Comcast said it has added Paramount Pictures to its content partners for the Xfinity On Demand digital store, the cable operator's multi-screen electronic sell-through product.
The addition allows Comcast to sell titles from Paramount, including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Wolf of Wall Street, Transformers: Age of Extinction, Anchorman 2, World War Z and Star Trek: Into Darkness, and enable Comcast to offer some Paramount fare prior to their respective DVD windows.
Comcast, which now offers “thousands” of titles through the EST product, has similar deals with Twentieth Century Fox, Lionsgate, NBCUniversal, Warner Bros, Sony Pictures, and MGM, as well as A24, Relativity, Starz, and Vertical Entertainment.
The MSO hasn’t released EST sales figures, but in a blog post, Nancy Spears, Comcast’s VP of digital media distribution and monetization, noted that 42% of Comcast customers who own a movie or TV show via operator’s EST offering own more than one title. On average, they own at least two movies and/or four or five TV episodes, she added.
Comcast launched its EST platform late last year, allowing customers to purchase and playback movies and TV shows via the set-top and PC browsers. Comcast has also developed apps (for playback—streaming and downloading) for iOS and Android smartphones and tablets.
Comcast competes in a heated EST market that also includes iTunes, M-GO, Target Ticket, Google Play, VUDU, Amazon Instant Video, and Verizon FiOS, among others.
