Brian Roberts, CEO and President of Comcast, took the stage yesterday in the first keynote address to the assembly from a cable company chief in the entire 41-year history of the CES. Riding on the coattails of Monday's keynote by Panasonic President Toshihiro Sakamoto in which the Roberts made a cameo to announce new tru2way devices, Roberts' Tuesday speech highlighted Comcast’s plans for implementation of DOCSIS 3.0 and delivery of more HD content.

"The age of the closed, proprietary set-top box is behind us," said Roberts, who, like others, says open source development must be a priority for the electronics industry. The new tru2way technology will allow consumers to go to a retail store, purchase a new component such as a DVR or set-top, bring it home and plug it in, "and expect it to support all cable interactive services," Roberts said. He reminded the audience that the cable industry learned a great deal about how open-source stimulates innovation and consumer adoption with the development of the cable modem, based on the old DOCSIS standards.

Along with the 1000+ choices of HD programming expected to be in Comcast homes by the end of 2008, Roberts also announced several new services in the realm of converging technologies. In the coming months, Comcast will be implementing Caller ID to the TV, and a service called SmartZone which will serve as a web-based control of all of a customer's Comcast services. Home voicemail will be sent to a customer's e-mail inbox, and set-tops will send show alerts. The show alert e-mail will include options for setting the home DVR to record the show, or even schedule to record an entire season.

Cable's "next big thing"—DOCSIS 3.0, or “Wideband”—was presented with the help of a new service called Fancast, a website that will serve as a home base for entertainment. The site catalogs shows and movies, offering over 3,000 hours of streaming video and over 11 million pages of entertainment at its launch. To demonstrate the amazing speeds possible under the new standard, Roberts proceeded to download an entire movie in HD in about 5 minutes, a whole 50 times faster than with DSL. Wideband utilizes standard analog channels available on the system, bonding them together to allow transfer speeds of up to 100 mbps.

Tying it all together, Roberts announced that, through the use of tru2way, even customers outside of the Comcast network would be able to use DVR controls on the Fancast website, thanks to the development of a new industry standard. To which I can only say, "bravo!"

by Tony Brown, a junior at the University of Missouri