At the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Comcast attracted a lot of attention with their announcement of their plans to offer ultra high speed internet (wide-band) to selected areas in early 2008 and to the entire nation by the end of the year.
Though we may have to wait for wide-band, we can look at the other big innovation from Comcast right now. Fancast offers hundreds of hours of movies, current and retro TV shows right now available free for everyone. Missed that episode of 24, 30 Rock,My Name is Earl, CSI, or forget to DVR that Billy Joel appearance on Late Night with Conan O’Brien? No, problem just click on the episode on Fancast. The episodes stream very fast with little noticeable delay. Its not perfect since the episodes have commercials, but hey this is free people.
And Wide-band internet is unbelievably fast, check out this youtube video demonstration and see for yourself. There’s no word on pricing yet but as wide-band becomes the standard for internet, the impact on digital material available from the library or on the web should be significant. Wide-band allows a full 2 and half hour film to downloaded to your computer in less than four minutes, effectively removing one the major barriers to digital material becoming omnipresent in our lives.
