The Cable Show Comes To Town

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Mari chats with ESPN VP Damon Phillips

The Cable Show has returned to DC and while the NCTA’s annual convention is winding down, our coverage is still rolling in. Mari, who hosted the Navigation Station panel (shown above), is writing under the Light Reading masthead and I’m preparing a story that touches on the cable industry’s complex and evolving corporate relationships with two scoops from familiar faces thrown in for good measure. Beyond that, I’ve got a couple more interesting products/solutions to share in the coming days. But, until then, here’s a sampling of my Cable Show tweets:

5 thoughts on “The Cable Show Comes To Town”

  1. Any TiVo hardware being shown in their booth?

    Afraid to ask, but was the roku premiere implementation faster than the standard premiere?

  2. I didn’t actually venture into TiVo’s booth – but I assume any new hardware would only be shown or discussed behind closed doors at this time. Regarding the ActiveVideo tech demo, I can’t say for certain as I wasn’t handed the remote and this probably is a subset of TiVo functionality, anyway – so it may not be a fair comparison. But ActiveVideo’s approach is to take a HTML5 UI and pipe it down via the cloud – in this case, at the convention center, “the cloud” was servers on the other side of their booth’s wall.

  3. “Just saw an amazing “proof of concept” — the TiVo experience running WITHIN a Roku app”

    If only they could flip it. I’d be incredibly happy with a TiVo that could run the Roku experience without having to change inputs and remotes.

    I want that TiVo peanut in my hands at all possible times…

    —–

    Also, I think The Cable Show has the best TV show theme song.

  4. I thought Brian Roberts (CEO Comcast) presentation was pretty slick. The new X2 cloud UI looks fabulous. Graphically its kind of like Windows 8 + Apple (including Siri’s voice) + X1 platform. It appeared to run pretty quick, and the tiny ARM powered Xi3 set top box is finally a breath of fresh air in terms of performance and energy consumption.

    I hope they license the X1 / X2 platform to other interested cable providers. It could be a whole new revenue stream for Comcast offering it as a SaaS solution to many smaller / independent operators who are members of the ACA that would never have the resources to develop such a platform from the ground up.

    Here’s a link to Comcast’s blog with pictures and even a link to Brian Roberts presentation. Check it out, its really slick stuff.
    http://corporate.comcast.com/comcast-voices/x2-find-the-right-content-for-your-family

  5. Well the HBO Go on Apple TV won’t matter to me, since as a Comcast subscriber I won’t be able to use it anyway based on the Roku situation.

    As far as the Comcast X2… seriously? Go to the X1 forums at:

    http://forums.comcast.com/t5/XfinityTV-and-Equipment/X1-Forum/td-p/1557105

    and see if you still want it. Also I was trying to guess how many households actually have the X1 now that its about a year since it was announced. My guess is less than 100,000 of Comcast’s 23 Million customers based on:

    – You have to have triple play to get the X1
    – Comcast added 200,000 phone customers. Assume ALL of those are triple play customers. Probably not that far off.
    – They’ve rolled out the X1 to what 12 of 80 markets in the last year? Let’s call that 1/8th of their customers.

    So the MOST customers there might be running X1 right now is 100,000. Out of maybe 23 Million? Meaning something like 0.4% of their customers are running X1 a year after it was introduced.

    I wouldn’t get too excited.

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