CHICAGO—Going where no major MSO has gone before, Comcast intends to introduce a personalized, Internet-connected TV guide and content navigation service for its digital cable subscribers as part of its push to offer video content on multiple display devices and duke it out with telco TV, satellite TV and over-the-top (OTT) video providers.
Just as he demonstrated the first iPad application for cable last year, Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts demonstrated the new cloud-based service, dubbed ‘Xcalibur,’ at a Cable Show keynote session here last week. Wielding a powerful new RF-based remote control, Roberts showed off the mix of channel guide, search and navigation tools, highlight videos, recommendation engines, and web apps and widgets in the Xcalibur portfolio, including weather and traffic data, social networking links with Facebook and links to the Pandora Internet radio service.
In particular, Roberts played up a new social networking feature called “Friend Trends,” which is designed to let viewers exchange text messages with each other while watching their favorite shows. “The guide becomes what your friends tell you to watch, not what the alphabet soup wants you to watch,” he said.
Although it’s still just in the testing stages, the Xcalibur service is a big deal for the cable industry. Because it is both IP-based and web-based, the guide will enable MSOs like Comcast to break free of their long-standing dependence on set-top-based guides, with their clunky channel grids and limited video highlights. “Moving to IP finally frees navigation and the programming guide from the tyranny of legacy set-top boxes, a problem that has dogged the industry for a generation,” wrote Craig Moffett, senior analyst of Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., in a note sent to clients on Friday.
The move to the cloud will also enable cable operators to put uniform TV guides on any video display device, including tablets, game consoles, smart phones, laptops and new connected TVs. Further, with a network-based guide, cable providers will be able to update the listings and apps quickly and frequently. “It’s the beginning of the next-generation by taking the guide and putting it in the cloud,” Roberts said. He stressed that the Xcalibur guide’s user interface and the apps that run on it “can be innovated and changed on the fly and in the cloud and changed all over the country instantaneously."
In preparation for the launch of the new guide, Comcast has been testing a new service, called Xcalibur Spectrum, on an advanced HD-DVR set-top box in a few dozen cable homes in Augusta, Ga. But the MSO hasn’t said how or when it will roll out Xcalibur commercially yet.
At the Cable Show, Comcast also revealed the first four vendor partners for Xcalibur, which has been shrouded in secrecy for more than a year. The MSO said its initial partners include thePlatform for content management, Pace for the hybrid QAM and IP set-top boxes, Intel Corp. for chips and Facebook for social networking.
In addition to demonstrating Xcalibur, Roberts showed off a set of eight DOCSIS 3.0 cable modems acting in tandem to download videos at super-fast speeds over the MSO’s Chicago cable plant. As shown in a video presented during his stage appearance, the eight custom-built modems, supported by a Cisco Systems CMTS, downloaded the entire fifth season of NBC’s 30 Rock series in less than two minutes. A speed meter measuring the download rate indicated that the download speed came close to 1.1 Gbps.
Following his presentations, Roberts tackled Comcast’s recent acquisition of NBC Universal in a brief panel discussion. He shrugged off the question of whether the deal shows that Comcast believes that “content is king.” “I’ve never bought into who’s king or who’s queen,” he said. “You start by saying, what’s a great business? We wanted to get larger.”
Alan Breznick is a Toronto-based senior analyst at Heavy Reading, part of the Light Reading Communications Network at UBM TechWeb. He was in Chicago last week covering the Cable Show for Cartt.ca.
