As the 2024 college football season officially kicks off, new Big Ten members Oregon, Washington, USC and UCLA could all see TV blackouts on Comcast’s Xfinity pay TV platform this weekend due to an ongoing carrier dispute.

Washington’s soccer game against former Pac-12 conference rival Oregon State on Monday night was the first match impacted.

When fans in the coverage area of the four programs attempt to watch the Big Ten Network, they are redirected to a Big Ten website which urges them to “take action now” and call Comcast.  

Also Read: New Conference Alignments, Expanded Playoffs Mark Changes for Upcoming College Football Season

If the impasse between the cable giant and the regional sports network isn’t solved by Saturday, Comcast will continue to black out live events involving the four new Big Ten schools in their local markets. 

That includes third-ranked Oregon's season opener against Idaho on Saturday afternoon, and Washington's first game against Weber State on Saturday night. (USC plays LSU on ESPN Sunday night and UCLA opens against Hawaii Saturday on CBS and Paramount Plus.)

All four West Coast schools are beginning their first academic year under the Big 10 banner after decades of allegiance to the venerable but now forsaken Pac-12. 

The disagreement reportedly hinges on Comcast’s refusal to pay higher in-market rates for the four new Big Ten programs, following their new addition to the division. 

The Big Ten Network, a joint venture between Fox and the Big Ten athletic conference, said in a statement that Comcast “declined to expand along with us.

“The Big Ten Network is proud to present an expanded slate of live sporting events featuring the newest members of the B1G conference," the network added. "However, most Comcast subscribers will not see these games. Comcast Xfinity viewers in many areas will not have access to live broadcasts of the highly anticipated inaugural B1G season games for Oregon, UCLA, USC and Washington.”

Comcast's response: “We’re sensitive to the impact these costs have on our customers and have been in discussions with Fox and the Big Ten Network to find a solution to make certain former Pac-12 games available to the people who want them while not forcing others to pay for content they don’t want to watch.  We hope to be able to reach a fair agreement with FOX and the Big Ten Network to be able to offer these games to our customers.” 

Some misguided NBA enthusiasts on the social internet reveled Wednesday at the possibility of future NBA Finals telecasts no longer festooned with the omnipresent YouTube TV logo, perhaps assuming the ascendance of Comcast’s Xfinity pay TV platform as the league’s “Official TV Service” meant that the Google/Alphabet-owned vMVPD's marketing role had somehow been replaced. 

But that's not what's happening, a league source told Next TV Thursday. 

It is true that as part of the NBA’s new $2.5 billion-a-season deal with Comcast's NBCUniversal unit, Comcast Cable’s Xfinity brand will become the “official TV service” of the NBA, WNBA and USA Basketball (despite the fact that more than 2 million users bolted the platform in 2023 alone).

Also Read: NBA Says Warner ‘Didn’t Match the Terms’ of Amazon’s Proposal, Enters Long-Term TV Deal With Online Retail Giant

“The partnership includes collaboration on marketing and storytelling opportunities, virtual signage during game telecasts and activations at marquee NBA, WNBA and USA Basketball events,” the league said in an announcement about the broader deal. 

YouTube TV has paid to occupy the role of "presenting sponsor" of the NBA Finals since 2018, and that role is not changing, our source told us, noting that the Google and NBCU deals “are not in conflict.” 

That won’t be welcome news to everyone. 

After watching the 2023 NBA Finals featuring the Denver Nuggets and Miami Heat, Awful Announcing writer Devin Raab noted: “The degree to which these ads are omnipresent is breathtaking even by modern sports standards. For starters, the NBA Finals logo itself has ‘Presented by YouTube TV’ officially attached underneath it, meaning that every time you see that logo in branding either throughout the stadium or in graphics, you are also seeing the gaudy, red YouTube TV logo. There are also, throughout these broadcasts, commercial spots for YouTube TV and narrated voiceovers explaining that these games are sponsored by YouTube TV. You would think this would be sufficient, that this alone would represent so much product placement that any more would be overkill; after all, by tethering the YouTube TV logo to the Finals logo, you’re seeing it almost everywhere you look throughout the stadium, including the stanchion of the hoop and the chairs the players are sitting on. But oh no, this is merely the tip of the iceberg.”

Comcast announced Monday the release of Now TV Latino, a Spanish-language version of the “Now”-branded skinny bundle it launched a year ago.

The $10-a-month offering includes more than 25 live streaming channels, and comes bundled with a Peacock subscription.

Also read: Comcast Introduces $20-a-Month Now TV For Its Broadband-Only Customers, Delivering Peacock, Live Pay TV Channels and FASTs

“As we continue our focus on providing unique experiences, differentiated products and bring value to Hispanic consumers, [the platform] provides great Spanish-language and English-language content at an affordable price,” said José Velez Silva, VP of multicultural strategy, operations and community engagement at Comcast, in a statement.

The cable company said that Now TV Latino will feature movies, novelas, sports and live news across both paid streaming and free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) formats.

Channels in the bundle include Estrella News, Caracol Televisión, CentroAméricaTV, WAPA America and various Telemundo FAST channels like Noticias Telemundo Ahora, Telemundo Noticias Florida, Telemundo Noticias Texas, Telemundo Noticias California and more.

The new package is built on technology developed for Sky’s Now TV platform, which launched in May within the Xfinity Stream app as a $20 monthly streaming product.

Also Read: Fubo Launches on Xumo and Xfinity Flex Streaming Devices

The service, available only to Xfinity’s broadband customers, can be purchased standalone or as an add-on to Xfinity’s other streaming offerings.

In addition, the streaming service can also be bundled with Comcast’s cable service, or the recently released streaming bundle that combines Peacock with Netflix and Apple TV Plus for $15 a month.

“We’ve been bundling video successfully and creatively for 60 years,” Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts said in May of the aforementioned bundle. “This is the latest iteration of that.“

Comcast’s plan to keep its pay TV business alive with a variety of streaming bundles is a likely response to the nosedive that’s plagued cable operators for years, causing the telecommunications giant to lose nearly 500,000 cable customers in the first quarter.

Comcast customers who purchase the bundle can also order a Xumo Stream Box, powered by Comcast and Charter’s joint set-top OS, for no additional cost.

Counting down to the Summer Olympics in Paris, NBCUniversal plans to air more than 200 hours of live coverage as American athletes compete to represent their country and go for the gold.

NBCU and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee are rebranding the Olympic Trials as “Making Team USA,” and the coverage on NBC, Peacock and USA Network is being presented by Xfinity, parent company Comcast’s broadband and cable brand.

Making Team USA live coverage starts this month with wrestling, rowing, canoe/kayaking. In June, slots on the swimming, diving, track and field and gymnastics will be competed for, with NBC airing 14 nights of coverage in primetime.

Every trial will be streamed live on Peacock.

“All the drama we love about the Olympics begins with ‘Making Team USA,’ when our nation’s best athletes vie to make the most competitive team in the world. In some events, it’s harder to qualify for the U.S. team than it is to win a medal at the Olympics themselves,” Molly Solomon, executive producer and president of NBC Olympics Production, said. 

“Earning a place on Team USA is a lifelong dream for these athletes and most of them get only one opportunity to do so, which is what makes the competition so fierce and the drama so compelling,” Solomon said. “But the reward for all the hard work is sweet — once you make Team USA, you’re an Olympian for life.”

Among the highlights will be watching seven-time Olympic gold medalist Katie Ledecky try out for the swimming team. 

In gymnastics, four-time gold medalist Simone Biles will be trying out, along with Suni Lee, who earned three medals at the Tokyo Summer Olympics.

Six-time world champion Noah Lyles, hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone and women’s 100-meter champ Sha’Carri Richardson will be competing in track and field.

Team USA trials for boxing, the marathon and table tennis were held earlier.

NBCU will also be covering the tryouts for the Paralympic team. 

“The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Team Trials offer some of the best competition anywhere in the world — a testament to the excellence and depth of the athlete pool striving to represent Team USA in Paris this summer,” Rocky Harris, USOPC chief of sport and athlete services, said. “We are looking forward to the Paris Games  — opening just a little more than 100 days from now — but first we join fans around the country in celebrating the awesome effort of athletes giving their all to make Team USA.”

Xfinity, the presenting sponsor, is rolling out its Xfinity Athlete Connections program, which helps keep athletes who qualify for the Olympic and Paralympic teams connected to friends and family while competing.

“The Olympic and Paralympic Games Paris 2024 will be nothing short of extraordinary,” said Matt Lederer, VP, brand partnerships & amplification at Xfinity. “As a proud partner of Team USA, we’re honored to spotlight the incredible athletes on their path to Making Team USA“And, our Xfinity Athlete Connections program will keep Team USA athletes connected to what matters most during their pursuit of Olympic and Paralympic gold.”

All Olympic and Paralympic Trials coverage can be streamed on NBC Olympics.com and the NBC Sports app.

The Paris Olympics will be held from July 26 through August 11. 

PHILADELPHIA — Comcast held an upfront-style event on Tuesday showing off home-technology improvements coming to Xfinity customers sooner or later, including motion-detection services in the home, speed boosts to outdoor Wi-Fi hot spots and a new home gateway device that could be connected to hundreds of home devices.

The cable company, parent to NBCUniversal, brought in Saturday Night Live star Kenan Thompson as a celebrity emcee and screened a commercial touting the Paris 2024 Olympics for analysts, reporters and other guests. Also shown was a spot directed by Kathryn Bigelow that depicts a reunion of aging military pilots who relive their aerial exploits using virtual-reality headsets. The latter ad’s tagline was, “Comcast 10G WiFi Built to Wow.”

“Our mission is simple: we’re going to connect people with what they need and love now and in the future,” Comcast Cable CEO Dave Watson said during the gathering, called Comcast Converge and held at the Comcast Technology Center super-tall building in downtown Philadelphia.

Demonstrations included big-screen displays of English professional soccer presented in “high fidelity video,” combining high-resolution 4K video that looked far superior to 720p high-definition TV in a side-by-side display. The technology, which officials said was recently tested in trials for Comcast employees, also included high-dynamic-range audio and trimmed the latency delay in pre-recorded soccer action by about 20 seconds in the demonstration. During demos, Comcast said the goal was "10 seconds from the moment something happens in the stadium until you are experiencing it in your home." No timetable was offered for when it might be rolled out to customers.

A new home gateway device, the XB10, which officials said was being introduced today, includes Wi-Fi 7 and DOCSIS 4.0 technology that can connect to 300 different devices in the home. It's expected to be introduced in the second half of the year, officials said. Watson said the average Xfinity home now has 30 devices connected to WiFi, an increase of 40% over five years, and the forecast is for bandwidth consumption to keep on rising.

Officials said speed boosts are being rolled out to Xfinity Mobile WiFi hotspots that will enable 1 gigabit-per-second speeds. And motion detection will be added to Xfinity home gateways that will allow, for example, a parent at work to know when their children come home from school and then remotely manage what WiFi-connected devices the kids are allowed to use while they are supposed to be doing their homework. 

This story was updated to correct the speed enabled by the speed boosts.

In the days leading up to the Super Bowl, Xfinity is running a new campaign featuring 49ers running back Christian McCaffrey and another Christian McCaffrey who doesn’t quite measure up.

The point of the campaign, created by Whistle, is that other providers don’t measure up to Xfinity.

The spot announces that “not all Christian McCaffreys are the same,” introducing the NFL All-Pro and his namesake, a restaurant manager from Belvidere, Illinois. “I make tacos,” the less well-known McCaffrey says.

With both dressed in similar workout togs, the two McCaffreys go through a series of drills, running, catching footballs and pushing a tackling dummy.

It’s easy to tell the football player from the restaurant manager.

“Don’t settle for slow … or unreliable … or weak,"  the spot says. “Get real deal,  speed, reliability and power with Xfinity.”

The spot will air across linear networks throughout February.

The video will also appear on Whistle’s and Xfinity’s social channels, including TikTok, Instagram, Facebook Reels and YouTube shorts.

“All three challenges that Christian McCaffrey and his namesake will participate in lean into key product features of our internet — speed, reliability and power — and demonstrate that just because another offering technically delivers the internet doesn’t mean they are the same,” Comcast VP of brand partnerships and activation Matt Lederer said. “We are grateful Christian saw the playfulness of the campaign and was such a good sport.”  

Like other cable companies, Comcast has been under pressure from lower-price wireless broadband providers. In the fourth quarter, Comcast lost 34,000 broadband customers.

“It was a ton of fun to try challenges knowing I would be competing against another Christian namesake,” said Christian McCaffrey of the 49ers, who will take on the Kansas City Chiefs February 11 in the Super Bowl. “The fact that he is a fan of mine and was willing to try and keep up with me makes me very much appreciate him and his good nature.” 

Said restaurant manager Christian McCaffrey: “I have always been a Christian McCaffrey fan, given the crazy coincidence that we have the same name, and people bring it up to me all the time. I loved the campaign concept and thought about the playfulness of it, trying to hold my own and compare skills against a legend that wears the same name on his back every Sunday.” 

Team Whistle is a sports and media company that specializes in data-driven content creation and distribution.

“At Whistle, our playbook is focused on creating shareable moments in sports culture,” Team Whistle VP of brand partnerships Corey Radel said. “We were so excited to partner with both Xfinity and Christian to deliver these commercial assets across the social platforms our audience will be scrolling while they’re watching the big game on February 11th.” 

Anthem Sports & Entertainment said its AXS TV has gained new distribution in five key markets with Comcast’s Xfinity pay television service.

Beginning Tuesday, AXS TV will be available in Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Nashville, Miami and West Palm Beach.

“This announcement marks an incredible opportunity for AXS TV, and we are truly appreciative of Comcast and its continued recognition of the importance of supporting independent networks,” Anthony Cicione, president of Entertainment at AXS TV owner Anthem, said.

“Each of these five major markets helps AXS TV expand its reach even further across the country,” Cicione said. “We have many new and exciting original series and events about to debut, as well as the return of several fan favorites, and we look forward to sharing them all with viewers throughout Washington, D.C., Nashville, Atlanta, Miami, and West Palm Beach starting December 12.”

Also Read: AXS TV, ‘Spin’ Present ‘100 Greatest Rock Stars’

Some of the new markets have already been represented in programming on AXS TV. 

Most recently, the network highlighted some of Florida’s most famous festivals on its music-trivia show Parking Lot Payday and Nashville is home to the upcoming second season of Vinyl Obsession, which is filmed at the renowned Grimey’s record store. 

Comcast has integrated AirPlay mirroring capabilities into its Xfinity Stream app, allowing users to essentially carry their pay TV subscription on their Apple or Android mobile device and watch it on any AirPlay-enabled television.

For a cable company that lost nearly 11% of its video customers last year, it seems like a bit of a duh moment. No. 2 U.S. cable operator Charter Communications, after all, has supported AirPlay on its Spectrum TV app for some time.

Many connected TV devices and smart TV operating systems beyond the Apple TV 4K now support AirPlay — notably, the latter iterations of Roku and Amazon Fire TV TVOS support Apple’s inter-device connection standard.

Indeed, whether a user is trying to unwind in a hotel room or continue watching a show in their bedroom after starting it in the living room, AirPlay mirroring is kind of an existentially important feature for a pay TV streaming app.

But these kinds of support agreements between big media-tech companies are, of course, always more complicated than they look. Notably, it was only in June of last year that Comcast finally published a version of Xfinity Stream that supports the Apple TV 4K CTV device. And it was also less than a year ago that Comcast integrated the Apple TV Plus app on its X1 and Xfinity Flex TVOS platforms.

And not for nothin’, amid Comcast's dwindling video economics, the cable company is further driving secondary set-top leasing into further obsolescence among its 16.6 million remaining pay TV subs. ▪️

Comcast announced cross-tier free internet speed increases for more than 20 million of its broadband customers across 39 states. 

The impacted tiers include the following:

• Performance Starter/Connect from 50 megabits per second to 75 Mbps
• Performance/Connect More from 100 Mbps to 200 Mbps
• Performance Pro/Fast from 300 Mbps to 400 Mbps
• Blast/Superfast from 600 Mbps to 800 Mbps
• Extreme Pro/Gigabit (formerly Ultrafast) from 900 Mbps to 1 Gbps

Comcast ended the second quarter with 32.16 million high-speed internet users. The cable company, however, experienced flat broadband customer growth in the second quarter and is now facing real competition from telecoms focused on fiber-to-the-home and fixed wireless schemes. 

Bigger picture, the largest cable operator in the U.S. has already pledged to reach more than 50 million customers by 2025 with “10G” symmetrical services — that is, multi-gigabit broadband powered by its next-generation DOCSIS 4.0 network. 

“The number of devices connected in Xfinity households has skyrocketed 12 times since 2018, and the need for fast, reliable, and secure Internet will continue to grow,” said Bill Connors, president of Comcast Cable, in a statement. “That’s why today, Xfinity is increasing speeds for most of our customers across the country.” 

FuboTV ranked first among live TV streaming service providers and Dish Network topped cable and satellite companies in the latest J.D. Power customer satisfaction survey, as consumers picked price as the biggest driver in choosing a video offering.

FuboTV led live TV streamers with a score of 789 out of a possible 1,000 points, the first year that J.D. Power offered the category. FuboTV was followed by Sling TV (786), YouTube TV (779), Hulu + Live TV (775) and DirecTV Stream (751) in the J.D. Power 2022 U.S. Television Service Provider Satisfaction Study. Overall, streaming companies had an overall score of 774, far outpacing their cable and satellite competition, which had an overall showing of 699 points.

In a press release, J.D. Power said consumers picked price as the deciding factor in choosing a TV service provider. Cable and satellite video service providers charged an average of $110 per month while streamers charged an average of $68 per month, according to the survey.

“Delivering video to myriad devices both in-home and mobile is actually pretty difficult and yet the service providers in cable, satellite and streaming all make it look easy, creating ever higher customer expectations,” said J.D. Power managing director Ian Greenblatt in a press release. “Highest quality content is quite costly to produce or acquire for all providers. Operating the needed networks and equipment for cable and satellite TV from start to finish versus streamers who can use those networks for middle and last-mile delivery for hundreds of thousands of concurrent streams, are vastly different at a product level regarding cost.  Live TV streamers (and their customers) are therefore the beneficiaries of the imbalance and can be seen as providing more value for the subscription dollars spent.”

Dish was the top ranked cable and satellite service provider nationally for the fifth year in a row, with a score of 720. Comcast’s Xfinity service placed second with 706 points and DirecTV finished third with 699 points.

Dish took the cable and satellite regional crown in two other areas -- the South Region (comprising Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas) with a score of 736; and the West region (including Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming) with a score of 716.

Midco (formerly Midcontinent Communications) was the highest ranked cable operator in the North Central Region (comprising Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota and Wisconsin) with a score of 721. Comcast’s Xfinity placed second in that region with a 701 score and Dish finished third with a score of 701.

In the East Region, Verizon Fios grabbed the top spot among cable and satellite service providers with a score of 749, followed by Dish (713) and Xfinity (699). ■

Comcast said Wednesday that the MasterClass app, which offers instructive videos on topics ranging from gymnastics fundamentals to developing an original TV series, is now available across its Xfinity entertainment platforms, including Xfinity X1 and Xfinity Flex.

According to Comcast, the launch marks the first time the MasterClass app will be offered through a TV provider’s set top box.  

MasterClass's more than 150 instructors and classes span a wide variety of fields, including Arts & Entertainment, Culinary, Business, Design & Style, Sports & Gaming, Writing and more. Each class on MasterClass features about 20 video lessons, at an average of 10 minutes per lesson—all taught by elite instructors like Serena Williams (Tennis), Malala (Creating Change), Simone Biles (Gymnastics Fundamentals), Roy Choi (Intuitive Cooking), Mashama Bailey (Southern Cooking), Richard Branson (Disruptive Entrepreneurship) and Neil deGrasse Tyson (Scientific Thinking and Communication).

Also: Charter, Comcast Set Joint Venture To Create New Streaming Platform

"With today’s launch, customers can now enjoy all of MasterClass's programming right alongside the movies and TV shows they love," Comcast senior VP strategic development Michael DelCiello said in a press release. "Whether customers want to enhance their learning, explore or develop a new passion, MasterClass's robust content library is a great addition to the expanding catalog of programming already available on our platforms."

New and existing MasterClass customers can access the service on X1 and Flex by saying "MasterClass" into their voice remote. Existing customers will be prompted to sign in, while new customers can start the membership sign up process right from the app. ■

Charter Communications and Comcast have formed a joint venture to develop a new streaming platform that will be able to handle a new generation of devices and provide additional functions.

To form the joint venture, Comcast is licensing its Flex streaming platform and contributing the retail business of its XClass TVs and the Xumo streaming service. Charter will be contributing $900 million, funded over multiple years.

"We’re thrilled to partner with Charter to bring this platform and its award-winning experience to millions of new customers,“ Comcast Cable CEO Dave Watson said.  “These products are all designed to make search and discovery across live, on-demand and streaming video seamless and incredibly simple for consumers.  

“This partnership uniquely brings together more than a decade of technical innovation, national scale and new opportunities to monetize our combined investment,” Watson said. 

Also: Xfinity Flex Now Up to 3.5 Million Deployments

Added Charter chairman and CEO Tom Rutledge: “Our new venture will bring a full-featured operating platform, new devices, and smart TVs with a robust app store providing a more streamlined and aggregated experience for the customer. As the video landscape continues to evolve, this venture will increase retail consumer options, compete at scale with established national platforms, and join our existing lineup of options for the Spectrum TV App available on most customer-owned streaming devices.” 

The joint venture will offer app developers, streamers, retailers, operators and hardware manufacturers an opportunity to reach customers in major markets across the country with the platform.

It will support a variety of branded 4K streaming devices and smart TVs, providing consumers with a world-class user experience and navigation, all the top apps and more choice in the streaming marketplace, Charter and Comcast said. ▪️

Comcast said this week that it will spend nearly $33 million to extend its network in two communities in Oregon and Utah, a move that is expected to bring about 23,000 additional homes and businesses under the Xfinity service umbrella.

In Utah, Comcast said it will expand service to more than 18,000 homes and businesses in Eagle Mountain City over the next four years. The cost of the project will be about $22 million and will not use any public funds.  

“Giving our residents another choice for cable and internet services improves the quality of life for our residents,” Eagle Mountain City mayor Tom Westmoreland said in a press release. “We look forward to welcoming Comcast into our community.”

Service  is expected to become available to parts of the community beginning in early 2023 and will include cable, mobile and broadband services. Broadband speeds will range from its $9.95 per month Internet Essentials offering to its ultra-high speed 1 Gigabit per second service.  

Businesses in the area also will be able to take advantage of Comcast Ethernet, internet, advanced voice and video services, WiFi and managed enterprise solutions as a result of the expansion. 

"We are committed to supporting Utah’s growth plans by building infrastructure and bringing high-speed broadband to meet the state’s next-generation capacity needs,” Comcast Mountain West region VP, Network Engineering Bryan Thomas said in a press release. “Our fiber expansion in Eagle Mountain is the latest example of the significant investments we've already made in the state. Since 2019, we’ve invested $881 million in technology and infrastructure capital expenditures, taxes and fees, employee wages and benefits, and charitable giving.”

In Oregon, Comcast said it plans to expand its network to about 5,000 homes and businesses in Silverton. The $10.6 million project will allow residents to access Xfinity residential and commercial services.

Comcast said over the past three years it has invested more than $500 million in Oregon to improve the network, support the community, and ensure residents, students and businesses remain connected to the internet during the pandemic. The Silverton expansion is part of a broader plan to bring Comcast’s network to more Oregonians.

“Comcast operates with the fundamental belief that connecting people to the power of broadband technology can be life changing,” regional senior VP of Comcast Oregon/SW Washington David Tashjian said in a press release. “That’s why we are committed to bridging the digital divide for Oregon/SW Washington residents – not only with our network expansions and investments, but also with our lnternet Essentials program, which brings fast, affordable internet to those who need it most.”

He added the moves are strategic and that the company is “exploring expansions into additional communities adjacent to our footprint.”

Construction is slated to begin in the early spring with building the fiber backbone. Some customers will be able to connect to services in late 2022, with completion of the network throughout Silverton in 2023.

“I know there’s a lot of interest in Comcast,” Silverton Mayor Kyle Palmer said in a press release. “As a mayor, I want to have more choices, and I want residents to have better choices, and I want to have fewer people bugging me all the time saying they’re upset at their service.”

Last year Comcast said it would commit $1 billion over ten years in continued support of digital equity, including its Lift Zones initiative, which has established WiFi-connected spaces in 25 community centers around Oregon/SW Washington for students and adults.

Comcast Oregon/SW Washington has more than 1,000 employees who serve more than one million residential and business customers throughout the state.  ■ 

Comcast said it launched a rewards program for its customers, offering prizes, perks and discounts for Xfinity subscribers.

Customers who sign up get $1 movie rentals, access to free content and early usage of the latest technologies from Comcast, including the new xFi Advanced Gateway with Supersonic WiFi. 

Members also have a chance to win a trip to the Latin American Movie Awards in Las Vegas, tickets to the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon in New York, or a virtual meet and greet with Olympic Gold Medal winner Nathan Chen.

“The entire Xfinity Rewards experience has been shaped and inspired by our customers. They  told us they wanted meaningful rewards rooted in unforgettable experiences, so we’ve brought  together the best of Comcast NBCUniversal to deliver just that,” said Jason Wicht, senior VP of growth operations. “Xfinity Rewards truly speaks to our mission to connect people." 

Xfinity customers can sign up for the rewards program for free. Based on how long they’ve been Comcast customers, members are put in the program’s silver, gold, platinum or diamond tier. 

Xfinity Rewards members also get discounts at NBCU theme parks and at the NBC and Bravo stores. ■

Comcast launched a holiday campaign for Xfinity cable during NBC’s broadcast of the Thanksgiving Day Parade with a two-minute commercial that features characters from Sing 2, a film from NBCUniversal’s Illumination studio opening Dec. 22.

The campaign aims to show how Xfinity brings families together. It also illustrates how Comcast brings its many of its business units together to support initiatives like a movie premiere.

Comcast featured characters from Universal's E.T. in a 2019 holiday commercial. The reunion of Elliott and E.T. drove more than 1 million Xfinity subscribers to watch the original 1982 film.

An animated film, Sing was about a group of anthropomorphic animals in a singing competition. In the campaign, Angie, a nurse, mother and dog played by Keke Palmer, tries to get home to her family to watch a holiday special. She leaves her Xfinity phone in the hospital, runs out of gas and winds up at a studio where the Sing characters are getting ready to perform in the special. Angie fills in on stage for Matthew McConaughey's character--who she accidentally injured--while her family watches via Xfinity.

Angie and her family were created specially for the campaign. The other characters from Sing 2 who appear in the spot and perform Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) are played by Taron Egerton, Tori Kelly, Reese Witherspoon, Scarlett Johansson and Nick Kroll.

The spot was created by Illumination.

“Xfinity is developing a tradition of creating exceptional content that celebrates the holiday season. Working hand-in-hand with Universal and Xfinity, Illumination was given the opportunity to create content that was rooted in the world of Sing and captured Xfinity’s holiday spirit,” said Chris Meledandri, founder and CEO of Illumination. 

“With Sing 2 director Garth Jennings at the helm, the content introduces a brand new character who unexpectedly finds themselves expressing themselves creatively through song. It’s an honor to be able to remind people of the power of being together this holiday through the world of Sing 2 and our characters,” Meledandri said.

Other credits for the spot include Gilles de Lusignan, Dana Krupinski, Cameron Stevning, producers; Greg Perler, editor; Garth Jennings, writer and director; Bastien Laurent, animation supervisor and Benjamin Le Ster, visual effects supervisor. ■

Vudu, the on-demand streaming service, launched Tuesday on Comcast’s Xfinity X1 and Xfinity Flex platforms.

Comcast’s Fandango unit acquired Vudu from Walmart last April. Fandango is part of Comcast’s NBCUniversal division.

“Fandango has worked with Xfinity for many years, and we are thrilled to add Vudu’s comprehensive movie and TV offerings to X1 and Flex,” said Mark Young, Fandango senior VP, global Strategy, business and corporate development. “Vudu’s vast library of premium content will now be available to millions of X1 and Flex fans, giving them more ways to enjoy the best entertainment through Xfinity.”

Also Read: Is Comcast Getting Ready to Expand Xfinity Flex Out of Footprint?

Comcast cable has been making more internet-based streaming services available through X1 in order to slow cord cutting. X1 also features Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, YouTube, HBO Max, CBS All Access and NBCU’s Peacock and Comcast’s Xumo.

Xfinity customers will be able to access Vudu’s catalog of more than 150,000 movies and TV shows, including some new releases unavailable on subscription services by saying Vudu into the Xfinity Voice Remote.

Titles debuting on Vudu in March include The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run and Golden Globe winners Minari, The Mauritanian and Pixar’s Soul.

Vudu is also available through most streaming players, Android and iOS devices, game consoles and Blu-ray players.

Vevo, the music video service, said it made a deal with Comcast to make its programming available via the Xfinity X1 and Xfinity Flex platforms.

Xfinity subscribers can access the Vevo app via their voice remote control and choose from more than 500,000 music videos.

Vevo said its connected TV business has been expanding, with a 30% growth in viewership in 2020, compared to the previous year.

Also Read: Vevo, IPG Find Strong Ad Receptivity With OTT Viewers

“We are thrilled to kick off the new year with Comcast’s Xfinity to bring Vevo’s music programming to more listeners on television. Music video viewership in the living room is rising, especially as families stay at home and watch TV together,” said Kevin McGurn, president of sales and distribution, Vevo. “Joining Xfinity’s entertainment library delivers our premium and brand-safe content to millions of fans when, where, and how they want it.”

Comcast has been making more internet based content available via X1 and Flex as more viewers cut the cable cord and seek out programming from Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max and other streaming services.

Comcast said it has launched Spotify on its Xfinity X1 and Flex platforms, enabling customers of those services to access the streaming music service.

Subscribers to Comcast's Xfinity-branded pay TV services can say “Spotify” into their voice remotes to access Spotify Free of Spotify Premium. The streaming music service also will began rolling out to X1 platform customers on June 22 and will be available throughout the footprint in the coming days.

According to Comcast, streaming music consumption has had double-digit growth this year and the increase in working from home -- associated with the stay at home orders due to the COVID-19 pandemic -- is showing that more customers are streaming on their TVs.

“Xfinity customers love the broad range of content available on Xfinity, all easily discoverable with the award winning Xfinity Voice Remote,” said Comcast Cable SVP video and entertainment Rebecca Heap in a press release. “Music streaming on Xfinity X1 and Flex is at an all-time high and we’re pleased our customers will now be able to enjoy Spotify’s Free and Premium tiers and extensive library of on demand music, curated playlists and podcasts right on the TV alongside the growing catalog of entertainment already available on these platforms, adding even more great value to their Xfinity service.”

Spotify joins other streaming music services like Pandora, Amazon Music, Radio.com, iHeartRadio, XITE, NPR One, Music Choice, Stingray Music and Baeble, that are already available on Flex and X1.

Comcast said it has launched Spotify on its Xfinity and Flex platforms, enabling customers of those services to access the streaming music service.

Xfinity Flex customers can say “Spotify” into their voice remotes to access Spotify Free of Spotify Premium. The streaming music service also will began rolling out to X1 platform customers on June 22 and will be available throughout the footprint in the coming days.

According to Comcast, streaming music consumption has had double-digit growth this year and the increase in working from home -- associated with the stay at home orders due to the COVID-19 pandemic -- is showing that more customers are streaming on their TVs.

“Xfinity customers love the broad range of content available on Xfinity, all easily discoverable with the award winning Xfinity Voice Remote,” said Comcast Cable SVP video and entertainment Rebecca Heap in a press release. “Music streaming on Xfinity X1 and Flex is at an all-time high and we’re pleased our customers will now be able to enjoy Spotify’s Free and Premium tiers and extensive library of on demand music, curated playlists and podcasts right on the TV alongside the growing catalog of entertainment already available on these platforms, adding even more great value to their Xfinity service.”

Spotify joins other streaming music services like Pandora, Amazon Music, Radio.com, iHeartRadio, XITE, NPR One, Music Choice, Stingray Music and Baeble, that are already available on Flex and X1.

To help automakers struggling through the Coronavirus crisis, Effectv, the advertising sales unit of Comcast Cable is setting up free virtual showrooms that allow Xfinity subscribers to check out new vehicles from their living rooms.

The showrooms will be available free until July 4 to top-tier brands. At that point, Effectv will offer automakers a paid version of the showrooms with more features.

“The automotive industry is facing challenges they’ve never seen before,” said Melanie Hamilton, head of enterprise sales for Effectv. “We created the Virtual Automotive Showroom as a way to help Tier 1 automotive brands during this difficult time. Americans still need cars, and what better way is there to learn about the latest vehicles than on the biggest screen in their home.”

Automakers are usually among the biggest local advertisers but the virus has impacted sales and some brands cut back on their spending. 

Brands including Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC, Buick, Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Ram, Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, Volvo, Mini Cooper and Nissan are participating in the program.

Comcast customers with the X1 operating system can visit the showrooms by saying “auto showroom” into their remote controls or by turning to channel 889, 991 or 989, depending on their market.

Effectv is supporting the program by running a 30-second call to action spot letting viewers know to find the virtual showrooms on their cable dial.

The virtual. showrooms feature videos from the automakers. Some content is longer form. “We know the automakers have created some amazing video for their own websites, so we’re posting that in whatever flavor they want,” Hamilton said. 

While the free showrooms feature “upper funnel content” aimed at driving awareness for the brands and its models, more interactive features that help viewers contact local dealers  may be available in the paid versions. Hamilton said some participants in the free showroom program are already asking for pricing for the paid version.

“At Cadillac, we are always looking for contemporary ways to connect customers to our products, and a purchasing process they can facilitate from the comfort of their own home,” said Melissa Grady, chief marketing officer for Cadillac. “The Auto Showroom allows customers to get deeper product information about our whole lineup, on their terms.” 

After July 4th, Hamilton expects Effectv to offer paid versions of the showrooms, partially as a substitute for cancelled auto shows, where many new vehicles get unveiled.

“All consumer behavior has been affected, so for us having that local connection point and having the X1 technology, we’ve been exploring the art of the possible in terms of how we can create and curate unique opportunities and experiences to ensure that our advertising based feels like we’re partnering with them, feel like we’re working with them to meet their business goals and that we are innovating at the same time,” Hamilton said.

She said Effectv is looking into a virtual travel experience with most travel advertisers shut down.

Effectv has also been running a program called Hometown Hub, which promotes small businesses.

Comcast continued to offer free content to families sitting at home due the coronavirus pandemic by making on demand programming from more than two dozen multicultural-themed entertainment networks and subscription VOD services.

African-American targeted services available to Xfinity customers with X1 and Flex include AFRO, Aspire TV, Black News Channel, Revolt and TV One, Brown Sugar, The Africa Channel and Impact Network.

Latino-themed networks available include CBeebies, Cinelatino, Cine Sony, Cinema, Dinamita MX, Kanal D Drama, Kids Central en español, Pantaya, RCN Novelas, Universo, ViendoMovies and Vme Kids. International Networks now available include Filipino On Demand, Hi-YAH!, KOCOWA (all programs subtitled in English) and TV5MONDE.

The move to offer free services is the third for Comcast in response to the pandemic.

“All year round, we provide our customers with a wide variety of diverse and in-language programming and we’re happy to work with our partners to make a selection available for free,” said Rebecca Heap, Senior Vice President, Video & Entertainment for Comcast Cable in a statement. 

Comcast said it has made on-demand and subscription video on demand titles from a number of networks available to its Xfinity X1 and Flex customers for free during the COVID-19 outbreak.

According to the company, Showtime, Epix, CuriosityStream, History Vault, Grokker Yoga Fitness & Wellbeing, The Reading Corner and DOGTV will all be available for a limited time.

“This is an unprecedented time and we want to be there for our customers to help make the time they’re spending at home easier with free previews from our network, studio and streaming partners,” said Rebecca Heap, senior VP of video and entertainment, in a press release.

Xfinity customers with X1 and Flex can say “Free” into their Xfinity Voice remote to explore the range of subscription programs currently available as part of the free on demand event spanning kids educational content, fitness and TV & movies, including:

• Showtime – all X1 customers can enjoy 30-days of all the series and movies the network has to offer including Billions, Homeland and Shameless. Xfinity Flex customers will be able to watch select originals such as City On A Hill and Kidding.

• Epix – 30 days free of the full Epix catalog of thousands of movies, along with acclaimed original series including Godfather of Harlem, Pennyworth, War of the Worlds and the highly-anticipated Belgravia, premiering April 12.

• CuriosityStream – 60 days free of the top 300 award-winning documentaries and series on science, history, wildlife, adventure, travel and more.

• DOGTV – the whole family is covered with 30 days free of programs for dogs, as well as dog-related programs for all dog lovers.

• Grokker Yoga Fitness & Wellbeing – 30 days free of expert-led video classes in fitness, yoga, meditation and healthy cooking.

• History Vault – 30 days free of a deep offering of classic series, documentaries and specials.

• Kids Room – 30 days free of a wide selection of popular series including Bob the Builder, Polly Pocket, and Strawberry Shortcake.

• The Great Courses Signature Collection – 30 days free of educational video lectures from the world’s greatest professors on subjects from photography to psychology, guitar to genetics, or mindful health to a vast exploration of history.

• The Reading Corner – 30 days free of reading videos on themes such as spring, holiday, school and nature. For children up to 10 years old. Stories include Donuts: The Hole Story, This is a Book Full of Monsters, and Beauty and the Beast.

Xfinity said it plans to open up more preview content from dozens of new networks, studios and streaming partners on a rolling basis over the coming weeks.

Comcast said Tuesday that it has purchased ad-supported streaming service Xumo. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Xumo, based in Irvine, California, offers free, live and on-demand streaming entertainment, news, sports and features over 190 different genre-grouped channels. Its partners include Roku and smart television brands like Panasonic, LG, Vizio, Samsung and Hisense. Comcast said the company will continue to operate as an independent business inside Comcast Cable.

The deal comes as Comcast is gearing up to launch its Peacock streaming service. That product, which will be free to Xfinity customers, will debut on April 15.

Comcast already has a relationship with Xumo -- it agreed last summer to integrate the Xumo app into its Xfinity set-top boxes. 

“The talented team at Xumo has created a successful, growing, and best-in-class set of streaming capabilities,” Comcast said in a statement. “We are excited for this team to join Comcast and look forward to supporting them as they continue to innovate and develop their offerings.”

Comcast/Xfinity has settled a 2018 lawsuit filed by the state of Minnesota over allegations it overcharged for cable/broadband service, including by not disclosing fees that boosted the price and charging for services and equipment customers hadn't asked for. 

That is according to Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison and a copy of the settlement document, which includes 1.14 million dollars in refunds to 15,600 customers, $160,000 to the AG's office (which can be used for more refunds) and debt relief to another 16,000 for early termination fees, together totalling "millions of dollars," said Ellison.  

Comcast has also agreed to better and more prominently display prices in its advertising. 

Comcast is not acknowledging the validity of the forgiven debts or that its pricing was deceptive--the agreement "is neither an admission nor a denial." 

Specifically, the money is going to: 

1. "Minnesota consumers who did not receive their prepaid gift card as promised because Comcast did not record that they had accepted the terms of service between January 1, 2013 through July 1, 2017; 

2. "Minnesota consumers who downgraded their cable services or who Comcast cut off from services and who paid an early termination fee between June 1, 2015 and July 1, 2017; and 

3. "Minnesota consumers who were charged for a modem after subscribing to a cable package that included internet service but returned the modem within three months without otherwise changing their package between January 1, 2014 through July 1, 2017." 

“This settlement will help put money back in Comcast’s customers’ pockets where it should have been in the first place," said Ellison. "Just as importantly, it provides millions of dollars’ worth of debt relief. And we’ve made sure that going forward, Comcast customers will know exactly how much they’ll pay for service before they sign up for it. That should put an end to unpleasant surprises.”

“The settlement with the Minnesota Attorney General reflects our ongoing efforts to improve the customer experience," said Comcast in a statement. "While we disagree with the allegations initially made in the lawsuit – which do not reflect our policies and practices – we agreed to settle because we are committed to partnering with Attorney General Ellison and others who share our commitment to improving the experience of our customers in all respects. We believe this settlement agreement furthers that shared goal.”

After announcing an April launch date — as well as a name, Peacock — for its entry into the streaming wars, Comcast shook up the hardware side of the video industry a bit, too.

The operator revealed that Xfinity Flex, the light streaming box extension of its more robust X1 video platform, would be given away to the more than 6 million Comcast customers who take broadband but not video. These customers would also get an X1 Voice Remote, which also works Flex.

Previously, Comcast had been charging $5 a month for the Xi6 streaming device, which provides access to OTT apps including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube and Tubi. Pretty soon, one can imagine that Xfinity Flex will also support NBCUniversal’s Peacock, which is kind of the idea.

Speaking to investors at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference about Peacock’s potential, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts pointed to Comcast’s relationships with 75 million to 80 million U.S. consumers, either Xfinity customers or those who get NBCU networks through other service providers. “Can we extend with distributors, can we find a way to have Flex — I’m sorry, Peacock — be available to those customers? And if you do so, then there’s no cost to the customer,” Roberts said.

Comcast also is proliferating its streaming device via partners that license X1. Cox Communications, which markets Contour, a platform based on the X1 blueprint, has been quietly selling Contour Stream since May for $5 a month to broadband-only customers. Contour Stream uses the same Xi6 client and Voice Remote as Flex.

Having the biggest operator give away streaming devices to all the cord-cutters in its footprint, and license the No. 4 U.S. cable operator to do the same, could help Comcast but also cause collateral damage in the video industry. Streaming device maker Roku, which has been one of the hottest companies in the OTT space, saw its stock price decline around 15% after the Xfinity Flex announcement.

Comcast is launching a new $5-a-month streaming video platform on March 25 targeted to the increasing number of its customers that take internet services without video.

Xfinity Flex will blend user interface access to popular subscription streaming platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and HBO Go, AVOD services like Tubi and Xumo, movies and TV shows for rent and sale through Comcast’s transactional store, along with a limited number of live programming channels, including Cheddar and ESPN3. Music will also be available through Pandora and iHeartRadio.

The service will ship with a HD- and 4K-capable wireless set-top, along with Comcast’s X1 Voice Remote. In fact, Flex will have home automation and security features available through X1, letting customers control things like lights and thermostats through the user interface.

Flex customers will be able to upgrade to a full live TV package through Comcast. The platform will not support live programming through third-part virtual MVPD operators like Sling TV, DirecTV Now or Hulu+ Live TV.

“We think this is going to be great value. For $5 per month, on top of internet service, it’s effectively for price of renting a movie,” said Matt Strauss, executive VP of Xfinity Services for Comcast Cable.

Calling Flex “the right product and the right time” for a particular segment of the Comcast consumer base, Strauss said there will be no national promotion for Flex.

“It will drive value to our internet business, make it stickier, and reduce churn,” he said. 

Flex is only the latest attempt by Comcast to deliver a low-cost streaming video service over managed network to customers who don’t take a full video package, with Comcast launching a more vMVPD-like service, Xfinity Stream, several years ago.

“The TV is the dashboard to the digital home,” Strauss said. “Flex is a bit of a sandbox for us, where we can develop new features and experiences, geared to a very targeted audience.”

Strauss said Comcast is in talks to syndicate Flex, much as it has X1 and its home automation business to Cox Communications and the major Canadian cable operators.

“But we have no ambition to take Flex beyond our footprint,” he added. 

Comcast will open its first ever Xfinity retail store in Shreveport, La., this week,  part of an overall effort to revamp its retail presence throughout its communities with more modern, tech-savvy facilities.

The Shreveport store, set to open on Sept. 27, will give customers hands-on access to Comcast's Xfinity, Xfinity X1, Xfinity Mobile and digital voice and Xfinity Home products. The 3,600-square-foot location is designed to offer a simpler and more streamlined customer experience and features multiple service counters staffed by Xfinity sales consultants, interactive iPad product demonstrations, and dedicated areas that showcase Comcast’s suite of products and apps. It also offers an automated payment kiosk to increase speed of service.

“We’re excited to launch our first Xfinity retail center in Shreveport and to deliver an enhanced level of service to our customers,” Comcast regional SVP Doug Guthrie said in a statement. “This new store is designed entirely around the needs of customers, and offers them an opportunity to explore and interact directly with our products.”

The store will be open for business Monday through Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m.

Comcast and Tickemaster have reached an agreement to allow the cable company’s Xfinity X1 customers to access tour dates and request concert tickets for their favorite performers directly through their television sets using Ticketmaster’s open ticketing platform, with the first event being three-time Grammy Award winner Kelly Clarkson and her 2019 “Meaning of Life” Tour.

Beginning today, Sept. 18, customers can simply say “Kelly Clarkson Tour” into their Voice Remote to take advantage of a special presale window and see a list of Clarkson’s local performance dates and venues right on the TV.

“The Meaning of Life Tour will be unlike anything I’ve done before,” Clarkson said in a statement. “I am thrilled to partner with Xfinity to offer my fans a new, easy way to find tickets right on the TV and join me on tour,” said Clarkson.

Speaking “Kelly Clarkson Tour” into the X1 Voice Remote brings fans to a dedicated Kelly Clarkson destination. There X1 customers will see a Get Tickets promotional tile that enables them to review a list of performances and corresponding dates at nearby venues, powered by Ticketmaster’s open platform and API, and initiate the online ticket-buying process. Customers can then opt to receive a text message featuring a unique code that will enable them to complete the purchase online.

“Our team is always thinking of new ways to reach more fans by extending Ticketmaster’s open platform,” said Ticketmaster senior vice president & general manager, distributed commerce Dan Armstrong in a statement. “This partnership with Comcast is a groundbreaking way to discover events and buy tickets. We’re excited to launch with Kelly Clarkson’s Meaning of Life Tour and look forward to expanding this functionality to even more of the best live events soon.”

In addition, Xfinity X1 customers will be able to stream Clarkson’s music via Pandora, watch her music video appearances on NBC’s The Voice, clips f rom previous tours and access her web series, A Minute and a Glass of Wine, and more.

“Fans can now go to Kelly Clarkson’s dedicated destination on X1 to enjoy her music and shop for tickets to her much-anticipated tour right on the TV via this seamless integration with Ticketmaster,” said Comcast Cable vice president strategy & execution Nancy Spears in a statement. “X1 enables us to unveil new and innovative experiences that complement and elevate content across the platform and to add more value for customers by giving them more ways to interact with the events, entertainment, performers and brands they love.”

From Sept. 18-23, all Xfinity customers can enjoy access to a special presale window and also purchase their tickets via xfinity.com. Ticketmaster and X1 will continue to provide localized ticket information throughout the general admission sale starting Sept. 24.

Clarkson’s “Meaning of Life” tour will kick off Jan. 24th in Oakland, Calif. The 28-city tour is her first headline run in three years and she will be joined by special guests Grammy-nominee Kelsea Ballerini and last season’s winner of NBC’s The Voice, Team Kelly’s Brynn Cartelli.

Comcast and Ticketmaster will extend this ticketing capability to additional concerts and events on X1. This interactive integration with Ticketmaster follows a recent partnership with Comcast and Fandango enabling customers with X1 to browse local show times and theaters for some of the year’s most popular theatrical releases on their television. 

Comcast, perhaps the most video-focused cable company over the past several decades, continued its shift toward a more broadband-centric model  in the second quarter, including putting more emphasis on broadband-only services.

The move comes after Comcast reported its best Q2 broadband growth in 10 years, as video subscriber losses increased four-fold.

On a conference call with analysts to discuss Q2 results, chairman and CEO Brian Roberts said many of those video losses were due to increased competition from virtual Multichannel Video Programming Distributors (vMVPDs), adding that Comcast has adjusted accordingly.

Related: Despite Video Losses, Comcast Has a Strong Q1

“We remained focused on segments that we can serve profitably as part of a broader relationship with the customer centered on a whole-home experience,” Roberts said.

“As more people rely on faster and faster broadband and more capacity, that gave us a marvelous opportunity to make investments to take the innovation machinery our engineering and technology teams have built and repurpose them partially to focus on innovation around broadband with our XFi products and our XFi brand,” he continued. “The whole company understands that connectivity.”

Comcast chief financial officer Michael Cavanaugh said the broadband gains – 260,000 net additions compared to 175,000 in the prior year – was in part due to Comcast proactively promoting broadband-only packages.

The company also said it added 204,000 new customer lines for its XFinity Mobile wireless service, ending the period with 780,000 customer lines.

Related: Comcast Adds 197K XFinity Mobile Customer Lines in Q1 

“We have been very focused on broadband and the connectivity side both residential and commercial for some time,” Comcast Cable CEO Dave Watson said, adding that the company has increased broadband speeds every year for 17 years. “Our focus is delivering speed, coverage and control all under the XFi brand.”

Broadband customers have outnumbered video customers at Comcast since 2015 as the company, and the rest of the industry, has focused more on higher-margin high-speed internet customers.

Comcast has long recognized the shift toward streaming video. Roberts said last year that broadband was becoming the “epicenter” of the business. 

Cavanaugh said that customer data usage has soared – median monthly data usage now exceeds 150 Gigabytes per customer and the average home connects 11 devices to the network.

Roberts said driving that usage is video.

“One of our strategies is to have diversification in such a way as new technologies comes, it’s not all or nothing and we’re benefitting more than I think we’re losing from additional competition,” Roberts said. “Broadband is growing faster than in recent years. Why is that? Because video over the internet is more reliable, there are more devices and more bits per consumer and more bits per home. All of those are great trends for us.”

Roberts added the shift also could help its NBC Universal programming unit, giving it more opportunities to sell its content to new packagers.

“This is a dynamic time, and we’re uniquely positioned as a company to benefit from these changes,” Roberts said.

Investors appeared to be pleased with the shift – Comcast stock was up nearly 5% in early trading to $35.02 per share. The stock slipped slightly in later trading, priced at $34.38 (up 3%) at 10:14 a.m. on July 26. 

Epix said it has reached a carriage deal with Comcast that will make the premium channel available to X1 video customers early next year. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Epix was formed in 2009 by a trio of content providers – Viacom’s Paramount Pictures movie studio, Lionsgate Entertainment and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. But the service often struggled to obtain carriage in the early days, lost in the shuffle of more dominant players like Home Box Office, Showtime and Starz. Earlier this year, MGM bought out the other EPIX partners and continued its strategy to develop more original programming such as existing original series like Get Shorty, Berlin Station, Graves and, coming soon, The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair.

“Comcast’s Xfinity TV is one of the most innovative and powerful distribution platforms for entertainment content across the United States,” said MGM chairman and CEO Gary Barber said in a statement. “As we increase our investment in original series, expand content offerings and commit more resources to developing EPIX’s brand and appeal, we are excited to partner with Comcast and bring EPIX’s suite of premium content to their customers.”

With the Comcast deal, EPIX will be available live and on demand through the Xfinity Stream app to EPIX customers. The addition of Comcast’s 22 million subscribers will expand EPIX’s overall availability to about 70 million homes.  

“This agreement marks an incredible milestone for our company and provides EPIX with a launchpad to deliver our content to more consumers on every platform,” said EPIX executive vice president and general manager Monty Sarhan in a statement. “We’re extremely pleased to be in the Comcast universe.”

There are no flukes in Cable.

Just ask Comcast, which was the first cable operator to report a full year of positive video subscriber growth in a decade, ending 2016 with 161,000 more customers than in the previous year. That Comcast managed to do that just as over-the-top and alternative video delivery systems were proliferating, gaining legitimacy and chipping away at traditional pay TV customer rolls was remarkable enough, but it was no fluke.

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That growth was a planned, concerted effort that not only yielded a video customer surplus, but was also profitable. Comcast finished the year with a 6.6% increase in cable-systems revenue and a 5.6% rise in cash flow. And it did it all the hard way, with no aggressive promotional pricing or special deals to attract customers that will drop the service in six months.

Instead, Comcast put its collective head down and focused on the fundamentals, rolling out new products like Xfinity Home and Xfinity Mobile at a steady pace and pumping hundreds of millions of dollars to beef up customer service.

The path to positive subscriber growth was a multiyear process, starting with the hiring of former Charter Communications CEO Neil Smit in 2010. It was Smit who initiated a multipronged plan to improve customer service, beef up the network and steer the company on a path toward product innovation and network superiority.

Smit stepped away from day-to-day operations in April — he is now vice chairman of Comcast Corp. — and handed the reins to 20-year Comcast veteran Dave Watson, who moves up to Comcast Cable CEO after serving as the cable unit’s chief operating officer for the past seven years, implementing the plans that he and Smit developed. Watson takes over just as subscriber growth is expected to decline in the wake of two massive storms that devastated homes in Houston and Western Florida. Comcast has said it expects the impact of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma to result in the loss of 100,000 to 150,000 subscribers in the third quarter.

MoffettNathanson principal and senior analyst Craig Moffett observed that the declines weren’t that surprising given that the video subscriber estimates, even at best-in-class Comcast, will have to come down.

Infrastructure Advantage
“We’ve spent 18 years repeating a simple mantra: Cable operators are not media companies, they are infrastructure providers,” Moffett wrote in a research note. “Their infrastructure is still advantaged. Comcast will be just fine.”

But the company is confident that it will continue to hit its financial targets, as well as continue its pace of innovation. For those reasons and more, Comcast is the 2017 Multichannel News Distributor of the Year.

For Watson, Comcast’s success has been the result of the company’s decision to stick to three basic tenets.

“The key for us is that we’re very focused on our core set of operating principles,” Watson said. “Staying focused on sustainable, profitable growth, driving innovation, that’s a big part; and third is to continue to improve the customer experience.”

While that may sound oversimplistic, Comcast has managed to make it work. In the past five years (2012-2016), overall revenue has grown at a 6.2% annual clip while cash flow has risen 7.2% per year. This year, the growth is even more dramatic — in the last 12 months between the first half of 2016 and the first half of 2017, revenue has grown 9.4% to $41.6 billion and cash flow is up 10.2% to $14.1 billion. This in a year that has seen competitive pressures increase as Hulu (25% owned by NBCUniversal) launched its Hulu Live offering, AT&T unveiled its over-the-top product DirecTV Now and networks are queuing up to release direct-to-consumer versions of their channels.

Comcast has used the X1 platform expertly in driving forward what Watson said is its newest mantra — becoming an “aggregator of aggregators.” That means not only offering access to subscription video on demand and over-the-top competitors, but embracing them.

Xfinity subscribers can access Netflix directly from their set-top boxes and over the years Hulu, YouTube and music service Pandora have been added to the lineup. Earlier this year, Comcast reached a deal where Sling TV — the over-the-top MVPD service from Dish Network — received a coveted spot on the set-top (mainly for international and multicultural programming). Just last week the cable operator expanded its relationship with YouTube, allowing customers to launch the online video app merely by speaking “YouTube” into their X1 voice remote.

Including those products is all part of the overall strategy of offering customers best-in-class products in almost every category, Watson said.

‘Aggregator of Aggregators’
“We look at each part of our business, every major product area, and we look at innovation opportunities at each one,” Watson said. “With X1, I think we are delivering in its early stages the promise of being an aggregator of aggregators — the best in linear, the best of on-demand, a terrific DVR, a great app, data and applications integrated. Netflix is a good example and soon-to-come will be You Tube. … To me this is constant improvement of our major product areas.”

That’s a far cry from the past, when a Netflix app embedded in any cable operator’s set-top box would have signaled the end of the world. But the evidence continues to mount that SVOD services like Netflix, Hulu and YouTube aren’t replacements for cable, but can complement the service. And making it easier for an X1 customer to access their SVOD subscriptions only enhances the cable operator’s stature in the customer’s mind.

That shift, along with a continued focus on innovation — Comcast still has a mandate to roll out a new product or product enhancement at least once per quarter — has been a key part of Comcast’s success. In the past five months, Comcast has rolled out a new wireless service, Xfinity Mobile, part of its mobile virtual network operator agreement with Verizon Communications; xFi, a cloud-based home WiFi management platform; and enhancements to XFinity Home that allow consumers to remotely control home functions like heating, cooling, lighting and security cameras through their voice remote.

The voice remote, launched in 2015, is one of those product enhancements that has fared even better than its staunchest proponents had hoped. Comcast has deployed about 17 million voice-remote devices and customers now make about 1 billion voice commands per quarter.

“It’s just remarkable,” Watson said of the product.

Comcast has also embraced products from programmers such as AMC Premier from AMC Networks and 21st Century Fox’s FX+, ad-free versions of the AMC and FX pay TV networks available for an additional fee. In an interview, Comcast executive vice president of Xfinity Services Matt Strauss said the offerings are part of an overall evolution of the video product, and of the strategy to entice customers to buy into the entire Xfinity family of offerings, not just one or two things.

Strauss said the strategy could be traced back to Comcast’s initial investments in infrastructure that laid the foundation for the product suite that is available today.

“We’re now at a point where it’s really about scale, and how do we continue to deliver innovative products and services and accelerate how we get deeper and deeper into our base,” Strauss said.

The answer, Strauss said, is to provide elegant, easy solutions to customer problems even before subscribers know they are problems. For example, as the TV audience became more and more fragmented and finding shows grew more difficult, X1 provided a user interface that made it easier to navigate through the thousands of linear and on-demand content choices. Later, X1 added a voice remote, which made navigation even easier.

For high-speed data, the solution was faster speeds. Comcast has increased data speeds 17 times in the past 16 years and by the end of 2017 will have fully deployed DOCSIS 3.1, which will enable speeds of 1 Gigabit per second.

“Speed is important, but access is equally important,” Strauss said. “Most people now connect devices via WiFi. Ensuring we have the best WiFi in the home, as well as the best WiFi out of the home is also very core to the strategy and that’s where you’re seeing us deploy our newest wireless gateway, the XB6 (xFi) which can deliver the fastest in-home WiFi speeds.”

From there, xFi customers would naturally migrate to Comcast’s XFinity Home product, which again incorporates the aspects of other company products, like the voice remote, to control household functions. Comcast is truly selling a bundle, and that bundle is interconnected.

“When we look at the future, today we typically sell on price,” Strauss said. “And the more products you take, the better the price. The challenge there is when you sell on price, essentially you’re making yourself a commodity.

“What we really want to transition to is selling an experience,” Strauss added. “The more products you take from us, you will of course get a better price, but you will also get a better experience. Starting to weave together the portfolio and reinforcing that, I think, is a big opportunity. A lot of that you’re going to see solidly around the home. There is a big opportunity around the digital home.”

The company is obsessed with giving more choice in the video-on-demand side of the business. “We’re breathing new life into what it means to get video,” Strauss said. “Now we have 130,000 choices, the top 100 Nielsen-rated shows, 900 series fully stacked. We added Netflix, not just as an app, but integrating Netflix contextually.”

As a result, on-demand is growing again — this year, Comcast customers are spending an average of 32 hours a month watching on-demand shows, up 20%.

“When people have said video is in a decline, ratings are in a decline, we see something different,” Strauss said. “We see more and more video consumption moving to time-shifting, we see while live ratings may be declining, the total video consumption is increasing, instead that more is happening outside of traditional measurement. It’s like dark matter, people aren’t seeing it, but we think the total video pie is increasing. And we’re continuing to build the platforms and the capabilities to all people to watch TV smarter and on their terms.”

The emergence of over-the-top players has added to that shift and is continuing to challenge the model, Strauss said, but Comcast doesn’t see any compelling reason to join the OTT fray.

“Part of what is happening in the market, especially on the video side, is you are seeing a lot of increased competition, you’re seeing a lot of competitive offers — in some cases you’re even seeing some of these OTT players offer video at negative gross margins. We’re not going to chase that.”

But the evidence is mounting that younger consumers are increasingly looking outside the traditional pay TV ecosystem for their content needs. Pay TV subscribers fell by more than 900,000 in the second quarter, the worst Q2 performance in history. That’s after a record first-quarter loss of more than 750,000 video customers.

Moffett, who raised his rating on Comcast to “buy” earlier this month after downgrading the stock to “neutral” in June, said he sees the company as the standard for the pay TV business. But he also estimated that the MSO will lose almost 1 million video customers in the next five years, ending 2021 with 21.7 million subscribers, down from 22.5 million in 2016. The analyst does see Comcast adding about 5 million broadband customers in that same time frame, finishing 2021 with 31.1 million high-speed data customers compared to 26 million in 2016.

Competition is also heating up. Google’s YouTube TV expanded to eight additional markets earlier this month, growing its total markets to about 48 cities. In addition, AT&T began pricing its DirecTV Now service even more aggressively in the quarter, at $10 per month for any unlimited wireless subscriber, and returned to offering free Apple TV devices with a three-month commitment.

While weakening subscriber metrics shouldn’t come as a surprise, Moffett said, they aren’t a calamity, either. Pay TV companies, he said, still have broadband pricing power, which should help them in reaching financial targets. That’s just what Comcast said when it predicted the Q3 subscriber loss.

Strauss noted that all the panic over OTT and cord-cutting could be unwarranted. There is no doubt, he said that viewing habits are changing, but life stages and household economics also need to be considered.

As an example, Strauss pointed to Xfinity on Campus, Comcast’s multiscreen managed IPTV service for college students. When the product was in development, Strauss said Comcast realized that the last thing college students wanted was to be tied to a set-top box. So the MSO had to rethink the idea, creating a product that allowed students to download the Xfinity Stream app, offered a cloud-based DVR and would let them watch live TV anywhere on campus. The product has been highly successful and, as students returned for the most recent fall semester, it is deployed in more than 100 schools.

“Millennials do watch TV as much as any other segment,” Strauss said. “They just have different needs and how they want to consume and access it.”

That, Strauss said, has led to Xfinity Instant TV — an in-home, in-footprint, managed IPTV service slated for a Q3 launch — as well as ad-free versions of networks that consumers can buy for a fee. Comcast reached a deal with AMC Networks in August for AMC Premiere, an ad-free version of the popular AMC network for an additional $4.99 per month. A month later, FX Networks announced a deal to offer an ad-free version of its flagship FX channel — called FX+ — to Comcast customers for $5.99 per month.

Strauss said those channels and other services like it are just an example of how Comcast’s foresight in investing in content, infrastructure and innovation have translated into meeting needs even customers didn’t know they had.

“The future we’ve always talked about has finally come, at least for us,” Strauss said. “I think that is because of decisions that we made, not six, 12 or 24 months ago, but years ago, based on where we saw the puck going and ensuring that we would have the technology capabilities and the infrastructure in order to deliver upon the innovation that we believed we were going to need to stay competitive. As a result you’re seeing us deliver on a lot of these products and services. But this didn’t happen by accident. It really happened because of very important strategic decisions we made years ago.”

Over-the-top video services, once considered an enemy of the pay TV industry, are becoming important partners as traditional multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) look to gain and retain customers amid a small but growing cord-cutting trend.

After holding OTT rivals at arm’s length early on, many pay TV providers are now embracing them and stitching them into their core video platforms.

A prime example of this is Comcast’s announcement last week that it will offer a You- Tube app on its X1 set-top box platform later this year. But rather than placing YouTube into its own silo, it will weave the OTT into the X1 platform in a way that lets customers search for YouTube content in the same manner as Comcast’s regular TV shows and video-on-demand fare.

That integration, which ties in support for Comcast’s X1 voice remote, is similar to the one the MSO has already completed with Netflix. Sling TV and its array of international video services is also on deck for integration.

Comcast, which has also tied Watchable, its own ad-based, shortform OTT video service, to the X1 platform, is expected to add more streaming partners to X1 in the months ahead.

Like other MVPDs, Comcast has concluded that it is in a great position to blend its own TV service with OTT, even if some of that content competes with its own.

“We’re an aggregator of aggregators,” Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts said last week at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom conference in San Francisco.

“We’ve been using X1 to just change your whole experience and … merge streaming and traditional television and on-demand,” said Roberts, who also used his time to demo Netflix and the coming YouTube app running on X1.

Notably, Comcast’s YouTube integration will include the full YouTube catalog, including the content from the YouTube Red subscription service. The operator confirmed that the tie-in will not include YouTube TV, the new skinny bundle, live TV service that’s slated to launch later this year for $35.

Comcast’s Netflix integration on X1 has yielded some significant results since its launch late last year. Roberts said more than 30% of X1 subs are “regularly” accessing Netflix via the MSO’s pay TV platform.

“That’s an incredibly quick take rate for something we barely have advertised,” he said, adding that Comcast VOD usage (which now factors in Netflix titles watched via X1) for January 2017 rose 35% year-on-year.

Creating an app and placing it on a pay TV platform is “table stakes,” Roberts said. “What I think is completely different is using voice and having it be integrated.”

About half of Comcast’s pay TV base is now on X1. Roberts said the MSO has distributed some 13 million voice remotes.

Comcast is not alone in hitting on this trend. TiVo, which works with a variety of MVPD partners, has been a pioneer in this area, as it already integrates OTT apps like YouTube, Netflix and Hulu with pay TV services. Dish Network has tied in Netflix, YouTube and Vevo, among other apps, to its Hopper platform.

Verizon Communications is working on a next-generation, IP-based version of Fios TV. The timing of the rollout hasn’t been announced, but Light Reading caught a glimpse of it at last week’s Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona, Spain. In addition to supplying a fresh interface for its baseline products, Verizon will also be looking for the new platform to extend a bridge to OTT services.

Comcast has launched Glued, a marketing vehicle for the operator’s pay TV service and VOD offerings that is being billed as the first original webisode series to carry the Xfinity brand.

The six-episode series, created with ad agency Droga5 in partnership with Merman X Pulse, “is a humorous take on how people’s favorite television shows change the way they act and interact with each other,” Comcast said.

Each episode (at three to five minutes in length) focuses on a different TV-watching behavior, including bingeing and “TV cheating,” centering on a married couple who discover a hit TV show.

Glued stars John Ross Bowie (Big Bang Theory) as Jason, and Jamie Denbo (Orange is the New Black) as Sara, and is executive produced by Sharon Horgan (Catastrophe, Divorce), and directed by John Riggi (30 Rock).

In addition to the webisodes, Comcast is backing Glued with an integrated digital and social media campaign that includes 15-second cut-downs, and customized gifs.

"TV is more than entertainment – it’s a universally shared experience that brings people together, and Glued explores the common behaviors we all recognize when we get hooked on a show,"  Sherri Davis, senior Director, brand Experience at Comcast, said in a statement. "Sharon Horgan has an incredible talent for highlighting these cultural truths, demonstrating how Xfinity connects people to the things they love and enjoy."

The first episode, “The Discovery,” which shows Comcast’s X1 platform and voice remote in action, can be seen below:

Bucking a trend amplified by a small but growing cord-cutting trend and the popularity of over-the-top video options, Comcast just came off a first quarter in which the MSO added 53,000 subscribers, its best first-quarter video result in nine years.

While a portion of the credit goes to X1, Comcast’s Internet protocol-capable next-generation video offering, those results are due to a confluence of efforts and initiatives that span not just the core product but also areas such as improved customer care, according to Matt Strauss, Comcast Cable’s executive vice president and general manager, video services.

Multichannel News technology editor and Next TV editor Jeff Baumgartner recently caught up with Strauss to discuss Comcast’s new video products and strategies involving X1, TV Everywhere, its new IP-delivered “Stream” product, and future 4K plans.

Editor's Note: An expanded version of this interview will appear in Multichannel News’s show dailies at this week’s INTX show in Boston.

MCN:As you look at the second half of the year, what are your top priorities?

Matt Strauss: We’re really focused first and foremost on continuing to execute against the deployment of X1. We’re seeing a lot of very positive benefits from X1, both on the churn and on the increased consumption side. We’re now at about 35% penetrated, and it’s even higher if you just look at triple-play subs — about 50% of our triple-play subscribers now have X1.

What goes hand in hand with that is that we also want to finish out the deployment of our cloud infrastructure. We’ve been deploying cloud across our footprint — both cloud streaming and cloud DVR — and we are very close to getting 100% deployment. We want to finish that up by the middle to end of this year.

Finally, we want to continue the penetration and usage of our products and services. We’ve got a very ambitious deployment for our new consolidated Xfinity app. With the upcoming Olympics [in Rio] we want to use that as an opportunity to shine a light on this new application, which we think is a tremendous value to our customers.

Related:INTX 2016: Comcast's Roberts Says No Plans to Take Pay TV Over-the-Top

MCN:With respect to the pay TV momentum, how much credit does X1 get, even as you continue to improve other areas like customer care and customer experience?

MS: It certainly is contributing. When you look at X1, we’re seeing improvements in churn. X1 customers are also consuming more video. They also have a higher attachment rate to DVRs and typically they take additional outlets in their home. There’s no doubt that X1 is contributing, but I don’t know if there’s any one silver bullet.

When it comes to growing the video business, it’s really a combination of several factors and investments that we’ve been making over the past few years, in how we’ve been improving our infrastructure, moving more to IP.

MCN:What kind of usage patterns are you seeing with the Xfinity TV app? Is the big challenge getting the message out to customers so they understand the app’s full capability?

MS: I’d almost characterize it as we’re in a moment in time because we have the Xfinity TV in-home app and we have our Xfinity TV Go app. We are in the process of consolidating those into just one app, which will be the Xfinity TV app. This unification … will provide this unprecedented access to content both in the home and out of the home. And I think those lines are going to continue to get more and more blurred.

When you look at the usage of our app in general, we have about 42% penetration of our mobile app among our double-play customers on a monthly basis. On a quarterly basis, it’s almost 60% who are using one of our apps, and that’s up about 16% year-over-year.

Related:CEO Roberts: Comcast, X1 Ready for Olympics

MCN:What’s next for Comcast with respect to 4K? You’ve got the app for Samsung TVs but we’ve seen some recent reports that you’ll really be focusing more on a strategy that puts an emphasis on High Dynamic Range (HDR)?

MS: While there’s hyper-attention on 4K, when we look at the total video experience, we think 4K is part of the offering. But HDR, which is not necessarily getting the same amount of attention, is in many ways more immersive and, we think, impactful.

Instead of deploying maybe a half-baked solution, which we’re starting to see a little bit of in the market, we thought it was more prudent to deliver the complete experience … and that’s what’s being developed with our Xi6 box, which we’ll be testing this year, but it’s going to really be deployed next year.

MCN:The video market continues to be abuzz about skinny TV bundles. Comcast has been going after that segment with the Stream TV product in some select markets. What have you learned so far, and what’s next on the rollout plan?

MS: In many ways X1, we think, is satisfying the demand for how many of us watch television. The average person watches about 130 hours of video every month.

But there are changes in how other segments are consuming video. When we look at skinny bundles, we believe that they are in some ways a manifestation of the economy as anything else. It’s rare that you hear someone say that they want fewer choices. What’s more likely is that you might hear someone say they want to pay less.

We have been experimenting with skinny bundles and experimenting with ensuring we’re getting the right product to the right customer at the right time in their life, whether that’s Internet Plus or the Xfinity On Campus product, or Stream.

While Stream is, at the moment, comprised of a skinny bundle, the strategies behind Stream are much more around how we’re going to transform the overall end-to-end customer experience, and Stream is just one example of how we are expanding into that terrain.

CHICAGO – Comcast kicked off a major customer care initiative Tuesday, announcing that it will hire 5,500 customer service reps over the next three years, unveiling a prototype Studio XFinity store where customers and potential customers can try out the latest technology and announcing new programs aimed at enhancing the customer experience.

Comcast said it will hire about 5,500 CSRs across the country, 2,000 of them at three new call centers in Spokane, Wash.; Tucson, Ariz.; and Albuquerque, N.M. The Albuquerque center will open first, staffed with bilingual employees that will speak with Spanish-speaking customers across the country. The other two centers will open later this year.

In addition, Comcast revealed a prototype Studio Xfinity store in Chicago – slated to officially open in June – which will allow customers and potential customers to explore XFinity products and services and purchase them if they want. But the emphasis will be more on educating customers rather than the hard sell.

“We’re looking at this as a huge opportunity,” Comcast chairman Brian Roberts said of the Studio XFinity stores and the customer care moves. “As we improve the service and offer more and more products, customers are saying ‘Gosh, I didn’t know I could do that.’”

Comcast has about 500 retail stores across the country and has revamped 125 of them. The Chicago Studio XFinity is a flagship store, so chances are other converted locations will not look the same.  

Comcast Cable CEO Neil Smit said the stores are only part of the changes in store for Comcast, all aimed at making the customer experience better. He added that the customer care unit has a budget of about $300 million and the additional employees will be added to that.

But among the bells and whistles – including on-screen notifications that the batteries in the customer remote need changing, and mobile tracking of service technicians – are several  back to basics initiatives. Those include an always on time pledge that will take effect in the third quarter, which would automatically credit a customer’s account $20 if a service technician is one minute late for an appointment.

Comcast EVP of customer experience Charlie Herrin said its customer care plan is broken down into four basic tenets: seeing things through the customer’s eyes; simplifying transactions; using creative technology to help customers enjoy the experience and giving employees the tools and training the need to deliver a top-notch customer experience.

Comcast has taken it on the chin on the customer service side especially during the approval process or the Time Warner Cable merger that was terminated late last month. Roberts acknowledged that there have been some black eyes on the service front, but added that they inspired the Comcast team to do better.

Roberts said that while those highly publicized slip-ups were minuscule compared to the 350 million customer calls the company receives each year, they were totally unacceptable.  

“It was a rallying cry inside the company, that we are going to top to bottom rethink every way we do business,” Roberts said. "Will we ever be perfect? I think the bar is always rising.”

As Comcast's Xfinity brand moves toward its title sponsorship of NASCAR's second level series next year, the parties began revving the transition today, by releasing the circuit's official logo.

Beginning in 2015, Xfinity will step into title sponsorship position for what is currently called the NASCAR Nationwide Series, which features up-and-coming drivers and teams. The parties announced the 10-year pact last month.

The NASCAR Xfinity Series mark is creatively aligned, and similar to the other NASCAR national series marks. It is being driven by NASCAR in advance for the purpose of allowing teams and tracks to prepare for integration of  the series' marks for the 2015 season, relative to uniform production, paint scheme design, promotional materials, et. al.

Fans will see the new mark in the same places as NASCAR Nationwide Series logo: including race car windshields, officials' and drivers' uniforms, haulers, pace cars, headsets, grass stencils, banners / flags, credentials / hard cards, Victory Lane accessories, websites, media guides, schedules, souvenir programs, tickets, and the NASCAR Xfinity Series championship trophy.

Nationwide remains the series entitlement partner through Dec. 31 and will continue as an official NASCAR partner and Sprint Cup team sponsor.

Expanding on its Watchathon initiative, Comcast is providing its video subscribers with a week-long opportunity to catch up on some of the best that cable has to offer via live viewing and an array of on-demand fare.

The Free Channel Week extends from Sept. 22 and Sept. 28 and affords Xfinity TV Digital customers unlimited access across myriad devices to thousands of TV shows and movies from more than 30  channels.

The programming play, aimed at providing sampling and ultimately customer acquisition, encompasses Encore, A&E, AMC, Disney XD, Disney Junior, Food Network, FX, History, Lifetime, Movieplex, MLB Network, National Geographic Channel, Nick Jr., Sprout, Sundance, Syfy, TNT, TBS and USA Network, among others.

The initiative, which builds on Comcast’s highly successful Watchathon on-demand gambit by adding live viewing to the mix, will give Xfinity customers a chance to reacquaint themselves with or watch some of cable’s most successful programming for the first time during broadcast’s premiere week, including AMC’s zombie hit, The Walking Dead, FX’s biker skein, Sons of Anarchy, and TNT’s summer hit, The Last Ship.

Free Channel Week also has kids (and parent) appeal with access to Nick Jr.’s Paw Patrol and Disney XD classics like Lab Rats and Phineas and Ferb, while sports fans can check out the final week of the 2014 baseball season’s pennant chases, via coverage on MLB Network.

The nation’s leader distributor provided details about Free Channel Week on its "Comcast Voices" blog.

Comcast and Univision have put a deal in the back of the distribution net for the U.S. Spanish-language media leader’s cable sports network.

Beginning in October, Comcast will make Univision Deportes Network available to a wide swath of its customer base through carriage on its Digital Preferred package and Xfinity Latino levels of service.

With the long-term contract, financial terms of which were not disclosed, Univision Deportes Network will add upward of 12 million Xfinity customers and boost its subscriber base past the 52 million mark. When the futbol-centric UDN bows next month on Comcast systems, the service, which kicked off in 2012, will have positions with all 10 of the nation’s top distributors.

A spokesman for Comcast, whose NBCUniversal programming arm’s Telemundo and mun2 are competitors to Univision’s varied services, said negotiations have been taking place over the past year and the patties finally reached terms that makes sense for its subscribers.

Comcast’s Hispanic distribution platform delivers more than 60 Latino networks in both Spanish and English to Xfinity TV customers. UDN will be available in standard-definition and Comcast’s largest Hispanic markets, which include New York, Miami, Houston, Chicago, San Francisco, Sacramento, Albuquerque, Fresno, Denver and El Paso, will begin receiving the channel in high-definition by year-end.

Although the launch comes after the 2014 World Cup – UDN became Univision’s de facto service for the FIFA competition during the months of June and July – the sports service still serves up an array of futbol fare, topped by action from Mexico’s top circuit, Liga MX.

Additionally, UDN, which ranks as the top Spanish-language cable sports network in primetime and total-day, presents Mexican national soccer team matches, as well as action from Major League Soccer, the Copa MX and CONCACAF Champions League circuits. It also covers Formula 1 racing and boxing, while keeping tabs on the NFL, NBA and MLB.

“Univision Deportes Network offers terrific programming and will be a great addition to our growing lineup of networks for Hispanic customers,” said Marcien Jenckes, executive vice president, consumer services at Comcast Cable.  “Comcast is already the nation’s largest provider of Latino packages and we’re excited to add UDN’s wide range of sports programming for our Xfinity TV customers."

“We are pleased to expand the reach of UDN and our popular sports content through this deal with Comcast,” said Juan Carlos Rodriguez, president of sports, Univision Communications. “This partnership speaks to the growing influence of Hispanics and underscores Univision’s position as the gateway to a growing and increasingly influential consumer base.”

Looking to match up speeds entering the home with the capacities supported by customers’ home networks, Comcast has introduced a souped up wireless gateway from Cisco Systems that bakes in 802.11ac WiFi and the 2.0 version of Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA), which utilizes the home’s coax network.

The product, which carries the consumer-facing brand of the “Xfinity Wireless Gateway,” is the Cisco-made DPC3941T. According to this blog post from Jill Formichella, Comcast Cable’s director, home network product development, the WiFi piece is outfitted with a 3x3 MIMO design that delivers three spatial streams and 1.3 Gbps of raw throughput via an 80MHz-wide wireless channel. She said third-party lab tests by Allion Engineering Services showed the gateway delivering 700 Mbps of actual throughput.

The 700 Mbps mark is more than two times faster than Comcast’s current router and seven times faster and provided better overall in-home coverage than similar devices from competitors, including Verizon Communications and AT&T, claimed Eric Schaefer, Comcast Cable’s SVP and GM, communications, data and mobility, in this separate post.

The new gateway integrates a DOCSIS 3.0 modem, though the channel bonding configuration was not immediately available. Top-of-the-line D3 modems can bond 24 downstream channels and 8 upstream channels, putting the downstream within shouting distance of 1 Gbps bursts. Broadcom is working on a D3 chipset that can bond 32 downstream channels.

Comcast also did not announce pricing and packaging options for the new product, but Schaefer wrote that will become available “later this fall in select markets,” and will eventually be introduced to Comcast’s entire footprint.

A spokesman said that new customers who qualify for a device will automatically receive one when they sign up for service, subject to availability. Customers who want to receive info on the new gateway and when it becomes available in their market are directed to send an email to: AC_WirelessGateway@cable.comcast.com.  

Comcast, which ended the second quarter with 21.27 million broadband subs, is introducing the gateway as it bumps its Blast Tier to 105 Mbps down (from 50 Mbps) and its Extreme Tier to 150 Mbps (from 105 Mbps) at no additional cost in markets in its Northeast and West regions. Comcast offers a fiber-based residential service in select markets that delivers 505 Mbps down and 100 Mbps upstream.

Last April, Comcast launched a Cisco-made 802.11n DOCSIS 3.0 gateway with a 16x4 channel-bonding configuration that also supports MoCA 2.0, a technology that delivers in-home wireline throughputs of 400 Mbps in basic mode and up to 800 Mbps in the enhanced, turbo mode.

Comcast is also using its new gateways to deliver a separate "Xfinity WiFi" SSIDs and community hotspots that are accessible to credentialed broadband subs. Comcast is on pace to deploy 8 million hotspots by the end of the year, a number that includes its residential hotspots and those deployed in outdoor and business locations.

Xfinity has an affinity for NASCAR.

Comcast has reached a 10-year agreement to become the title sponsor of NASCAR’s second level racing circuit, currently called the NASCAR Nationwide Series.  

Beginning January 1, 2015, the circuit will be known as the NASCAR Xfinity Series and will serve as a multimedia platform for the brand to attach its name and various product lines to the stock car group’s 10-month competition for upcoming drivers and teams. The agreement, the longest title sponsorship of for any NASCAR national series in history, also makes Xfinity an official NASCAR partner in the multichannel video programming distributor and broadband ISP categories.

Neither party would disclose the price of the deal. Comcast officials called the pact the largest of its various sports sponsorship commitments spanning the National Football League, Major League Baseball and the National Hockey Leauge. Published reports place the value at some $200 million over its course, when media expression, marketing and promotional considerations, are factored into its equation.

Officially announced today in Charlotte at an event at the NASCAR Hall of Fame, the pact is co-terminus to the one programming arm NBC Sports Group signed with NASCAR. NBC Sports will drop the flag on a 10-year, $4.4 billion rights deal for the second half of the Sprint Cup and the NASCAR Xfinity series, beginning next July.

NASCAR COO Brent Dewar said the organization selected Xfinity given Comcast’s continuing pursuit of technological advancement.

“We think it’s a perfect partnership. Comcast is a leader in technology and entertainment and is constantly innovating,” he explained in an interview. “And at NASCAR, there is constant innovation on the track, with our drivers and cars. Our fans are also big users of technology and are interested in content-rich products.”

Peter Intermaggio,senior vice president of marketing communications at Comcast, in an interview said that Xfinity -- the company's residential services for video and broadband and its X1 entertainment operating system -- match up extremely well with fans of the motorsport.

“In today’s entertainment landscape, live sports are tremendously important and the NASCAR audience is very technologically savvy and loyal to companies associated with racing,” said Intermaggio. “We believe our Xfinity brand and X1 operating system will have strong appeal to NASCAR fans.”

Intermaggio said the NASCAR Xfinity Series will have a folder within X1’s operating system, wherein subscribers will be able to find circuit and driver stats, and espy look-ins and different camera angles that were previously only available on digital platforms.

Commercial placements in and around the races throughout the complete season on Fox and NBC’s coverage aside, Xfinity will showcase its products where racing fans convene. “We will activate trackside. There is no better way to appreciate our products than seeing and using them,” said Intermaggio, noting Comcast personnel will be on hand to accommodate sign-up and/or upgrade transactions.  

Comcast operates in 39 states and in areas home to NASCAR tracks in such markets as Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit and Miami. Should its proposed $45 billion union with Time Warner Cable pass regulatory muster, Comcast’s position in NASCAR strongholds in California, Texas and the sport’s home in North Carolina, would be enhanced.

Dewar said NASCAR weighed other offers – Autozone and Adance Auto Parts were reportedly in the chase – but Xfinity provides an array of services that will play well with NASCAR community.

“Our fans are very tech-savvy and want rich content about the sport and their favorite drivers and teams,” he said. “They will spend their weekends watching the races and engaging on various digital platforms. When they go to track they take mobile devices with them. They are high-tech users and Xfinity is a high-tech brand.”

According to NASCAR Fan Engagement Tracker 2013, which was commissioned by the racing organization and conducted by Toluna, NASCAR fans spend an average of four-and-a-half hours each week watching NASCAR on television and an additional two-and-a-half-hours each week following the sport on digital platforms.

Residential customer exposure notwithstanding, Dewar said that with many of the organization’s sponsors members of the Fortune 100 and 500, Xfinity will have opportunities to connect with the circuit’s high-end, business-to-business roster.

Dewar also said NASCAR is looking to increase its position with millennials and multicultural audiences,noting that the series provides a 10-month stretch for fans to get to know drivers and teams, which will also enable Xfinity to reach those key demographic groups.

"We’re excited about having Xfinity on board and believe they also will benefit from working with us," said Dewar. 

Added Intermaggio: "NASCAR fans are thoroughly engaged. They are committed to drivers and teams and the companies that support them. Xfinity certainly wants to connect to NASCAR fans. We’re looking to raise the profile of our brand and help NASCAR further grow its fan base."

Nearly 1 million people have viewed the first episode of Starz’ Outlander prior to its Aug. 9 premiere, the network said Friday.

The first episode of the series, adapted from author Diana Gabadon’s best-selling books, has been seen 897,372 times by more than 600,000 unique viewers between Aug. 2 and Aug. 7 via Starz On Demand, Starz Play, Starz.com, Youtube and Xfinity On Demand, said network officials. (Click here for a review of Outlander.)

The network has made the first episode available for several other series, including Power, Black Sails and Da Vinci’s Demons, but none have generated the streaming views Outlander has thus far generated, said Starz.