A million years ago, and for a very brief period of time, I did some public relations work with the Comcast High-Speed Internet division. At the time, Comcast was pushing its Comcast.net portal as a destination site for news, video, entertainment and applications like photo sharing and shopping. Unfortunately, only Comcast subscribers could access everything on the site, so it wasn’t a very attractive story to the consumer media.
Anyway, today Comcast announced that it’s adding Fandango to its online portal (for $200 million?). Not Comcast.net, but the upcoming Fancast.com. Apparently Fancast will offer search and organizing functionality for video across a number of different devices and channels. (TV, computers, DVDs, etc.) Kind of a modern-day TV Guide.
Om Malik wondered who would own the new TV Guide space, and Broadband Daily has an article today (subscription only) about how Comcast is trying to compete with Yahoo and Google portals.
My question is: do we really need a portal site anymore? I love widgets and would rather get just the content and applications I want in widget form. Sure, I’ll still need a guide to find good content on the Web and on the TV, but why get it on a portal? Widgets are wonderful. Can Fancast.com be anything more than Fandango-tastic?
i think it would be key if they had a portal and a widget, personalized to my account so i can grab it at home on my mac and at work