Comcast to launch 4-min HD movie downloads

By Yinka Adegoke

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Superfast Internet speeds on Comcast Corp this year will allow subscribers to download a whole high-definition movie in just four minutes, as the largest U.S. cable operator hastens to fight off competition from phone and satellite companies.

Comcast will also offer up to 1,000 HD movies and programs for downloads in another new service slated for 2008, in hopes of winning back customers and boosting its stock which has slumped more than 40 percent in the past year.

The Wideband superfast Internet service will mark a "quantum leap" ahead of its competitors, Comcast Chief Executive Brian Roberts told Reuters in an interview before the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Conventional DSL requires six hours to download an HD movie.

"Wideband takes four channels and bonds them together and will enable speeds to go up from 12-16 megabits a second to over 100 megabits a second," said Roberts.

Roberts said Wideband would be available to millions of homes in 2008, but he would not be more specific on a timeframe or a retail price range for the new service.

"If it's as successful as we plan we'll roll it out to tens of millions of home shortly thereafter," he added.

Super-fast download speeds could render the debate on high-definition disc formats moot, even as Hollywood studios are fighting over whether to back the Blu-Ray or HD-DVD disc systems.

PROJECT INFINITY

Comcast is building a library of 1,000 high-definition choices of channels and on-demand programming by end of 2008, and will eventually have more than 6,000 movies a month with more than 3,000 of them in HD, it said.

The so-called Project Infinity is an ongoing plan to allow subscribers as much video-on-demand TV shows and movies as the company can license, with the widest range of HD available.

"We want to make it demonstrably clear that we have the best TV service," said Roberts.

Analysts have said satellite operators such as DIRECTV Group and EchoStar Communications Corp's Dish Network have done a better job convincing subscribers they offer the best HD television service.

In the second half of 2007 Comcast started losing subscribers and said it expects more to drop out this year. Last month the increasing economic pressure on subscribers forced it to lower its cable revenue growth forecast for 2007.

Comcast, with more 24 million subscribers, has seen its share price fall more than 40 percent since the end of January 2007 as investors worry that the company is facing a weakening U.S. economy and stiffer-than-expected competition from nascent advanced video and Internet services from phone companies AT&T Inc and Verizon Communications Inc.