By Matt Strauss
It’s clear that for many people, life doesn’t always operate around a primetime television schedule. And even if you’re home when your favorite show is on, you may be preoccupied in another room or over-ruled by someone else in the family who wants to watch something else.
The DVR has changed the game for millions of people and allowed for more flexible viewing. However for most viewers, recordings are still tethered to the TVs in your home and don’t provide access for viewing on the devices that have become such an integral part of our lives.
We’re aiming to change that, by setting your TV and recordings free. Today, we’re continuing our rollout of X1 DVR with cloud technology in the San Francisco Bay Area and Houston and giving customers greater flexibility with their live and recorded content. They’ll be able to stream and download their recorded DVR programs to any internet-connected device; and while in the home, turn any mobile device into a television with the ability to stream virtually the entire channel line-up and Xfinity On Demand catalog
Now, just load up the Xfinity TV app on your phone or tablet, tap over to your list of DVR recordings and start streaming any content straight to your device. It’s that simple. Or, if you know you’re going to be on a plane without an internet connection, just download the movie or show to your device and watch it later.
That same app also now gives you virtually the full X1 TV experience on any screen in your home, including the full set of features like channel guide, On Demand, DVR and more.
The magic behind these new features comes from the X1’s cloud technology. Like other “cloud” services such as webmail, collaborative documents, or online storage, we’ve taken the “brains” of the set-top box out of the hardware and moved it to the cloud. By moving from a hardware-based approach to a cloud-based experience, we’re able to innovate much faster and deliver new features and updates to users in real-time -- much like a webpage or an app.
Live in-home streaming and X1 DVR with cloud technology are already available in Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington D.C., and we’re excited that subscribers in both the Bay Area and Houston now have access to these useful features. And we expect that most of our X1 customers will have access to these features by the end of year.
To get-started, just download the Xfinity TV App from the app store or Google Play or visit xfinitytv.comcast.net to stream directly to your computer.
