COMCAST HAS LAUNCHED NEW WEBSITE FANCAST.COM ARTICLE IS FROM WIRED.COMCable giant Comcast on Tuesday plans to unveil Fancast, a TV-and-movie search site that the company hopes will become one of the Web's top entertainment destinations.
After a year of development and six months in beta, the site still isn't all there yet -- but it's already far enough along to become the electronic programming guide that TVGuide.com only wishes it could be.
"The problem is that people don't know how to get their hands on something," says Amy Banse, president of Comcast Interactive Media. "We thought, let's give consumers a one-stop shop."
Fancast is one of several announcements Comcast CEO Brian Roberts is expected to make at Tuesday morning's CES keynote address -- the first by a cable exec. He'll also tout a dramatic expansion of Comcast's video-on-demand lineup and a portable DVR developed in partnership with Panasonic.
The AnyPlay DVR -- announced by Panasonic on Monday, but not available until early 2009 -- is designed to slide out of a docking station on the set-top box and has a pop-up screen, so you can watch it in a plane or a car. It will double as a DVD player, so you'll also be able to watch movies and TV shows you can't find on television.
With Fancast itself, if something is on TV at all, you should be able to find it. If it's in movie theaters or on DVD or available from iTunes, Netflix, Amazon or Web-video sites like Hulu, you can find it too.
Key to the site was Comcast's purchase last year of Fandango, the movie-ticketing site best known for its incredibly annoying sock puppets. News of the deal was greeted with snorts of derision: Would the move pan out, or was it, as blog baron Nick Denton predicted on ValleyWag, "a classic boom-time blunder by an aging corporation eager for the internet limelight"? Given the cable industry's dismal track record on innovation, the smart money was with Denton.
Yet Fancast turns out to be surprisingly well-designed -- and useful enough that the biggest complaint is likely to be, what took so long?
Like IMDB and other sites, it can be searched by title, actor, director and any number of other keywords. But it also takes a crucial next step, leading you directly to what you're looking for.
Take television. You don't have to be a Comcast customer to find a show on your TV lineup. Type in your ZIP code and check off your cable or satellite provider, and Fancast tells you not only what time it's on but whether it's on channel 43 or channel 403.
Other links take you directly to iTunes, Amazon, Netflix and Blockbuster. If you're looking for a film that's still in theaters, Fancast hands you off to Fandango, which provides local times and theater locations, and in many cases a link to buy tickets online.
Fancast is also supposed to play full-screen video from Hulu, CBS.com and -- Roberts announces today -- Viacom networks like MTV and Comedy Central. Unfortunately, this feature is still pretty buggy: On a Mac running Safari, for example, Fancast plays CBS videos but not Hulu's. Tech support is said to be on the case.
Within a few months, Comcast and TiVo customers should be able to click a button on the site and automatically record a show on their DVRs. Banse says Comcast is talking with other cable providers about doing this for their subscribers as well.
Also in the works are "community" features like consumer reviews and sharing recommendations with friends, plus the ability to program your DVR from a mobile phone -- something you can already do in more-advanced countries like Great Britain. "We have another 12 months of work ahead of us," Banse says.
Until then, users will just have to content themselves with the Six° button, which -- you guessed it -- provides links to just about every movie, television show, actor, writer and director anyone has ever been involved with. Kevin Bacon, eat your heart out.
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