With the NBCU news drowning out other Comcast conversation, I thought I’d take this moment to tally up the gifts the MSO has promised to all the good little subscriber girls and boys this year. First and most important, TV Everywhere, er, On Demand Online, um, Xfinity is scheduled to roll out before the start of Hanukkah on December 12th. Yes, that’s right, Broadcasting and Cable has discovered that the new name for the Comcast service will be Xfinity. Actually it will be Fancast Xfinity TV, but you can call it Xfinity for short. If you’ve been following along with the story so far, the new Comcast offering will let subscribers to both television and broadband service access TV shows anywhere and everywhere from a Comcast portal site. Never again be without NCIS, NCIS LA, or the upcoming NCIS Louisville, NCIS Dubuque, or NCIS Stars Hollow.
Of course, if you want to watch a lot of TV online, you’ll need to keep track of your bandwidth usage. Comcast now has a bandwidth meter in trials that should roll out to all customers in Q1 of next year. We first heard about ISP bandwidth meters back when operators started testing bill-by-the-byte models in 2008. Now that Comcast has one coming to market (with an independent third-party company validating measurements), it will be interesting to see any aggregate data collected on consumer bandwidth usage. How much are we really using the interwebs? I’ll be curious to get a look at not only how online TV affects my personal bandwidth numbers, but also how Slacker usage, Squeezebox listening, and massive photo uploading impact my meter readings.
Finally, Comcast has promised that remote DVR scheduling is on the horizon. Granted the company’s been a bit busy of late, but I’ve been checking on the feature landing page and haven’t seen any changes to note from Dave’s original report. Then again, Comcast has probably been keeping tabs on whether we’ve been bad or good. If we all stay on the non-naughty list, maybe we’ll see remote DVR features by CES.