may be slow) on sites like iTunes, Netflix and Amazon Unbox where I can find episodes to buy.

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/thebigblog/archives/134124.asp?from=blog_last3

Cape Cod Online, Candy Hammond, March 03, 2008

I have come across a fun Web site for TV and movie fans: fancast.com, where you can watch movies and full television episodes (they even have such classics as "The Mary Tyler Moore Show"). You can view coming shows, watch movie trailers and, according to the site, before long be able to program your DVR from a PC. That means if you're at work and someone mentions something you really want to see, you can program it to record while you're at work!

http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080303/LIFE/803030303/-1/NEWS

Geeksugar, 02/28/2008, by Geeksugar

There are times when I forget to TiVo the latest episode of Heroes or
The Office — hey, it happens to the best of us! Rather than spending hours scanning the web for your favorite shows like the The Hills, head on over to Fancast where you can find tons of full-length TV series, as well as check out the latest movie trailers, clips, photos, news, and reviews. Just a FYI: Shows have mini-ads at the beginning, but it's totally worth it considering you are getting to watch your "missed" shows for free!

http://www.geeksugar.com/1082182

Philadelphia Inquirer, By Bob Fernandez, Feb. 22, 2008

There are more than 450,000 TV shows and tens of thousands of movies out there, many of them available over the Internet, cable on-demand, or Netflix. How do you pick a needle from this entertainment haystack?
Comcast Corp., the nation's largest cable company, says it can help Hollywood-drenched Americans.

Three years ago, the company created in Philadelphia what it calls one of world's largest databases of celebrity culture and information, the equivalent of 5,000 sets of Encyclopaedia Britannica on actors and actresses, directors, casts, crews and musicians, TV shows and movies.

Then it hired a 33-year-old computer Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania with a streak of gray hair, Jon Moore, to develop a search engine to mine the database for relationships and other connections among celebrities. The emerging product: Fancast.com's Six Degrees.

The idea behind Six Degrees is that if you liked an actress in one movie, you might like the same actress in another movie, or TV show.

Or if you liked the actress in a movie, you might be interested to know she dated this actor, who starred in these movies. And so on.

"It's making sense of the complex mass of entertainment," said Fancast general manager Alix Cottrell, who described Fancast as an interactive Internet guide for Hollywood entertainment. "We're recommending what you should watch in an individualized way."

Continue reading "Site lets fans track web of celebrity connections" »

USA TODAY, Mike Snider, January 22, 2008

Even as their supply of new programs dwindles during the months-long writers' strike, major TV networks continue to try to capture online viewers.

Streaming free full-length episodes on their own websites was just the beginning. Episodes from ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC are showing up on an assortment of sites, from big destinations such as AOL to newcomers Veoh and MeeVee.

Signs are that time spent watching video - not just snacks à la YouTube, but full episodes - is increasing. The number of broadband users who watched full shows online weekly doubled in 2007 from 8% to 16%, says market research firm Horowitz Associates.

Embracing the Web is "an acknowledgement that this is real (and networks) have a business model and can monetize it and make it part of their growth," Howard Horowitz says.

By giving consumers online access, networks have learned they can reinforce viewer devotion. "This is mostly driven by TV audiences who missed (an episode) and want to watch it on their computer," says Shelly Palmer, author of Television Disrupted: The Transition From Network to Networked TV. "I don't think NBC or ABC is caring where you watch as long as they can count on you."

Traffic on Veoh.com, which recently sealed a deal to add MTV to an array of CBS, Fox and NBC series, rose 24% during the last three months of 2007; 40% comes during traditional TV prime-time hours, says Veoh's Dmitry Shapiro. "That is a very telling and important statistic. It's the same content they can find on TV, but they feel they have more control."

Traffic tracking firm ComScore found online viewers watched an average 3π hours in November, 29% more than January 2007, though YouTube and MySpace dominate, says analyst Andrew Lipsman.

A growing number of sites, including MeeVee, seek to not only connect viewers with full episodes but also offer TiVo-style recommendations and direct them to offline diversions.

"There is a lot of content out there," says Amy Banse of Comcast, which just started Fancast.com with CBS, NBC and Fox shows, among others. "Some of it lives in movie theaters, some on television, some in video on demand and some on the Internet, but it's hard to find. We wanted to create a tool (for) people to find what they are looking for regardless of platform or screen."

Any traffic caused by strike-dissatisfied viewers accelerates the long-term move to online, says Alex Patriquin of Web analysis firm Compete. "The race to become the destination for TV episodes online is very much an emerging market."

*A look at some of the top sites on the Web

Fancast.com

Description: Online since last summer but formally announced last week by cable giant Comcast, Fancast has more than 3,000 hours of shows, including Jericho (CBS), Bones (Fox) and 30 Rock (NBC), as well as Bravo and Sci Fi programs. Can be personalized for your cable or satellite networks.

Experience: TV series have their own home pages with episode guides; the CBS Jericho page, for example, tells you there are 22 episodes on Fancast and several will air on Universal HD next week, and it links to areas on Amazon Unbox, iTunes and NetFlix. A short ad runs before the episode begins. Enlarged to full-screen, the video gets slightly fuzzier. A neat "Six Degrees" function suggests other shows that Jericho actors appeared in and that have similar themes.

Expert says: "It really looks good," says Alex Patriquin of Web analysis firm Compete. "It's got all the cool shows Hulu has to offer and a few extras, and it's doing quite well. They had almost 450,000 visitors in December, so it's off to a very strong start."

Continue reading "Websites make it easy to catch a missed TV show" »

New York Times, By Tim Arango, January 8, 2008

Comcast, the nation’s largest cable television company, will outline an ambitious plan Tuesday to set up two new paradigms for how people will watch movies and television shows in their homes or on the road.

The plan, which Brian L. Roberts, the chairman and chief executive of the Comcast Corporation, will describe in a keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, is aimed at making a nearly limitless supply of movies and television shows available on television, where Comcast subscribers could view them on demand, and through the Internet, where anyone with Web access could watch them.

Although the television component is still at a nascent stage — Comcast’s existing video-on-demand service has about 300 titles, compared with the 6,000 it eventually hopes to offer — the Web portion is further along.

Comcast has set up a site called Fancast.com where viewers can watch more than 3,000 hours of television shows from NBC, Fox, CBS and MTV and where they will soon be able to remotely program the digital video recorders in their homes. The shows on Fancast are available free. Comcast has yet to say how it will price the rest of the content as its plan moves forward.

Continue reading "Comcast Plans to Offer a Huge Menu of Films" »

Variety, Ben Fritz, January 8, 2008

Company wants to boost standing.

Comcast is looking to on-demand hi-def and the Web to help bolster its standing against increasing competition from telcoms.
In a keynote address Tuesday, the first every by a cable exec at the Consumer Electronics Show, Comcast topper Brian Roberts announced that his company plans to significantly up its library of hi-def movies and TV shows available on demand. He also unveiled a new technology called Wideband that he said could deliver HD movies download in just four minutes. On services like Xbox Live, downloading a hi def movie typically takes several hours. Wideband is expected to get an initial roll-out to several million Comcast subs this year.

Company also publicly launched Fancast.com, its entertainment portal that has been in beta since last summer. It features on-demand TV from providers like CBS and NBC and Fox’s Hulu that are syndicating online, as well as the ability for users to program a DVR online and buy movie tickets through Fandango, which Comcast acquired last year.

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117978677.html?categoryid=2112&cs=1&query=fancast

Wired, By Frank Rose, 01.08.08

Cable giant Comcast on Tuesday plans to unveil Fancast, a TV-and-movie search site that the company hopes will become one of the Web's top entertainment destinations.

After a year of development and six months in beta, the site still isn't all there yet -- but it's already far enough along to become the electronic programming guide that TVGuide.com only wishes it could be.

"The problem is that people don't know how to get their hands on something," says Amy Banse, president of Comcast Interactive Media. "We thought, let's give consumers a one-stop shop."

Fancast is one of several announcements Comcast CEO Brian Roberts is expected to make at Tuesday morning's CES keynote address -- the first by a cable exec. He'll also tout a dramatic expansion of Comcast's video-on-demand lineup and a portable DVR developed in partnership with Panasonic.

The AnyPlay DVR -- announced by Panasonic on Monday, but not available until early 2009 -- is designed to slide out of a docking station on the set-top box and has a pop-up screen, so you can watch it in a plane or a car. It will double as a DVD player, so you'll also be able to watch movies and TV shows you can't find on television.

With Fancast itself, if something is on TV at all, you should be able to find it. If it's in movie theaters or on DVD or available from iTunes, Netflix, Amazon or Web-video sites like Hulu, you can find it too.

Key to the site was Comcast's purchase last year of Fandango, the movie-ticketing site best known for its incredibly annoying sock puppets. News of the deal was greeted with snorts of derision: Would the move pan out, or was it, as blog baron Nick Denton predicted on ValleyWag, "a classic boom-time blunder by an aging corporation eager for the internet limelight"? Given the cable industry's dismal track record on innovation, the smart money was with Denton.

Yet Fancast turns out to be surprisingly well-designed -- and useful enough that the biggest complaint is likely to be, what took so long?

Continue reading "Comcast Unveils Fancast Video and Film Finder" »

Profy.com, Michael Garrett, October 29th, 2007

FancastToday's launch of Hulu (and its partnership with Comcast) reminded me of Fancast, which is a hybrid entertainment portal from the cable service provider.

Back in August when I reviewed Fancast, I admired it and described it as "web 2.0 meets IMDB meets TV Guide" for its comprehensive database of movies and television shows that also provided viewers with TV listings in an effort to help visitors decide what to watch each day on television.

Just as expected, my visit to the Fancast homepage today revealed that full episodes of several shows are now available from a variety of television networks.

Users of Comcast's Fancast can now view programming from CBS, USA Network, Sci-Fi, and of course, content from Hulu's selection of NBC and Fox shows. Fancast has it's own customized player, although it would be nice to see a 'Full Screen' feature, as most online video services now have. As seen in the screen below, the pages of content that is provided by Hulu contains the new Hulu logo prominently above the video.

In addition to full episodes, the service now also features a new 'Watch It' feature which helps users discover where to watch and download their favorite programs. For example, let's say a user searches for the NBC show Heroes on Fancast. The search results page (shown in the screenshot below) has Heroes as the first entry along with a green box to the right that says 'Watch It.' Hovering over this box displays a larger box with links to full episodes on Fancast, a listing to see when it will next air on television, sites that sell the DVD box set, as well as places to find digital downloads such as Amazon Unbox and iTunes.

Now that it has new features available, I find myself more compelled to use Fancast over IMDB to find information about movies or television shows. When I want to see who stars in a certain movie or the premise of a new show, I almost always visit the Internet Movie Database first. Now, however, Fancast offers a much better-looking interface as well as the ability to keep track of my favorites and view thousands of full episodes. I can find exactly what is on my cable service with a custom TV listing and did I mention that it also does a great job of recommending new entertainment to watch, as several of its suggestions are already favorites of mine that I just had not gotten around to marking in Fancast yet.

Planned, but yet to be completed, are features that will aim to better integrate Fandango (a Comcast-owned service that sells movie theater tickets) into Fancast. Currently, the menu contains a 'Movie Tickets' links, but instead of remaining on the Fancast site users are being redirected to the Fandango homepage.

http://www.profy.com/2007/10/29/fancast-now-with-full-episodes/

Wall Street Journal, Peter Grant, 4/26/07

Comcast Corp., which has more subscribers than any other cable operator in the U.S., has joined in the fray over which
Web site is going to become the top destination for TV shows, movies and other professionally produced videos.

Google Inc.'s YouTube has for the time being won the battle to become the premier site for short amateur videos. Now a
host of major Internet players and others -- including Amazon.com Inc., Time Warner Inc.'s AOL division, Joost,
Brightcove and Apple Inc. -- are all maneuvering to claim dominant positions in the world of prime-time shows and other
premium entertainment content that's started to mushroom on the Web.

Comcast is hoping to play the same middleman role on the Internet that it does on traditional TV -- buying programming
from entertainment companies and packaging it for consumers. Earlier this month, the Philadelphia-based giant
announced plans to launch Fancast.com, an ad-supported free TV and entertainment site. Comcast has stuck deals to
carry prime-time content produced by CBS, Fox and NBC on Fancast, including shows like "Survivor," "Heroes" and
"House."

"Being the place people go to for [video] content is what we have always done and it makes sense to provide content
online as well," says Brian Roberts, Comcast's chief executive.

Continue reading "Cable Giant Comcast Tries to Channel Web TV" »

Financial Times, Joshua Chaffin, Apr 16 2007

Comcast (NASDAQ:CMCSA) , the US cable group, on Monday became the first media company to sign a content deal with an online video venture being developed by News Corp and NBC Universal.

Under terms of the deal, Comcast will supply clips from its E!, Style and Golf Channel networks for distribution on the new venture in exchange for a share of associated advertising revenue.

Comcast will also serve as a distribution partner, adding its Comcast.net website, which draws 15m unique visitors a month, and Fancast.net, an entertainment site the company plans to launch this summer, to an internet network that already includes AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, MySpace and others.

Continue reading "Comcast agrees online video deal" »

CNNMoney.com, April 11, 2007, Paul R. La Monica

Comcast (CMCSA), the nation’s largest cable company, apparently doesn’t want to keep its customers glued to their couches watching movies on demand. The company announced Wednesday that it plans to purchase online movie ticketing service Fandango.

The acquisition of Fandango will put Comcast in competition with rival online movie showtime and ticketing services such as as AOL’s Moviefone, which like CNNMoney.com is a subsidiary of Time Warner (TWX), and MovieTickets.com, a joint venture of several movie chains, including AMC and National Amusements and Marcus (MCS) as well as Hollywood Media (HOLL), an entertainment news and information company. AOL and Viacom (VIAB) are also minority investors in MovieTickets.com.

So what does Comcast plan to do with the site? In the company’s release, Comcast said it will also be launching a site called Fancast.com this summer and that Fandango would be an integral part of Fancast. Comcast described Fancast as a “national online destination that will enable consumers to search, discover, manage and enjoy their entertainment exptelevision, computers, DVDs and wireless services.”

Continue reading "Comcast goes to the movies" »