New York -- A fast-paced and competitive market has pushed
innovation as the key to cable operators' success, and Comcast Cable
Communications president Neil Smit is driving the company to keep up with the
competition, even as the company faces subscriber losses.
At B&C/Multichannel News' OnScreen Media Summit
here on Thursday, Smit said Comcast has launched 16 products this year,
including a partnership with Skype and NextGen TV on Xfinity, which is more than the company had released in
the last two years combined. In keeping with this past year's heavy roll-out of
product offerings, Smit says the company plans to release a new customer-facing
or customer service product every quarter.
Smit says that the rapidity in which products are now
released has become a cultural norm of the company. "People really thrive on
it," he said. "They get into -- 'What's the product of the quarter?'"
Comcast's existing platforms and great partnerships, such
as their partnership with Microsoft make it easier to execute a quarterly
product release. "We're really trying to find the best of the industries out
there and integrate that into our Xfinity platform," Smit said.
One product that spans the industry, TV Everywhere, is
something on which "the industry can and should be picking up the pace," said
Smit. A large benefit of offering TV Everywhere, he says, is that it combats online
piracy. "If the content is there and available and easy to access, it will
discourage folks from going and looking at it in an unauthorized manner," Smit
explained.
