Written by: Roshan Dwivedi
Now that Comcast has made a major investment in Vox Media, and is likely about to announce a similar deal with BuzzFeed, you would think that it would be done for a little while on the Web. Not so. According to multiple sources, Comcast is courting Vox Media and BuzzFeed, as well as a host of other websites and digital publishers, for a brand-new video platform called Watchable.
Don’t get too wedded to the name just yet, though; as Business Insider reports, it’s possible that Comcast might opt for another name entirely by the time the service goes live in a few weeks. It was previously thinking of calling the service Gazeebo (yuck), and Variety reports that it’s known as Project Helen internally.
Though Comcast is also still firming up its partners for said service, the various digital publishers that Comcast is rumored to be working with thus far—including Vox, BuzzFeed, The Onion, Refinery29, Vice, and NBC Sports, to name a few—are all allegedly being asked to sign a multi-year agreement with the cable giant. Said agreement would give Comcast’s new video on demand service a ton of “unlicensed, original video content,” as Business Insider describes, which would be viewable by any Comcast user with an Xfinity X1 set-top box.
At some future point, Comcast would also open up its video streaming service for viewing via iOS or Android devices. And said partners could also presumably post their content wherever they want, as Business Insider notes that the deals they’re working out with Comcast are non-exclusive.
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