Taking a step beyond SEEiT, the platform developed by Comcast that lets customers tune to live TV, set DVR recordings or fire up a TV Everywhere app directly from the Twitter app, Comcast has begun to integrate data from the social network with its X1 platform to show viewers what’s buzzing on TV.
Comcast launched its new trending guide capabilities for the X1 platform last month and offered a glimpse of it at its booth at the recent Cable Show in Los Angeles. In this phase of development, the iconic Twitter bird appears in the guide next to shows that are people are talking about on the social network.
Sam Schwartz, Comcast Cable’s chief business development officer, shed more light on this recently launched X1-Twitter combo on the MSO’s blog.
“We wanted to embed the social buzz from Twitter so our customers can benefit from Twitter's rich conversation about TV when they make their entertainment choices in the X1 guide,” he wrote.
Comcast has also applied a similar trending feature to its VOD platform (again, for X1) using set-top data, and has added “trending” as a sorting filter on the X1 guide alongside categories such as movies, kids and sports.
And going back to SEEiT, Schwartz noted that early data shows that more than 50% of people who engage with it via Twitter watch or record a show as a result.
