Comcast This Week: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

It’s been a rollercoaster week for Comcast, and let’s start with the bad: a major Internet outage crippled customers in the Northeast last Sunday night. The glitch, which affected areas from Boston to around the DC Beltway and Maryland, lasted several hours and has been attributed to problems with Comcast’s DNS servers.??

Then there was the ugly: Comcast’s troubles regarding over-the-top (OTT) video. Specifically, Level 3 claimed Comcast strong-armed it into charging extra fees for delivering Netflix video to Comcast’s last-mile customers. For the story, click here. There’s been a ton of analysis about the Level 3/Comcast dispute, and the only thing that has become clear is: it’s all very complicated. Comcast claims Level 3 is just grandstanding to avoid paying customary peering charges. One thing is for sure – Netflix’s streaming of massive amounts of video traffic over the Internet is causing a big disruption to the status quo.??

But these two headaches haven’t prevented Comcast from advancing its own OTT video play, and here’s the “good” part of the story. The operator just posted a video on its corporate blog that demonstrates a nifty new "bookmarklet" app to help Xfinity customers find, record and watch movies and TV shows online and to set up DVR recordings from any site on the Internet.??To watch the Xfinity bookmarklet demo, click here.