Two years ago, in a major address at the Consumer Electronics Show, Brian Roberts announced Project Infinity — our mission to give consumers infinite content available anywhere, on any platform. This vision drives our strategy in next-generation technology and delivers an incredible variety of content across multiple viewing platforms, from the big studios to small independent providers.
Today, at the national Cable Show in LA, Brian Roberts announced another milestone for Project Infinity: we’re increasing the number of movies available On Demand by 450%. We use our next-generation content distribution system, capable of storing and delivering hundreds of thousands of video-on-demand (VOD) titles thereby aligning our TV platform to what we can do online. This system can deliver 11,000+ movie choices to our customers each month On Demand, in every conceivable genre, including comedy, action, drama, independent, foreign, classics and documentaries – with more than 3,000 available in HD. New release movies like Nine, Twilight: New Moon, Leap Year, Daybreakers, Edge of Darkness as well as classics like Casablanca, The Exorcist, The Godfather and The Blues Brothers are just a remote click away. Our customers can also access more than 1,500 movies online as well as buy or rent more than 5,500 movies from the Fancast store.
Our new explosion of movie choices is now available in Philadelphia and Washington, DC, and we’ll continue launching new markets over the next year. This dramatic expansion of movie content On Demand brings our total number of choices to more than 25,000 each month - from movies, music and top TV shows to the most popular kids, sports, lifestyle and local programs.
This increase in capacity is made possible by a new storage and delivery system that leverages Comcast’s national fiber network and uses several centralized "library" servers. In the first phase of this roll-out, we’ll increase our On Demand capacity from 8,500 hours to 70,000 hours. The system offers us flexibility to add servers efficiently to expand that capacity to a virtually unlimited number of national choices in years ahead as we continue to grow the content available to consumers. It is a very scalable and flexible system.
Our goal is to bring more content our customers love, across multiple platforms – live TV, On Demand, online and on-the-go. In addition to movies, we will bring our customers more TV programming, kids content, music and other programming across multiple platforms so that our customers can access the content they want anytime, anywhere. This new delivery system also provides a tremendous opportunity for us to work with even more content providers - large and small - to exponentially expand the number of choices available across platforms. Today is a great leap forward, but it is just the beginning…