Comcast to Offer High-Speed HD Movie Downloads

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on January 8, 2008 - 11:39am.

Las Vegas - Comcast (NASD: CMCSA), the nation's largest cable TV provider, on Tuesday announced plans to launch Wideband, a high-speed download service that promises to deliver full HD movie downloads in just four minutes. "Wideband takes four channels and bonds them together and will enable speeds to go up from 12-16 megabits a second to over 100 megabits a second," Comcast CEO Brian Roberts told Reuters. "If it's as successful as we plan we'll roll it out to tens of millions of home shortly thereafter."

The company also plans to offer 1,000 HD movies and TV shows on-demand by the end of 2008, and eventually hopes to offer over 6,000 movies per month via its on-demand service.

Meanwhile, Comcast also announced the launch of Fancast.com, a site that will allow users to watch, manage and find content available on television, online, on DVD, in theaters or from the website itself.

The site will offer access to over 3,000 hours of free streaming content, and provide links to outside sources and partners if the content is not available on Fancast.

Later this year, Fancast.com will allow users to program their digital video recorders (DVR) online, while in 2009 Comcast plans to let users add content to a folder in their TV video-on-demand menu directly from their computers.