The Comcast Corp. bid for Walt Disney Co. could help determine whether the living room of the near future looks more like Lydia Woods' in Maryland or Kenneth Crudup's in Los Angeles.
Both are Comcast subscribers who use new technology to take control of the television schedule, letting them watch what they want when they want.
The difference: Woods relies on the Comcast cable system to do the heavy lifting, while Crudup uses a digital videorecorder -- the approach favored by satellite TV operators News Corp. and EchoStar Communications Corp.
The satellite companies' technique is more effective at delivering television on demand today. If Comcast ends up owning Disney, that will improve its on-demand offering. But persuading the rest of Hollywood to embrace the cable industry's vision for a new generation of TV would be another matter.
Comcast is a leading advocate of "everything on demand," which enables viewers to tune in to any show for a limited time after it is broadcast. The company wants ultimately to record all the programs it transmits and store them temporarily on computer servers in every region its cable systems serve. That way, customers who missed a show when it was originally shown could play it again later at no additional charge.
The problem for Comcast is that TV programmers have refused to give it the right to record and replay hit shows such as "Alias" on video-on-demand, or VOD, services. Comcast hopes to address that shortcoming by buying Disney, which owns the rights to "Alias" and many of the other shows aired on ABC, ESPN and their cable network siblings.
"There's no question that Disney-branded and ABC-branded content would be a good thing to have on a VOD service," said Jack MacKenzie of Frank N. Magid Associates Inc., a media research and consulting firm. "The question is, can they survive just being an outlet for their own stuff, or do they need to acquire other people's content to make it a fully realized offering?"
Analyst Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research Inc. said that if Comcast proved it could make money offering on-demand Disney shows, other leading TV programmers probably would offer their shows for VOD.
Not only can on-demand services boost the number of people who watch a show, Bernoff said, but cable operators can reassure advertisers by preventing on-demand viewers from skipping commercials. By contrast, the commercial-skipping ability of home-based digital videorecorders, like those made by San Jose-based TiVo Inc., is a selling point.
