Comcast Joins the Tablet TV Party

The usual caveats apply: to use AnyPlay, you must as well subscribe to the cable company’s internet service. It as well doesn’t work outside your home network; this keeps the programming and broadcast wolves at bay. Cable and satellite companies deliver other people’s content to your home, in the main through a set-top box or cablecard or some other decoding device which keeps that signal tethered to the one place it was ordered. Taking that TV signal outside the home network tent would upset that entire apple cart.

But Comcast’s rollout is limited in other ways. So far, it’s only available in Denver and Nashville, and only on the iPad. Motorola’s less-than-barn-burning Xoom tablet is then and there, however there is no mention of any smartphones. All things considered, a television or broadband subscription isn’t enough; you must subscribe to Comcast’s Xfinity Triple Play. Don’t need voice? Don’t want a bundle? Too bad.

TV sets are getting bigger and more feature laden. For two straight years, CES tried to seduce the consumer into believing that 3D TV can be a consumer device, and every major manufacturer is incorporating internet access and apps as the lines blur between television and computer and we inch past the era of the clunky set-top box and other peripherals. Though they’re now slim and trim, “smart” TVs are fighting hard for living room floor space, and along with gaming systems are creating beefy terrestrial media centers.

The same time

At the same time, television is actually available anywhere: newly portable, by virtue of leveraging the smartphone and tablet revolution, and fueled by hotspots, ubiquitous data networks and “old” standbys like SlingBox. It may not seem like much of a development to untether TV only within the confines of your home, however even a small release from this form of house arrest is hugely liberating.

Just how liberated will we become? Cheap calling plans and fantastic mobile phones killed the phone-company landline, and Skype-like cable-company-provided VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) service are crowing over its corpse. The trajectory for TV sets probably isn’t as dire.

Still, tablet TV is making it practical to anyway reduce your dependence on multiple sets served by rented set-top boxes. That cuts into the cable/satellite business’s bottom line. So it’s telling that all the big players are innovating after a fashion which on its face would seem not to be in their best financial interests. They’re paying a little now to avoid losing big later.