Earlier this month, Comcast launched Fancast XFinity, their branded name for their version of TV Everyehwere. Essentially, XFinity is a distributed authentication system, in which users prove their association to an existing cable subscription, and receive corresponding entitlements to an online video catalog.

Browsing to a video which requires authentication results in this modal dialogue:

Trying to View Premium Content on Fancast Requires Authorization

Comcast Access (and a specific Movie Player from Move Networks) has to be installed to your machine – and running – to be able to view videos behind the paywall. Comcast Access is an Adobe AIR based application and is available for Mac OS X (intel-based Macs running OS X 10.5 or later) and Windows (XP Service Pack 2, Vista, or 7). No love for Linux and Unix users (which won’t make Comcast Access very popular around Optaros), older PowerPC Macs, or Windows users stuck on Windows 2000. (This also means you’ll have to have or accept AIR being installed on the machine as well). Finally, you’ll need administrative rights on the machine(s) you install Access on – which may restrict some work desktops (a popular place one might want access outside the home).

Installer for Comcast Access on Mac OS X

Users can authorize up to three named computers for access – though it isn’t clear to me yet what happens when you reach your fourth machine (can you un-authorize the first and sawp in the second, as in Apple’s FairPlay DRM in iTunes?).

Once you’ve installed Access (and the Move Networks player) you can authorize the machine it is running on:

Setting up Comcast Access

The process was relatively painless (though I did have to chat with a customer service rep to find my “comcast email account,” something I set up when subscribing to cable but have never used) on my MacBook Pro, unless you count the pain of accepting yet-another set of digital restrictions management (DRM) shackles. Specifically, the Comcast Access Terms of Service make it clear that this isn’t really TV Everywhere. (I’m reminded of one of my favorite The Princess Bride quotes: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means”).

In addition to the platform restrictions, and the requirement that Comcast Access be running as you watch the videos, the TOS notes:

• “You may only install the Software . . . and use Protected Services on Authorized Devices.” – Comcast defines which devices are authorized – they mention PDAs and portable devices, but if your device isn’t on the list you’re not part of everywhere
• On software upgrades: “Upgrades will either be optional, in which case you will be presented with the choice to install such Upgrade, or mandatory, in which case the Upgrade will install automatically and you will be notified after such Upgrade has been successfully installed. By installing and/or using the Software, you consent to such Upgrades being delivered and implemented in such manner.” At least some upgrades might be optional.
• Whose devices can you authorize? “you will not . . . designate as an Authorized Device any device that is not owned and used solely by people then-resident at the service address for your Comcast Digital Cable subscription.” Does this mean that by authorizing my laptop, which I don’t technically own (Optaros does) I’ve violated the TOS? What does then-resident mean: if I’m travelling on business for a week, am I still resident at my service address? What if your roomate moves out – is it your responsibility to de-authorize her authorized devices?
• You also will not “export, import or re-export the Software in violation of any applicable law, rule or regulation of any jurisdiction.” Does traveling with a laptop on which the software is installed constitute export? What if the installer itself is sitting on the desktop? Is it my responsibility to know about the applicable laws in all jurisdictions?

Much (if not all) of this is fairly standard proprietary software TOS fodder, I suspect. DRM systems have to be able to insist on the ability to force updates in case holes in existing versions are discovered and need to be plugged. Controlling the devices (and system software versions) on which the software can be legally installed also helps prevent folks from, for example, hacking a version to run without enforcing DRM.

I wonder how Comcast Access deals with geographic restrictions – can I access premium content to which I have rights as a Comcast customer even while in, say, the UK or Germany where those rights haven’t (potentially) been negotiated?

Or would Fancast, maybe even before requiring Comcast Access authentication, already geolocate my IP and prevent me from requesting material not available in that geography?

Will TV Everywhere be enough to keep cable subscriptions relevant? Frankly, if faster fiber-optic were available at my home address, I’d drop cable in a heartbeat. For me cable is and has been since the mid-nineties primarily about access to the Internet, and only secondarily a way to see a breadth of content on TV. But I recognize I may be the minority there.

Might folks who are not Comcast Cable Subscribers someday be able to purchase a “Fancast XFinity” subscription independent of whether they current have coaxial cable hooked up to their home address?

What will Fancast XFinity, and Comcast’s purchase of NBC Universal, mean for services like Hulu? Is this the beginning of a “return to paywalls” for professional video online?

I hope not. I hope that it’s a first step in the direction of acknowledging the user desire for control, and a first step toward separating the value of the content from the value of the delivery medium. (Just as newspapers aren’t the only or even the best way to consume/distribute news, coaxial cable via subscription isn’t the only or even the best way to consume/distribute professionally created long-form video content.)

Freeing the content from the channel should enable lots of different monetization models, including some form of Freemium access (let users watch the first five episodes of Entourage free, or all free two weeks after original air date) as well un-bundled access (I never want premium sports channels, but many packages include them).

Will the restrictions imposed by the DRM encourage consumers to keep going to unauthorized channels to get content, or will the ease-of-use (so far it has been quite simple) and the low barrier to entry (for subscribers) make this an iTunes moment for online video? (Perhaps this is only possible if/when the service gets extended beyond current cable subscribers and becomes a way to subscribe to premium content online directly).

A few videos to spark (or reinforce) your interest. First, (via Biella) a two-part series from an event by the Meme Factory, from March 24th of this year, in which they give a ~45 minute overview of internet memes. (Warning: much of the content may be NSFW – remember the Internet is Serious Business).

Part One:

Part Two:

Second, a Berkman Luncheon Series presentation by Tim Hwang (ROFLCon founder) titled “The LOLCat-hedral and the Bizarre: A Memescape Manifesto.”

Although I wasn’t able to make this Berkman luncheon, I did see Tim give a similar talk at SXSW interactive this year, which unfortunately isn’t yet one of the ones they’ve posted audio or video from. During the question and answer period of that talk, an audience member commented on the new circulation of old memes (e.g. 25 things about me no one knows) on Facebook, and noted that some people with less context for the word “Meme” were interpreting it as “me-me” (as in, these things are all about me).

Voters expect that the level of public engagement they experienced with Barack Obama during the campaign, much of it occurring online, will continue into the early period of his new administration. A majority of Obama voters expect to carry on efforts to support his policies and try to persuade others to back his initiatives in the coming year; a substantial number expect to hear directly from Obama and his team; and a notable cohort say they have followed the transition online.

Photo by Joe Crimmings

The report resonated well with me since I’ve just finished reading Joe Trippi’s excellent book from 2004, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. (A second edition is also available, including an author’s note and afterword on the 2008 campaign). (Although I do wonder about the difference between “being engaged” and “support[ing] his policies.” The choice of terms in the PEW report which seems to collapse the two. I’d argue the most important way to be engaged is to continue to examine everyone’s policies critically, not just to support them or ask others to do so. For example, the choice of Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the inauguration, while mostly symbolic, certainly deserves widespread critical comment).

The book focuses on Trippi’s experience with the Howard Dean presidential campaign and what he calls “open source” campaigning. Although many remember the campaign’s collapse (and the “scream” which was its highly visible, overplayed sound bite), Trippi argued (in 2004) that it is wrong to think of the campaign as a failure:

. . . it was a stunning victory that will resonate long after the election of 2004 is forgotten.
In fact, it was the opening salvo of a revolution, the sound of hundreds of thousands of Americans turning off their televisions and embracing the only form of technology that has allowed them to be involved gain, to gain control of a process that alienated them decaides ago. In the coming weeks and months and years, these hundreds of thousands will be followed by millions, and this revolution will not be satisfied with overthrowing a corrupt and unresponsive political system. It won’t stop at remaking politics. And it won’t pay attention to borders.

Trippi points the way for later candidates, including Obama, who would use the power of Internet-enabled, grass-roots, bottom-up, hyperlocal organization for political change:

Imagine the presidential candidate who is able to continue Dean for America’s exponential Internet growth . . . when it grows to two, then four, then six million online Americans – which Dean would have had if he’d been the nominee – all linked up on the Internet. At that point, the election will only be the beginning. That president’s mandate would be a living, breathing thing.

Joe Trippi - Photo by J.D. Lasica

In fact, if every business and civic leader in every sector of the economy and in ever segment of society doesn’t think that in the next decade they’re in for Howard Dean-style surprises from the people they’ve been treating with total condescension, they haven’t been paying attention. Every business that spends $20 million on television advertising and just $20,000 to post a static web site that is updated once a month had better watch their backs. Every institution that doesn’t understand that the technology is finally here to allow people to reject what they’re being given and demand what they want had better start paying attention.
The revolution comes for you next.

Ultimately the key metaphor in Trippi’s tale is the contrast between the age of Television and the age of the Internet. (Trippi points to data from Bowling Alone which links the rise of television viewership and the decline of civic engagement). He argues that the ‘net has ushered in an age of empowerment:

In the beginning of this book, I wrote that we had misnamed this era The Information Age. I said that it should be more appropriately be called The Empowerment Age. This is what I meant: The Internet is the most democratizing innovation we’ve ever seen – more so than even the printing press. There has never been a technology this fast, this expansive, with the ability to connect this many people from around the world. If Madison was right, and the people can only govern when they can ‘arm themselves with the power which knowledge give,’ then the Internet is the first technology that truly gives people full access to that knowledge – and empowers them with the ability to do something with it.

Empowerment mural in Detroit - Photo by Taubuch

Related posts from elsewhere:

• The Open Source Force Behind the Obama Campaign – Doc Searls in Linux Journal
• Under Obama, Web Would Be The Way – Washington Post
• You Are Now Friends with Barack Obama – Slate

(Photo by kevingc on flickr, creative commons attribution non-commercial share alike license).

See my rambling notes below:

He basically argued (riffing on many themes from Everything is Miscellaneous) that the internet has changed the nature of fame – that in the pre-internet, mass communications era, fame was incredibly scarce, and drew it’s power from scarcity – very few people could make someone famous, and the number of ways to become famous was very small.

This created a certain kind of fame we call celebrity, along with a bunch of notions of what that means.

But thanks to the internet, we are no longer are interested in the inhuman, they’re-not-like-us-they’re-so-different famous – we’re looking for real, homespun, authentic, not separate, one of us kind of famous.

Examples:

Mahir I kiss you. 1999. *we* made him famous. Not orchestrated by any media conglomerate. (Some people may be condescending here, some not).

Dancing hamsters.

Star wars light sabre kid. (Here there’s definitely condescension, not us at our finest – we’re laughing at him).

These are all things we made famous.

We’ve invented a way to scale conversation – loosing a lot, gaining some. Conversation will fill every vacuum.

Everyone now is famous to 15 people.

We know how fame works in a time of scarcity but not in a time of abundance – now that everyone can recommend media, not just famous people, what does famous look like?

There are more people who are sortof famous – we’re lengthening out the elbow in the power-curve graph of fame – not exactly a long tail, but a thicker elbow and a somewhat thicker tail. More complex, more continuum, more stops along the way between famous and unknown. [My addition - what Kathy Sierra might call a high resolution experience of fame].

The obama bollywood remix.

The “a thousand true fans” concept – basically fame on line softens the power curve in the direction of a continuum.

We’re maing people famous in lots of new ways – one to a few, one to a lot, anonymous fame, pseudonymous fame, mimicing, mocking, mimocking? evanescent, persistant, stupid brilliant mean knowing polished confused confusing

Fame on the internet is human. It’s messy and complicated, just like us.

This is a benefit not only for the steady stream of students (undergrad and graduate) and recent graduates all those colleges and universities pump into the workforce regularly, but also because of the broader institutions they support.

My two favorite examples this year are the MIT Comparative Media Studies program and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School. (As an alumnus of neither Harvard nor MIT, I can recommend both impartially).

Somewhat less well-known in tech circles than the Media Lab, the Comparative Media Studies program practices “applied humanism”:

The . . . program is committed to the art of thinking across media forms, theoretical domains, cultural contexts, and historical periods. Both our graduate and undergraduate programs encourage the bridging of theory and practice, as much through course work as through participation in faculty and independent research projects.

Among the projects that the MIT CMS program currently sponsors / hosts:

• The Convergence Culture Consortium
• Learning Games to Go
• Metamedia
• Project New Media Literacies
• Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab
• MIT Center for Future Civic Media

In addition, check out their Faculty, Theses, Publications, and subscribe to their Events Calendar and News Feed, which often includes podcasts of various events.

This week (Nov. 16th and 17th, 2007), the Convergence Culture Consortium will be hosting the Futures of Entertainment II conference, which (true to their mission):

brings together key industry players who are shaping these new directions in our culture with academics exploring their implications. This year’s conference will consider developments in advertising, cult media, metrics, measurement, and accounting for audiences, cultural labor and audience relations, and mobile platform development.

Check out the full conference schedule for more detail on speakers and subjects. I will be attending and hopefully blogging about much of the conference – though those posts may not appear until the following week due to some vacation time which will take me offline.

Just up the Charles in Harvard Square, the Berkman center focuses on “Internet & Society” in the broad context of the Harvard Law School.

To get a sense of the breadth and depth of the center, just look at:

• The projects linked from their home page, including the Center for Citizen Media, the Citizen Media Law project, the Digital Natives project, and the Internet and Democracy Project, among others)
• Their faculty and fellows, including Yochai Benkler, John Palfrey, Jonathan Zittrain, danah boyd, Dan Gillmor, Doc Searls, Jimmy Wales, and David Weinberger, and that’s just grabbing the names that immediately jump out to me, not to suggest all the others aren’t equally prominent or doing equally fascinating and worthwhile work.

Also be sure to check out (and subscribe to) MediaBerkman, which podcasts / vodcasts many Berkman sponsored events for those not able to make it to Cambridge in person.