Earlier this week, Comcast announced a relationship with Facebook and a complete reboot of how users navigate with cable TV. Today, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts demonstrated the new experience at the Cable Show, including a cable TV first called “friends trends.”
Here’s a screen grab from Roberts’ presentation (hence the bug) that shows the Facebook app running on the new Xfinity experience. TV shows are listed by the most “likes” from your friends. You can also punch up a basic Facebook news feed. “It’s the beginning of a social networking TV experience,” Roberts said.
And with each TV show, you can share it with your friends, and Facebook “like” it straight from your TV remote. (With more people liking TV shows, the “Friends Trends” experience may become more dynamic). In the Xfinity guide, you can also click “My TV” to see TV recommendations across live, on demand and DVR’d content based on your viewing behavior and shows you’ve “favorited” (no social signals here, at least yet.)
The new Xfinity experience runs entirely off the cloud. “It can be innovated and changed on the fly, in the cloud, and it changes all across the country simultaneously,” Roberts explained. Xfinity also includes integrated search — type the first few numbers (that correspond to letters) on your remote, and it pops up search results spanning live, upcoming, on-demand and recorded content EVEN if the search topic appeared in a show.
Among the apps that Roberts demonstrated, there’s weather from Weather.com, live customizable traffic maps (and cameras if available), Pandora and Facebook. Roberts said they’ll also soon add live sports scores to the program guide.
Compared to Comcast’s existing service, the new Xfinity is a huge leap forward with a user-friendly experience and some rather powerful features. The service is live in testing in Augusta, Georgia. We’ll link the video replay of the today’s Cable Show demonstration when it becomes available.
