The up-tempo corporate atmosphere was on display last week as several staffers described Comcast's freshest product, videoconferencing for the TV using Skype.
Eighteen months of customer focus groups, product planning, business negotiations, and conversations among a handful of Comcast employees had come down to a grilling in January by Smit in the development labs on the 35th floor of the Comcast Center.
Eric Budin was there to lead the demonstration. Cathy Avgiris, David Juliano, and Dave Watson had already seen the Skype service and liked it. The final test would be Smit, whose reputation after a year had been to start business meetings promptly at oh-whatever-hours and to keep them short.
Budin, a vice president for business development, demonstrated Skype for about five minutes, speaking to Comcast employee John Hart in another room. It was flawless and, according to Budin, visceral: Imagine doing this in your living room.
Then Smit "started rapid-fire, asking us questions: You will really be able to get a working prototype by June? Would our customers want it?" Budin recalled. Satisfied with the answers, Smit told Budin to make Skype's development a priority.
Smit kept the meeting to 30 minutes, and the Skype videoconferencing technology was quickly pushed ahead in Comcast's product pipeline. In early June, it was introduced at the industry's cable show in Chicago - beating last week's Skype launch on Facebook by a month.
Comcast expects to have Skype ready for one or two markets this year (but will not say whether Philadelphia will be one of them) and nationally to 23 million Comcast cable-TV customers in 2012.
