Comcast/NBCU Announce Hackathon Winners
Our Take
On Friday it was announced that 17 media companies–a list comprised of programmers, vendors and MVPDs, including Comcast–have formed the Steaming Video Alliance to propose standards, policies and best practices for streaming video assets. This move suggests that the cable companies involved are indeed serious about enhancing the quality of streaming video–and mean to compete with other Internet providers. Another development in this regard is today’s announcement from Comcast/NBCU on the winners of its hackathon, based on the theme “New Forms of Storytelling Driven by Technology.” As this article from Light Reading points out, “The hackathons are partly a bid to recruit new developers (Comcast/NBCU hired three after the New York event), and partly a way to foster new agile development processes. Comcast CTO Tony Werner has made no secret of the fact that he believes agile development is critical to the cable industry’s future success.”
With their second hackathon in the books, Comcast and Comcast-owned NBCUniversal have awarded the grand prize for their latest coding contest to the developers behind a new application called “Top 3 I Want To See.”