Xfinity On Demand Continues Its TiVo Invasion

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tivo-xfinity

TiVo Premiere owners in Western Washington and Minnesota woke up to Xfinity On Demand this morning, as Comcast’s TiVo roll out continues. If you recall, this technology tie up allows any retail TiVo Premiere DVR to receive cable operator’s previously out-of-reach library of on demand programming — both freebies and pay per view. Deployment began this past spring in San Francisco, but has quickly accelerated as you can see from the chart below… with two happy customers reaching out today. Kevin near Bellvue, WA has been impressed with the responsiveness of both the app and shifting through content – saying TiVo bests Comcast’s own set-top box. As a non-Comcast customer and given TiVo burying the hatchet (in Verizon’s back), I sure hope we FiOS TV customers might one day receive similar on demand functionality. Make it so?

tivo-xfinity-sites

(Thanks Kevin H & Dan J!)

23 thoughts on “Xfinity On Demand Continues Its TiVo Invasion”

  1. It looks like these new markets make Xfinity On Demand now available to close to 50% of Comcast’s footprint. My back of the napkin estimates using Nielsen Designated Market Areas (DMAs) and Comcast Spotlight marketing information brings the total subscribers who may have access to this in the 10 million range. Now the real question is whether we will finally see some uptick in TiVo Retail subs in the upcoming quarters. I would think the availability of On Demand coupled with the release of the TiVo Stream and a small uptick in advertising from Comcast and TiVo may be enough to move the needle a little and at least continue to reduce the churn in retail subscribers.

  3. Asterisk means deployment hasn’t been completed. So we figure those are the newer regions. Some neighborhoods will have received it, some won’t.

    As to wether or not this moves the needle or significantly limits churn, who knows…

  4. x2 on “I sure hope we FiOS TV customers might one day receive similar on demand functionality”. Well I was a Verizon FiOS customer but now a Frontier FiOS customer. Either way, I would love for my provider to support this.

    BTW: News on TiVo extender release date?

  5. This is almost enough to get me to upgrade my Series3. Almost. Release the IP box (mini) and I’m all in for upgrading my entire home.

    I just wish there was some way to transfer my entire subscription list!

  7. I’m not getting a good feeling on the TiVo Mini IP-STB hitting soon. But maybe I’m unreasonably pessimistic. On the other hand, a few extra months to bake and overcome that locked Premiere tuner issue might be worth the wait.

    I’m not getting a good feeling about it either. I think we will see it released to their MSO partners first since they can control expectations and help with the set-up. As much as I want one, TiVo is probably smart to wait to release it after they have the dynamic tuner hijacking working and working well. My prediction for a retail release is February 2013.

  9. I could see February. TiVo has to get the next update out before the mini can roll out. TiVo tends not to release anything in December due to vacation time. If TiVo begins early rollout the end of October this gives about two weeks of soaking before full rollout starts which puts you at Thanksgiving. CES is January and we know TiVo never announces anything at CES.

    TiVo will probably have the mini on display at CES and once the flood of press releases stop they will probably announce a release date a month later which puts you at February/march.

  10. Where are the bad feelings about the Mini missing the fall target coming from? No beta yet? I’m anxiously waiting for it… so any data would be good.

  11. I was in the SF Bay Area roll out and there were some glitches and slowness at first. But in the last few months they’ve done some nice updates that have brought the snappiness and speed of browsing way up. Browsing shows on the OnDemand menus is now faster than scrolling through items on the Now Playing menu.

    When recommending TiVo to people in the past I would always cringe a little at the no OnDemand caveat since that’s a show stopper for a lot of people. Not anymore. For what Comcast charges for their HD DVR and how awful the UI is on the Comcast gear, the TiVo with OnDemand is a pretty easy sell.

  13. locked Premiere tuner issue???
    What is that??

    I hope they don’t delay the Mini to next year. I already got screwed with the Stream by not being able to use it with android devices yet.

    I’m all ready to by a mini and a stream but TiVo seems to be really dragging their feet.

    I guess I’ll be keeping my third FiOS cable card longer than I had planned? I was hoping to be down to two cable cards by now. I used to have eight a few years ago, so I have made alot of progress.

  14. I am guessing he is referring to the fact the TiVo Mini with its currents software steals a tuner permanently. Future updates are supposed to make the tuner allocation dynamic so it only steals a tuner when it needs it. This would also open it up to use with the Premieres rather than limiting it to the XL4/Elite.

  15. aaronwt-

    Dave’s referring to the initial requirement to dedicate a tuner on your Premier XL4 to the IP STB. They don’t have it doing dynamic tuner allocation when you turn the IP STB on and decide to watch live TV. Yet. The assumption is they’ll have to get this working at some point.

    Yeah, I’ll be keeping my guest bedroom Tivo HD unit running until the IP STB comes out, with the current working cable card I’d like to get rid of. The assumption is that this would save me both the Comcast $8.00/month service fee (-$2.50 for customer owned equipment) and potentially a portion or all of the $12.95/month I pay TiVo for that box. We’ll have to see of course.

    In my case this box is just there as a host for a SlingBox since I spend a lot of time in hotels. And the IP STB would be a better option since it could stream shows from HBO etc that are otherwise locked down. Sure I could get a Premier for this room, but I’m not interested in paying MORE for what I’m doing than now thanks.

    As far as the Comcast On Demand thing, I’ll say in the time we’ve had it in SFO, I’ve only used it sporadically. Its nice to have it, but its not that big a deal honestly. I’m not using it as much as I expected.

    The fact that the search function inside Comcast On Demand doesn’t work so once you’re in there you end up navigating around the stupid blue buttons that Comcast has used forever with the arbitrary hierarchy often sends me to my Apple TV to watch something there instead.

  16. They have also expanded into the Seattle Area, as I came home last night to find my two Premieres with Xfinity on Demand.

  17. Very surprised that Chicago doesn’t seem to be part of this role out. Especially to compete with RCN offering TiVo right now.

  18. I live in the Boston area and other than seeing a billboard briefly a few months back on I93, I haven’t seen a single advertisement since. I thought we were supposed to see some advertising and support by Comcast.

  20. No one seems to be mentioning the line on TiVo’s support page:

    “Customers with a Cisco/Scientific Atlantic CableCARD will not have XFINITY On Demand available at this time.”

    Comcast swapped out everyone’s CableCards to Scientific Atlanta cards in Houston about a couple of years ago. Boo!

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