Comcast and Time Warner plan to roll out cell phone service later this month. The two announced a partnership with Sprint/Nextel last November.Each company already provides residential telephone service over VoIP. But as companies like Verizon and AT&T roll out television service, the cable companies are trying to diversify their offerings as well. It's possible that Comcast and Time Warner may require subscribers to sign up for broadband or VoIP service in order to qualify for telephone service.
Convergence does have some benefits for the consumer. For example, Comcast has access to plenty of video content, PVR technology, broadband pipelines, and now cell phone service. Comcast plans to make short video clips from E! and other cable networks it owns available to cell phone users.
And starting next year, Comcast plans to roll out a kind of mobile PVR, allowing users to record programs directly to their phones. It's not entirely clear if this is a true PVR in the sense of putting a hard drive in your phone and allowing it to record content. I'd probably be happier with a setup that lets you record shows via a Comcast PVR at home and watch them on the go using SlingPlayer-like software on your phone. Of course, it's possible that Comcast just plans to stream on-demand full-length programming or video clips to your phone while calling it a PVR. But that wouldn't necessarily be all bad either.
