Comcast and Netflix expand quarrel for viewers
America’s largest wire user and largest online video association are heating adult a conflict for a country’s eyeballs.
Comcast Corp. denounced skeleton Tuesday to launch an online video-on-demand subscription use featuring thousands of TV re-runs and comparison cinema for a prosaic monthly fee. Netflix Inc., a colonize of that business, announced a understanding to tide cinema from Weinstein Co., including a Oscar favorite “The Artist.”
The flurry of announcements demonstrates a passion with that normal video providers like Comcast and cutting-edge ones like Netflix are seeking to attract and keep consumers who have a flourishing array of party observation options.
The dual companies are fighting for prevalence in an increasingly swarming margin of competitors, among them Dish Network, DirecTV, Verizon Inc. and Amazon.com.
Comcast’s new digital subscription offering, called Xfinity Streampix, launches this week and allows users to watch calm on televisions and Internet-connected digital inclination like smartphones. It will be giveaway to business who allow to Comcast’s video, Internet and phone service, and cost $5 to those who get usually TV from a company. Netflix streaming costs $8 a month.
Although a new use will fundamentally pull comparisons to Netflix, and spurred a 4% dump in that company’s batch Tuesday, there are important differences.
Xfinity Streampix — that facilities TV shows like “30 Rock” and “Grey’s Anatomy” and cinema such as “Brokeback Mountain” and “Ocean’s Eleven” — doesn’t come tighten to a some-more than 14,000 titles accessible to tide from Netflix, according to a site InstantWatcher.com. Netflix also has disdainful deals for TV shows like “Mad Men” and eccentric films like final year’s Ryan Gosling play “Drive.”
Also, while anyone with an Internet tie and a digital device can entrance Netflix, Xfinity Streampix is now accessible usually to a 22.3 million homes national that have Comcast radio service, including homes in San Francisco, Oakland and Sacramento. (Los Angeles is not partial of a Comcast territory.)
Comcast has a rights to offer some of a calm on a new Xfinity use nationwide, but, according to Marcien Jenckes, Comcast’s ubiquitous manager of video services, has no skeleton to do so: “It is not during all a goal to contest with Netflix.”
Among wire companies, Comcast has been a many assertive in adding services to respond to a blast of digital inclination while perplexing to keep a core customers. Comcast final month negotiated a extensive understanding for cinema and TV shows from Disney/ABC Television.
“This only creates a existent subscriptions some-more valuable,” Jenckes said.
This new use is apart from Comcast’s Xfinity On Demand, that offers some-more new cinema accessible to consumers on a per-title basis.
Netflix, meanwhile, continues perplexing to accelerate a lineup of strange calm that isn’t offering by competitors Comcast, Dish Network-owned Blockbuster, Hulu, HBO and Amazon.com.
This month, kiosk DVD let association Redbox and telecom hulk Verizon announced skeleton for another competing venture, a video subscription use that will launch this year.
The multi-year Weinstein Co. understanding gives Netflix a array of medium box-office performers, many of them documentaries and foreign-language pictures, that interest to niche audiences who have valid to be zealous users of on-demand services.
In further to “The Artist,” a understanding includes a chronological dramas “Sarah’s Key” and “W.E.” and a arriving documentary “Undefeated.” But Netflix will not get Weinstein Co.’s English-language movies, such as “My Week With Marilyn,” that are lonesome underneath an existent understanding a association has with Showtime.
Netflix is also in talks to sinecure HBO maestro executive Colin Callender to assistance supplement to a tiny though flourishing collection of strange content.
The association launched a initial series, “Lilyhammer,” this month, and has during slightest 5 other shows in a works.
If he strikes an arrangement with Netflix, Callender would furnish a initial strange mini-series and/or cinema for a renouned online streaming service. Callender, who left his post as boss of HBO in 1998, declined to comment, as did a orator for Netflix.
Comcast Corp. also announced Tuesday that it would launch 4 eccentric channels targeting minorities in a subsequent dual years. They embody one owned by former Lakers star Magic Johnson, one owned by former rapper and businessman Sean “Diddy” Combs, and a third owned by “Spy Kids” executive Robert Rodriguez.
Revolt, a due channel corroborated by Combs and former MTV executive Andy Schuon, is designed for a 2013 launch. Rodriguez’s El Rey channel, a corner try with FactoryMade Ventures executives John Fogelman and Cristina Patwa is scheduled to launch within dual years.
The fourth channel, BabyFirst Americas, is corroborated by Spanish-language radio maestro Constantino “Said” Schwarz and will entrance in April.
ben.fritz@latimes.com
meg.james@latimes.com
