CES 2018 was not the stage for a battle to the death between Amazon, Google, and Apple. It was home to a plethora of product announcements, each a little victory for the big-three consumer brands, but no one dealt a knockout blow. But working in the background, cable TV giant Comcast prepared an opening salvo in its fight to sew up the Smart Home as a Service (SHaaS) market. Comcast has been developing its Xfinity Home platform for a few years now, and has just opened the doors for third-party integrations – setting the stage for a licensing business that could go global, if it pulls the trigger. There’s an inherent tension between the new BYOD approach and the existing…