Charter Communications Chairman and CEO Tom Rutledge said the No. 2 U.S. cable company will deploy home management services in Austin, Texas in the fall and will subsequently roll them out across its national footprint.

“My sense is that over the next few years, it will roll everywhere,” said Rutledge, speaking Tuesday at the Deutsche Bank Media, Internet and Telecom Conference in Palm Beach, Fla. “It’s not really a question of are we going to do it, but a question of getting it right, getting all the control apparatus right and security.

“There are 300 million devices connected to our 28 million broadband customers,” Rutledge added. “We have a tremendous connections business, and we have the opportunity to provide features in that connectivity business that do not exist today, that includes privacy, security, control over all the devices in your home—the ability to look through your network and see what the signal levels are throughout your dwelling.”

Rutledge didn’t offer a lot of details on the home WiFi management plans of Charter, which has sat on the sidelines the last five years as Comcast has steadily built out its Xfinity Home business. 

Charter has reportedly been in talks with a number of name brand home automation companies.

Yale Assure Locks have joined the list of products that can operate and be voice controlled within the Xfinity Home ecosystem.

The locks can be controlled from virtually any location using Comcast’s Xfinty Home mobile app. Users can remotely lock and unlock doors, check lock status and create rules such as to receive lock status notification at a given time, say when the kids get home from school.

The locks can also respond to voice commands via the Xfinity Voice Remote from within the home. Example: “Lock the door.”

Related: Comcast Integrates Tile's Trackers with Xfinity Home and X1

Comcast said it now has 1.2 million users of its home automation services.

The Yale Assure Lock line includes a series of smart locks that offer a choice of keyed and tee-free entry. In order to work with Xfinity Home, the locks need to be purchased with a Yale Zigbee Network Module, which retails for around $50. Yale sells four Assure locks that are compatible with the network module.

“Smart door locks can be a meaningful home security addition, especially when combined with other IoT devices like cameras,” said Patti Loyack, VP of IP services and home automation for Comcast Cable, in a statement. “Xfinity’s platform gives consumers the ability to manage and control all of their smart devices in one unified experience and we’re excited to give our customers even more choice by integrating the Assure Lock line from Yale.”

Comcast has teamed with “smart” home insurance provider Hippo on a trial in Houston that, they claim, will help consumers there save up to 25% of their annual home insurance premiums via a program that leans on integrated IoT home safety devices.

For this stage of the test, which will have some linkages to Comcast’s Xfinity Home service, Comcast said it has made Hippo’s home insurance offering available to all interested residential customers in the greater Houston area. Comcast and Hippo plan to expand the offer to other Comcast service areas later this year.

Hippo currently is officially licensed and operating in California, Arizona, Texas, Illinois, Iowa, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania.

The trial announcement comes about five weeks after Comcast Ventures helped to lead a $25 million “B” round in Hippo, which was founded in 2015 and has raised about $36 million so far.

RELATED: Comcast Ventures Backs Home Insurance Tech Startup

Hippo’s aim is to focus on a large base of underinsured homes with an approach that, it claims, is both cheaper and more modern.

As part of its plan to serve what it sees as a market of underinsured homes, Hippo uses smart home technology, such as water leak sensors, to help detect problems early and, when possible, prevent damage from taking place.

RELATED: Comcast to Sell Rooftop Solar Services, Take Possible Stake in Sunrun

Per the site dedicated to the Houston pilot, Comcast Xfinity Home customers are also in line for additional “smart home discounts” for having certain home safety devices – such as monitored smoke detectors -- installed with their system and lower risks that “typically lead to insurance claims – like theft and fire.”

“This new offering can provide customers with meaningful savings on their annual home insurance premiums and enhanced home insurance coverage,” Jon Kaplowitz, managing director and GM of new businesses at Comcast, said in a statement. “By bringing together smart home devices like monitored smoke and water leak detectors with home insurance, we’re able to help customers lower their annual home insurance cost and, at the same time, help to provide protection and peace of mind for our customers’ most important assets – their home and family.”

“We’ve modernized traditional home policies to go beyond just providing coverage in the event of fire, theft, or water damage,” added Assaf Wand, CEO and co-founder of Hippo. “We’ve added equipment breakdown coverage into our policies so customers have repair and replacement protection on the things that ‘run’ their home - things like heating and air conditioning systems, hot water heaters, major appliances, electronics and more.” 

Comcast confirmed that Dan Herscovici, the former SVP and GM of Xfinity Home, has left the company.

Comcast didn’t elaborate on Herscovici’s exit from the company, which happened earlier this month, but also confirmed that Dennis Mathew, who has held roles such as president, wholesale and VP of new business at Comcast, now leads the Xfinity Home business and reports to Matt Strauss, EVP of Xfinity Services at Comcast Cable.

The Philadelphia Business Journal first reported that Herscovici had left Comcast.

Herscovici was with Comcast for more than 10 years in exec roles that included VP of new business and VP of the MSO’s high-speed internet services, and was a key player in the rollout of Xfinity WiFi. Prior to Comcast, Herscovici was a product and operations exec with Motorola.

Under Herscovici, Xfinity Home, Comcast’s home automation and security service, grew to about 1.1 million subscribers and expanded its ecosystem of third-party product support via its "Works With Xfinity Home" program. During his tenure, Comcast also deepened its expertise in home security technology and services via the acquisition of a piece of Icontrol. Comcast has since rebranded that as Xfinity Home Wholesale. 

RELATED: Why Comcast Is Buying Icontrol

Herscovici’s departure also comes amid a shift and broadening of Comcast’s service and technology strategies involving the smart home and home automation.

For example, Comcast last month announced that it had extended home automation services and functionality to more than 15 million customers, centered on the company’s xFi Wireless Gateway and the xFi Advanced Wireless Gateway, along with plans to extend those capabilities across multiple services, including X1, Xfinity Home, Xfinity Mobile and xFi, its new home WiFi management service.

RELATED: Comcast Scales Home Automation Services to 15M Subs

Oversight of those automation-facing functions has been moved to Eric Schaefer, SVP and GM, communications, data and mobility, Comcast Cable; and Patti Loyack, the company’s VP of IP services.

Comcast’s voice remote for its X1 platform has become an increasingly popular feature, and the operator has kept it stocked with a constant flow of updates that, for example, support voice commands for special events such as the Super Bowl or the Winter Olympics.

The technology that underpins that platform is also branching well beyond the TV. Comcast has already started to integrate the X1 voice remote with Xfinity Home, its home security and automation service.

Related: Comcast Adds AI Smarts to Home Security Cameras

Comcast also recently added another voice wrinkle with a Phone Finder feature for Xfinity Mobile. Those customers can activate it by saying, “Xfinity Mobile, find my phone” into the X1 voice remote, or by uttering their 10-digit phone number into the remote.

That’s expected to be just the tip of the voice-enabled spear. Comcast, which has deployed nearly 20 million voice remotes, envisions it will support voice navigation and other voice-based features across a greater number of “domains” that criss-cross the company’s full lineup of services. But a major challenge comes with creating a system that can do that, at scale, without requiring an army of people to manage and update the system manually.

Progress: It’s All In the Telling
Not only does the system need to know and understand an increasingly broader scope of specific and conversational-style commands, it also needs to grasp the intent of the voice command. Is it a search for a TV program or movie, or is the user telling the smart home system to turn off a light or adjust the thermostat?

Comcast is taking on the scale challenge with a machine learning platform developed in-house that works in tandem with an integrated metadata platform. “We have a really good advantage to work with voice, because of our metadata platform,” Comcast Cable executive director of AI product Jeanine Heck said.

That same metadata system has helped to create a foundation for the voice engine.

Early on, Comcast used a more traditional, pattern-based algorithm that relied on manual tuning. But it later realized that machine learning would be required to train that algorithm to maintain a high level of accuracy while keeping pace with requirements as the scope and complexity of the system continued to expand.

Related: AI, Machine Learning to Change the Customer Experience, Comcast’s Watson Says

Machine learning tied to a language model would also become necessary as the voice platform reaches into more domains while adapting to a broader range of conversation-style commands. “We saw that the machine could learn how to accurately find intent in a better way than it did prior to that,” Heck said, adding that Comcast’s dependence on deep learning to process natural language has only become more pronounced over time. “Our machines can learn how to adapt to those [new domains].”

Added Jonathan Palmatier, Comcast Cable’s vice president of product management, voice control: “You’d need an army of people that are trying to capture every possible way that you can construct a phrase, and [that’s where] it starts to get untenable.”

In addition to expanding voice support to multiple Xfinity services, Comcast has also been working on how voice commands can support customer support functions.

After applying blockchain techniques to TV advertising, Comcast is now forging another link to the digital trust technology – the connected home.

RELATED: Comcast Partners Up to Forge Secure ‘Blockchain’ Platform to Boost TV Ad Efficiency

Comcast hasn’t announced timing on a commercial deployment of how it’s using blockchain technology in the connected home, but its Comcast Labs is already headed downstream in terms of developing these capabilities.

Blockchain establishes a trusted way to share digital information from multiple entities while also keeping that core data protected and validated even as those records change, essentially creating a disintermediation of a chain of data ledgers via a distributed, decentralized structure. In addition to advertising, it’s also being used for cryptocurrency.

Applying blockchain in the connected home is emerging as consumers continue to deploy and attempt to automate a wide range of smart home devices, including thermostats, locks, and lights. Comcast is taking a closer look at it in the context of services like Xfinity Home, which works with Comcast’s own equipment and a growing mix of third-party smart home products, and xFi, its whole-home WiFi networking management platform.

RELATED: Comcast Scales Home Automation Services to 15M Subs

And that’s also giving rise to the need for consumers to allow friends and family to use some of those products, perhaps on a temporary basis – from the physical world this would be akin to letting a trusted friend borrow the house keys while the owner is out of town, then retrieve them when the owner returns.

RELATED: Blockchain Technology Moving Into Cable, Advertising Sectors

In the context of the smart home, users might want to enable their kids to unlock the home’s smart locks with an app, but not give them access to the home’s security cameras, or remotely change the thermostat settings. Or the user might want to let a neighbor be able to enter the garage to check on the house during a vacation, but not give them control of all the other functions of the smart home. But a deeper level of authentication and security are needed to pull that off.

“By 2020, Americans will have an average of 50 Wi-Fi-connected devices in their homes,” Noopur Davis, chief information security officer at Comcast Cable, explained in a blog post about this blockchain-facing work. “In such ultra-connected homes, there are any number of situations in which we will want friends, or family members or guests to be able to control some features of our connected homes, without giving them access to everything.”

But today’s smart home systems “don’t have a way to provide that sort of pinpoint access,” Davis added. “We can give our kids access to the whole system via an app, or keep the control to ourselves, but not pick and choose exactly what devices and services we want to make available or keep off limits.”

But to enable that level of access, the information security team of Comcast Labs has been working with the digital home engineering team of Srindhar Solur, Comcast’s SVP of product development for Xfinity Home and IoT, an exec late of HP who joined the cable op in 2016.

The resulting approach, Comcast notes, aims to put the control of the digital home in the hands of the customer, allowing them to grant, revoke and otherwise tailor access to any IoT device in a private and secure way. Comcast is developing a wide range of use-cases, starting with products such as home security cameras.

The model Comcast is developing enables the creation of a “unique digital identity for each user, which will be associated with a permission-based blockchain ledger or ‘trunk,’” explained Davis, a former exec with Intel.

“Customers can then associate individual IoT devices –‘leaves’– with their ledger and then set and revoke permissions as they see fit,” she wrote. “The beauty of this approach is that because blockchains are decentralized you can grant and revoke access dynamically from anywhere in a secure way.”

On the heels of grand plans about smart home automation announced at CES, Comcast said it has added new voice commands to its X1 voice remote that enable customers to command and control several devices that work with the Xfinity Home service.

RELATED: CES 2018: Comcast Scales Home Automation Services to 15M Subs

In this phase of the program and next level of integration with IoT devices, Comcast has added a series of new voice commands that, for example, will enable customers to use their X1 voice remotes to access and control the cameras and lights that are integrated with the Xfinity Home service.  

“Starting today, customers can get specific about the camera they want to look at on the TV – just say ‘Xfinity Home, show me patio camera’,” Comcast’s Bryan Kissinger explained in this blog post. “You can also use the X1 voice remote to make a certain room brighter, or dim the lights and choose a certain hue if you have the Philips Hue connected lighting system.”

Customer can also say “Xfinity Home, I’m cold” to auto-adjust the thermostat a few degrees, or tell the system to set the thermostat to a specific temperature, or ask it if the home’s security alarm is active.

“If customers have the Nest thermostat, they can even say, ‘Xfinity Home, set Nest to Eco mode’ if they are trying to conserve energy,” Kissinger added.

Update:Comcast has deployed more than 20 million X1 voice remotes. The company confirmed that the voice commands for Xfinity Home work with its newly designed X1 voice remote as well as the previous model. Both X1 voice remote models are made by Universal Electronics.

For now, six Xfinity Home device partners have been integrated into the X1 voice commands database – the Zen thermostat, Caseta/Lutron lights, GE in-wall and plug-in switches and dimmers, the Nest thermostat, Philips Hue lights, and the Sengled Element Touch light bulb.

Earlier this month, Comcast announced that it had extended home automation services to more than 15 million customers as it works toward enabling that capability across multiple services, including X1 (TV and the X1 voice remote), xFi (WiFi), Xfinity Home and Xfinity Mobile.

Comcast’s push comes as consumers continue to buy and adopt smart home hubs, digital assistants and smart speakers.

While Comcast is taking aim at this from the service provider level, several others are taking the consumer retail angle. Some examples include Google (Google Home), Amazon (Alexa-powered devices like the Echo and Echo Dot), as well as Apple, which announced this week that its HomePod would arrive in stores on Feb. 9, with online orders opening up Friday (Jan. 26) in the U.S., UK and Australia, with sales in France and Germany slated for this spring.

Las Vegas – Adding more scale to its smart home scope, Comcast said it has extended home automation services to more than 15 million customers, and is working to enable that capability across multiple services, including X1 (TV and the X1 voice remote), xFi (WiFi), Xfinity Home and Xfinity Mobile. 

Read More: Complete coverage of #CES2018

By way of example, that move toward automation across services will enable a customer to say “Good night” into their X1 voice remote to automatically lock the home’s doors, turn off the lights, adjust thermostats and arm their home security system. 

That drive toward unified automation across those services stems strongly from Comcast’s adoption of a cloud-based Internet of Things platform from Stringify, which Comcast acquired in September 2017. That tie-in will eventually span across Comcast's product line, but for now that work is centered on Comcast's xFi Wireless Gateway (formerly known as the XB3) and the xFI Advanced Wireless gateway, a new DOCSIS 3.1-based device that used to be called the XB6. 

RELATED: Comcast Buys Stringify

“We are playing in the intersection of digital and physical coming together,” Sridhar Solur, SVP of product development for Xfinity Home and IoT, said in an interview ahead of this week’s CES in Las Vegas.

He noted that the push for scale will enable Comcast to support and integrate a massively greater number of third-party partners across its suite of products.

The acquisition of Stringify and its technology and talent has been “instrumental” in helping Comcast bring in more digital and physical parnters together and enable automation across all of them, he said.

"From there, we are moving to a world of open interconnectivity,” Solur said, adding that it will enable Comcast to push well beyond a relatively small curated set of partners for Xfinity Home (which has about 1 million subscribers) to a much broader and diversified approach that spans across multiple Comcast services as well as many more partners from the smart home sector. 

Stringify’s platform, already powering automation service for more than 500 IoT products and digital services, will soon be integrated into Xfinity’s lineup of products and services.

Comcast said that work will enable it to create a large number of rules and controls for smart home products from companies that include August, Carrier, Chamberlain, GE, Honeywell, Kwikset, Liftmaster, LIFT, Lutron, Nest, Netgear, Arlo, Philips Hue, Danalock, Sengled, SkyBell, Tile, Yale, and Zen Ecosystems, among others.

Comcast said that work will also help it to extend its partner ecosystem to other product categories such as wearables, automotive, voice assistants, and social media platforms.

“We have integrated automation as a platform…that’s what Stringify brought to the table,” Solur said.

It will also set the table to drive the concept of presence into automation, enabling the creation of rules and automation flows not just for the home, but to each individual who lives in the home, he explained.

Update: Comcast shed a bit more light on its smart home automation initiative here Wednesday morning at a press conference, noting that it will tie into a broadened “Works with Xfinity” program.

“This is where we will democratize automation and make it available to the broadest number of customers,” starting with xFi and Comcast’s latest line of gateways, Chris Satchell, Comcast’s EVP and chief product officer, said.

 “We’re going to work with any company that wants to approach us,” he added, noting that partners can decide whether to go for a shallow or deep integration. “We want to interoperate with everybody.”

One example highlighted is Comcast’s work with Tile, a company that has developed a system that tracks a person’s belongings. In addition to hardware based devices that track items like keys, Tile is also moving ahead with software-based integrations of its tracking system. Comcast will be integrating Tile with its service platforms.

Satchell suggested that these integrations are part of what’s “missing” from IoT today, as device makers usually leave it up to the consumer to figure out how to connect devices and make them work with others. “We’re going to take that stress away from the customer,” Satchell said.

Moving forward, Comcast will enable customers to create “scenes” that automate how those IoT devices work together. A “leave mode,” for example, can be made to automatically lock the home’s doors, turn down the lights and adjust the thermostat.

Satchell also offered an update on usage of xFi, the home WiFi management system that Comcast introduced in May.

About 4 million customers are using the xFi app and web site to manage their home WiFi, he said. “We’re rapidly increasing towards that 15 million addressable total number of households.”

He also shed some light on some new xFi features in the works.

Stream Check will add intelligence that tells the customer if they are getting the right streaming rate based on the capability of the end device and the speed of the connection. If it’s not getting the right speed, the system will offer tips on how to resolve it and run a retest. Stream Check will also tell the user if the connection is optimized and capable of getting SD, HD or even 4K video.

Away Mode will ensure that unknown devices can’t connect to the home WiFi network when the customer is away – on vacation, for example. It will also send the user a notification if an unknown device is trying to gain access.

Secure Connect Mode will enable users to authorize and monitor access of others that request to join the home network, and to deny access or set a time limit for access.

From a broad sense, Comcast’s work in all of these areas “is about how we see this transitioning more and more toward our portfolio being an experience,” Matt Strauss, EVP of Xfinity Services, said. “Where today we sell based on price, over time our ambition is to sell on experience…The more products and services you take from us, the better that experience." 

Comcast’s work around A.I. has extended to the cameras that are attached to its Xfinity Home platform to help pinpoint when those cameras should capture movement.

In the wake of a 24/7 recording feature with motion-detection introduced last year, Comcast  recently added A.I. and machine learning techniques that train the system to “identify the most relevant image in a motion event,” Chris Ganster, senior director, product at Comcast Cable, explained in this blog post.

RELATED: Comcast Brings 24/7 Video Recording to Xfinity Home

Those additions extend and enhance the movement detection capabilities of the earlier iteration of the system.

“While the system was smart enough to recognize movement, it was less good at capturing exactly when that movement was taking place (this resulted in a lot of a pictures of the tip of a dog’s tail or the edge of a car bumper in the far corner of an image),” he noted.

Comcast, he added, took some of the AI and machine learning techniques used to refine the X1 Voice Remote and applied them to technology called “computer vision.”

From there, engineers from Comcast’s Applied AI Team in Washington, D.C., worked with those involved with Xfinity Home to implement a “homegrown algorithm” that focuses on movement, centers it, and “delivers a thumbnail that is instantly recognizable.”

“So now instead of squinting to see the tip of your dog’s tail, you’ll see a clear image of your dog, or the delivery truck, or whatever else triggers your motion detector,” Ganster noted.

As a result, Comcast said it has already seen a 20% rise in customers using the Xfinity Home app to view recorded moments.

Ganster said Comcast intends to add more AI-focused features to its Xfinity Home cameras that, for example, will use optical zoom to deliver better, more useful images.

Comcast has more than 1 million Xfinity Home subs.

Comcast said Xfinity Home, its smart home and security service, has extended support to three connected door locks from Kwikset.

The integration, which extends Comcast’s relationship with Kwikset, covers the SmartCode 910 Deadbolt, SmartCode 912 Deadbolt Lever and SmartCode 916 Touchscreen Deadbolt, joining the SmartCode 914 Touchpad Deadbolt. The technical tie-in enables Xfinity Home customers to remotely view the status of the locks, lock and unlock their doors, and create rules/automated commands to be notified if doors are not locked.

Xfinity Home is also set to integrate with Kwikset’s SmartCode 914 Touchpad Deadbolt, which will be sold at Xfinity stores and online at the Xfinity website.

Dan Herscovici, GM/SVP of Comcast Xfinity Home, announced the expanded partnership today during a keynote at the Smart Home Summit in Palo Alto, Calif.

Xfinity Home is also integrated with smart locks from August, which counts Comcast Ventures as an investor. Parks Associates forecasts that nearly 1 million smart door locks will be sold this year, rising to 1.7 million units by 2021.

RELATED: Comcast V.C. Backs Smart Lock Startup

Xfinity Home, which has more than 1 million subscribers, has also been integrated with several other third party vendors and products, including Nest (smart thermostats), Philips, GE, and Sengled (lighting), Chamberlain (garage door controllers), and Lutron (wireless controllers and dimmers).

RELATED: Comcast Brings ‘Scenes’ to Xfinity Home

Diving deeper into the young IoT sector, Xfinity Home, Comcast’s smart home/security unit, has become a member of the Internet of Things Consortium (IoTC).

The IoTC isn’t a technical standards body, but is rather an association/trade group that provides a business-focused forum for large and small companies that are in the industry.

Examples of other IoTC members include Verizon, ADT, Fox, The Weather Company, Greenwave Systems, MasterCard, Cox Communications, Nielsen, T-Mobile, LG Electronics, Turner, and August, the maker of smart locks that has been integrated into Comcast’s Xfinity Home platform, and Stringify (an IoT automation startup that was acquired by Comcast earlier this year).

RELATED: Comcast Buys Stringify

Two Comcast execs are also joining IoTC as advisors -- Daniel Herscovici, GM and SVP of Xfinity Home; and Sridhar Solur, SVP of product and development for Xfinity Home.

Solur said a trade group such as the IoTC is important in part because it can take on the role of “self-regulation” in this early phase of the market while also putting large companies and startups on a platform dedicated to helping them grow their businesses.

The formation of trade groups such as the IoTC “is especially important for new industries,” he said.

“We’re still in the first few innings of what this industry will become, how large it will be, and how we will affect consumer experiences,” Herscovici said.

He said it’s important for a company like Comcast, which is focused on providing an underlying, cohesive platform with Xfinity Home that can be combined with third-party smart home products such as locks, doorbells, and garage door openers.

RELATED: Comcast’s Xfinity Home Lights Up More Device Partners

“It's important for us to work with these point solution providers to figure out how to go to market in the most compelling way,” Herscovici

Xfinity Home, which has about 1 million subscribers, is currently the lead for Comcast at the IoTC, but the company is also involved in several other IoT-facing activities. Its MachineQ unit, for example is focused on enterprise Internet of Things services.

RELATED: Comcast IoT Unit Heads Into a Dozen More Markets

In addition to the consumer side of the sector, the IoTC will also be working in other areas that include security, smart cities and B2B solutions.

“As we see how these working groups get formed, we will pull in the appropriate leaders from within Comcast to participate as needed,” Herscovici said.

Comcast is broadening the capabilities of its Xfinity Home platform with “Scenes,” a feature that enables users to string together a set of rules and routines for when they are waking up, leaving or returning home, or heading to bed for the night.

Comcast is setting that up with a rules engine that lets customers set, adjust and coordinate connected devices, such as smart lighting, cameras and security systems, for several specific events, including: "Good morning;" "Leaving;" "Returning home;" and "Good night.”

RELATED: Comcast Flips Switch on Another Xfinity Home Partner

Customers, for example, can use the “Leaving” scene to set up rules that could turn on the security system, restart Xfinity Home’s video cameras, and adjust the thermostat.

The “Returning” scene can likewise be used to auto-disarm the security system, turn on lights and raise the temperature of the home’s smart thermostat.

RELATED: Comcast Closes Icontrol Deal

All four Scenes can be customized with the Xfinity Home app for iOS or Android, and each one can be activated manually or scheduled to occur at a specific time of day, Neal Foster, vice president of product management at Xfinity Home, explained in this blog post.

“We’ll continue to enhance these features and add even more capabilities over time,” Foster noted.

Comcast announced in April that it was approaching 1 million Xfinity Home subscribers.

Following a one-year pilot program, Comcast and Sunrun have inked a formal agreement under which Comcast will market Sunrun’s rooftop solar services to customers in selected states earlier this year.  

Depending on how the partnership performs, Comcast also stands to acquire a sizable stake in Sunrun, which opened a corporate office in Denver in 2015.

Under the new 40-month program, which aims to accelerate the adoption of solar energy and to reduce the electric bills of Comcast customers, Sunrun will serve as the exclusive residential solar energy provider for Comcast. In turn, Comcast Cable will be a strategic partner of Sunrun via marketing campaigns to be run in those selected markets.

On the financial end, Comcast will receive fees for new customers they bring to Sunrun, and Comcast also stands to earn a warrant of up to up to 9.99% of Sunrun’s outstanding common shares. They said the warrant is earned pro rata after 30,000 customers under the agreement are installed by Sunrun. The warrant is fully earned if Sunrun installs 60,000 customers under the agreement, they said.

UPDATE: Per an SEC filing that sheds more light on the agreement, the warrant enables Comcast to purchase up to 11,793,355 shares of Sunrun’s common stock at an exercise price of $0.01 per Warrant Share

Sunrun, headquartered in San Francisco, said it had deployed 76 megawatts by the end of Q2 2017, a 16% year-on-year increase, and a net present value of $74 million, up 56%. For full year 2017, Sunrun expected to deploy 325 MWs, a 15% year-on-year increase.

Shares in Sunrun were up 31 cents (4.52%) to $7.25 each in morning trading Thursday.

Comcast confirmed the original pilot with Sunrun last fall, noting that it began in Comcast’s Northeastern Division (New Jersey, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maryland, Connecticut and New York). In addition to energy savings, Comcast also offered qualified customers a $600 discount payable via a reloadable Visa prepaid card in four quarterly installments of $150.

RELATED: Comcast Partners on Solar Power Trial

Regarding other synergies with Sunrun, Comcast noted that it lets customers manage, control and operate key smart home functions, including energy consumption management, with its Xfinity Home service.

Among other energy-facing efforts, Comcast last year relaunched Comcast Energy Rewards, a program offered in select areas, including Pennsylvania and Illinois, that ties energy savings to perks from Comcast that include prepaid Visa cards, three free months of HBO, Showtime or Cinemax and free tickets from Comcast corporate cousin Fandango.

“We believe the residential solar industry will continue to expand over the next decade as consumers look for more cost-efficient, independent and cleaner alternatives for their energy,” Jon Kaplowitz, managing director and GM of new businesses at Comcast Cable, said in a statement. “By working with Sunrun, Comcast can help customers take more control of the price they pay for energy, save them money and help contribute to cleaner communities.”

“At Sunrun, we know homeowners love the savings, backup power and control they get with our solar energy and storage plans,” added Lynn Jurich, Sunrun’s CEO. “Our challenge is making homeowners aware that they can save money with solar today. We are excited to work with Comcast to help their customers go solar and save on their electric bills while reducing their dependence on fossil fuels.”

Adding another third-party to the Xfinity Home product mix, Comcast said it has secured a partnership with Philips Lighting.

The agreement enables Xfinity Home subs to manage and control their Philips Hue connected lighting system via the Xfinity Home mobile app. Those customers can also create rules, or automated commands, that sync their lights with Xfinity Home’s security and smart home capabilities. For example, they can create a rule that turns the lights on or off when they arm their security system, or turn the lights on when away at night to make the home appear occupied.

Comcast is also working to let Xfinity Home customers control their Philips Hue connected lighting system using the X1 voice remote.

Philips Hue products join other third-party products that have been integrated via the Works with Xfinity Home initiative.  Others include Jasco and Sengled (lighting), August (smart locks), Chamberlain (garage controllers), Lutron (wireless controllers and dimmers), and Nest (thermostats).

RELATED: Comcast’s Xfinity Home Lights Up More Device Partners

Comcast, which recently closed an acquisition of a big piece of Icontrol, announced in April that it signed on nearly 1 million Xfinity Home subscribers.

RELATED: Comcast Closes Icontrol Deal

“Our partnership with Philips Lighting advances our commitment to bring our customers best-in-class devices they can trust and easily manage on one, integrated platform – the Xfinity Home platform,” Daniel Herscovici, SVP and GM of Xfinity Home, said in a statement. “With the Philips Hue family of products, our customers can customize their lighting according to their own needs and daily routines. They can also set up simple automated commands, such as turning on the hallway lights when they enter the home and disarm the system.” 

Comcast still hasn’t updated sub figures for Xfinity Home, its home security and automation service, for awhile (the official number has been 500,000-plus since mid-2015), but the company is starting to open up the marketing spigot with a new series of spots for TV and online.

Comcast, which recently closed a deal to acquire an important piece of Icontrol, will debut its latest Xfinity Home spot on Monday, April 10.

That 30-second ad, “Chores,” focuses on home safety and the platform’s support for real-time access to home cameras and 24/7 monitoring, albeit with a comedic spin:

Comcast said the above spot is part of a series of six that were developed by the company and its marketing agency partner, Digitas.

Below are two other spots, already on-air, that are tied to the campaign.

“Touch”:

 “Bedtime”:

Comcast has completed its purchase of Internet of Things company Icontrol Networks, a move the company said will enhance its Xfinity Home security and automation business.

RELATED Comcast, Alarm.com Divvy Up Icontrol Networks

Comcast said it would acquire the Converge business of Icontrol in August , with Alarm.com agreeing to purchase Icontrol’s Silicon Valley and Ottawa business units, for about $140 million. Comcast and Icontrol did not reveal the financial terms of their agreement, but the deal makes sense especially since Converge built the platform that powers Xfinity Home.

RELATED: Why Comcast Is Buying Icontrol

In a blog post Wednesday, SVP and general manager of Comcast’s Xfinity Home Daniel Herscovici wrote that the purchase of the Converge unit gives Comcast “full control over our research and development roadmap,” which will allow the company to invest more strategically in the future.

He added that with the buy Comcast will develop an "IoT Center of Excellence" in Austin, Texas, Icontrol’s home base.

“This will be a key hub where our engineers and developers will design innovations to support our various IoT businesses,” Herscovici wrote, adding that engineers in Austin will work closely with teams in Philadelphia, Silicon Valley, and other locations.

Finally, he said the purchase opens up a new line of business for Xfinity Home.

“We will also be able to offer wholesale services to new customers, either domestic or international,” Herscovici wrote. “We have plans to make a more formal announcement about this new line of business soon.”

RELATED: Rogers Tightens Technology Ties to Comcast 

As part of a plan to enable customers to save energy and manage “greener” homes, Comcast’s Xfinity Home service has struck a partnership and integration agreement with Zen Ecosystems, maker of a new connected thermostat.

Zen’s thermostat is now a “core” device in the Xfinity Home ecosystem and represents another step toward the relaunch of an “EcoSaver” technology/platform that aims to reduce energy usage by optimizing home heating and cooling using real-time weather analytics.

RELATED: Comcast Connects With Earth Networks

 “At Xfinity Home, we are always looking for new ways to delight our customers and add value to our services,” Daniel Herscovici, senior vice president and general manager of Xfinity Home, said in a statement. “We are eager to unveil a new home energy management service soon, fully integrated with Zen Ecosystems, that will redefine what customers expect from their smart home services. When we relaunch EcoSaver in the spring, our customers will be able to transform their smart homes into greener homes, while continuing to help them save money on their monthly energy bills.”

Zen Ecosystems joins a growing list of third-party companies to integrate products with Xfinity Home, a security and home automation service that has more than 500,000 subscribers. Other announced partners include August (smart locks), Chamberlain (garage controllers), Lutron (wireless controllers and dimmers), Nest (thermostats) and Sengled and Jasco (lighting). Comcast also builds its own products for Xfinity Home, including the recently introduced “xCam,” a WiFi-connected, HD indoor/outdoor camera.

RELATED: Comcast’s Xfinity Home Lights Up More Device Partners

Comcast, which expects to announce more partnership this year ,has also relaunched its Works With Xfinity Home portal as the MSO looks to drive more visibility and scale into the program.

Comcast is also in the process of buying a big piece of Icontrol, and has discussed how that acquisition might enable the operator to pursue an additional wholesale/white-label business. Icontrol's customers include Cox Communications, Rogers and Charter Communications. Fierce Cable reported that Comcast is holding meetings at CES this week with Charter and other operators to discuss potential licensing opportunities. 

RELATED: Why Comcast is Buying Icontrol 

Expanding on its curated smart home integration program for third-party products, Comcast said it will soon add support for two lighting partners – Jasco and Sengled – to its Xfinity Home platform.

Comcast, which helps outside vendors hook in via its Works With Xfinity Home initiative, said its smart home/security customers will be able to manage GE-branded plug-in and in-wall smart switches from Jasco and Sengled’s Element Touch connected LED lightbulbs via the Xfinity Home app.

RELATED: Home Smart Home (subscription required) 

Xfinity Home customers who also have Comcast’s X1 video service will also be able to bring up the smart home user interface on their TVs by saying, “Xfinity Home lights,” into the X1 voice remote.

Citing data from a study (PDF) from Icontrol Networks (Comcast announced a deal to acquire a large piece of Icontrol in June), more than a third of consumers said they are likely to buy connected lighting in the next 12 months.

RELATED: Why Comcast is Buying Icontrol

Jasco and Sengled are the latest third-party companies to be integrated with Xfinity Home. Others include August (smart locks), Chamberlain (garage controllers), Lutron (wireless controllers and dimmers), as well as Nest Learning Thermostats.

“By adding Jasco and Sengled to our growing list of curated smart home devices that we integrate with Xfinity Home, our customers will be able to create unique experiences that connect the devices that are important to them such as streaming security cameras, door locks, thermostats, and lights,” Daniel Herscovici, senior vice president and general manager of Xfinity Home, said in a statement. “We can integrate all of these devices into a unified experience on one easy-to-use platform.”

Comcast also builds its own products for Xfinity Home, including the recently introduced “xCam,” a WiFi-connected, HD indoor/outdoor camera.

Comcast said Xfinity Home subs can also set and manage rules/automated commands that trigger certain functions – for example, they can set a rule that turns on a light every day at sunset or every time the front door is opened.

Comcast revealed last summer that it has more than 500,000 Xfinity Home subs, but has not issued an updated sub figure since. In its Q3 earnings report, Comcast said that 55% of Xfinity Home subs were new to the company. At the end of that period, nearly 60% of Xfinity Home customers bundle four services – Internet, TV, phone and home security, and nearly all sign up for at least three products from the MSO.

RELATED: Comcast Pursues Bigger Piece of  Smart Home Market

Comcast is competing in the market against the likes of Alarm.com (which is also acquiring a piece of Icontrol), ADT and other service providers such as AT&T and  Verizon. EchoStar exited the smart home and home security game in September when it shut down Sage By Hughes, a do-it-yourself platform.

If it wasn’t clear before, Comcast’s deal to acquire a big chunk of Icontrol Networks delivered a powerful message to the home-security and automation sector: The cable industry is through with experimenting and ready to start disrupting.

Cable operators and other multichannel video-programming distributors (MVPDs) are relatively new to the smart home market and, so far, have only managed to make a small dent against a diverse group of incumbent providers.

But it’s increasingly evident that Comcast, along with companies such as AT&T, Verizon Communications and Cox Communications, now see home security and automation as an important growth engine. After all, video-subscriber growth remains a challenge for the whole MVPD sector, and even broadband Internet growth will eventually flatten out.

Related:Why Comcast Is Buying Icontrol

Comcast, which launched Xfinity Home in 2010, has said it has more than 500,000 customers for that product, a number that it hasn’t updated in more than a year. It sees nothing but opportunity ahead.

“We are at the start of a massive upgrade cycle,” Dan Herscovici, senior vice president and general manager of Xfinity Home, said, likening this period to the mobile market’s rapid shift from flip phones to smartphones.

About 70% of consumers are on “older, antiquated home-security systems” that simply sound alarms and call the police, and that don’t support the connected smart-home elements people now desire, Herscovici said.

Cox, whose Homelife service relies on the Icontrol platform that Comcast is acquiring, hasn’t disclosed subscriber numbers. “But I’d say [home security and automation] is material in terms of growth,” Kristine Faulkner, Cox general manager and vice president of home security and smart home, said.

Sixty percent of Cox’s new smart home subscribers have never had a monitored security service, she said. “We’re having a tremendous year in this category of the business.”

FRAGMENTED MARKET

The home security and automation market is expanding, but it comprises a massive array of large and small rivals.

Related:Charter: We’ll Continue to Support TWC Home Security Subs

The market leader is ADT, with more than 6 million subscribers. It’s fighting for share with more than 100 regional players and thousands of local dealers.

“It’s a pretty fragmented industry,” Tom Kerber, director of research for home controls and energy at Parks Research, said. “It’s still in the early-adopter stage, but that’s about to change.”

For it to get to the next level, consumers must get more familiar with smart home systems, he said, citing a survey in which 14% of respondents were aware of general smart-home market terms.

Despite those low numbers, the door is wide open for cable operators and other MVPDs and ISPs with direct consumer relationships to step in, educate the masses and pitch home security and smart-home products, he said.

“The product doesn’t sell itself; it has to be sold,” Kerber said. “All of the telecoms have superior capabilities in terms of consumer outreach, a customer base and marketing horsepower. But at this stage in the market, those [factors] are not what it takes to win.”

Success will also require service providers to embrace a consultative selling model, he said.

Cox’s Faulkner agreed that home security and automation are complex services that require a “fair degree” of customer education. “If you do that right, it works really well,” she said. “If you’re missing components, that’s going to hurt you.”

Cable operators also have a potential cost advantage because they can build smart-home services into their customer-acquisition costs, which, in turn, could allow them to undercut their competitors.

MVPDs have used these advantages to take about 5% of the market during their brief pursuit. “As familiarity grows and awareness grows, those major strengths will play a bigger role,” Kerber predicted.

And pay TV providers are trying to play to those strengths as they formulate and evolve their smart home and home security strategies.

Comcast is taking a hybrid build-buy approach with Xfinity Home as it prepares to pair a homegrown platform with the one it is acquiring from Icontrol.

The No. 1 U.S. MSO is buying Icontrol’s “Converge” platform, the element of Xfinity Home that uses ZigBee to underpin its fundamental security “state machine” (i.e., the engines, rules and requirements for that security component). Alarm.com is purchasing Icontrol’s Connect platform, a Z-wave-based service that counts ADT as its biggest customer.

Comcast’s in-house platform supports the MSO’s own smart home products and, through its “Works With Xfinity Home Program,” also links up with a curated mix of third-party retail devices from companies such as Google unit Nest (smart thermostats), Chamberlain (garage door controllers), August (door locks) and Lutron (wireless light controllers and dimmers).

By combining its in-home systems with Icontrol, Comcast hopes to establish a unified user experience that can rely on one app to handle all of Xfinity Home’s security and automation elements. “Building everything yourself doesn’t always make a lot of sense,” Herscovici said.

In addition to accelerating its own roadmap for Xfinity, buying Icontrol also turns Comcast into a vendor of sorts. A handful of other MSOs also use Icontrol’s Converge product for home security and automation, including Cox, Rogers Communications and Charter Communications (through its acquisitions of Icontrol partners Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks).

Comcast is “excited” about the prospect of being in the wholesale home security and automation business, Herscovici said. “Our hope is to grow both businesses.”

Faulkner said she views the Comcast-Icontrol deal as a positive for Cox, which is already licensing Comcast’s X1 platform for the next generation of its Contour multiscreen video product.

“Comcast will bring a good customer focus and mentality, and it will bring scale and investment,” she said.

AT&T, which sells a Digital Life-branded smart home and security product, is taking a similar approach. In 2010, it acquired home-automation platform developer Xanboo, whose technology now forms the foundation of a service that supports AT&T’s home security and automation products, as well as those of third parties such as Nest and Lutron.

The telco made the decision early on to bring that capability (and control) in house, which accelerated its ability to integrate it with its customer billing systems and sales channels. It also underpins a solution that AT&T is licensing to other telcos, starting with U.K.-based provider O2.

AT&T is now making progress toward integrating Digital Life with DirecTV. Before AT&T acquired the satellite-TV provider last year, DirecTV offered its own home security/automation platform under the LifeShield brand. Digital Life apps are now present on DirecTV’s Genie set-tops.

“We have brought those organizations together,” said Stephen Vincent, executive director of business development for AT&T Digital Life, noting that AT&T has deployed the product to about 86 U.S. markets.

Vincent also said he believes that service providers are positioned to propel the next phase of the smart home market.

“We’re starting to sense a bit of frustration from customers about all of these disparate experiences that are out there,” he said. To help customers link retail products with the Digital Life’s platform, AT&T has built a system that lets them self-connect compatible smart home products from companies such as Nest.

EchoStar, the technology spinoff of satellite-TV provider Dish Network, is taking a much different approach with Sage by Hughes, a do-it-yourself platform launched in early March. Rather than selling home security and automation products alongside Dish’s pay TV offerings, Sage is currently focused on retail distribution.

Sage is targeting a sizable consumer base that hasn’t sprung for such products, but the company has not disclosed any sales figures.

“The market data says about 20% of all households have a home-security system, so there’s 80%-plus, in our opinion, that don’t have a system,” EchoStar CEO Mike Dugan said on the company’s Q1 earnings call.

Early on EchoStar is sidestepping distribution through major “big box” retail chains and instead pitching the product through a mix of digital marketing and its network of independent satellite retailers.

“We are tapping that market, which really helped [Dish chairman] Charlie [Ergen] get started in the early days with Dish, and he did that instead of big box [stores],” Dugan said. “So we’re certainly taking that page from his playbook.”

At this stage, larger MVPDs such as Comcast, Cox, AT&T and Verizon have been leading the way with home security and home automation products.

“I think the industry learned early that you have to make a very significant, basic commitment to launching these solutions,” Greg Roberts, vice president of marketing at Icontrol, said. “There’s a significant amount of technical support and sales support that is very intense and very incremental to their business. It makes sense for those not offering to take a back seat and to watch what is going on.”

Suddenlink Communications has been amomg the exceptions among midsized MVPDs, as it launched a product in partnership with Alarm.com before it was acquired by Altice USA. Altice, which wrapped up its acquisition of Cablevision Systems in June, has not announced a home security and automation strategy for its U.S. operations.

WideOpenWest, meanwhile, plans to launch a market trial later this year with an unnamed partner. If all goes well, it could launch a commercial home security and automation product in the first half of 2017.

“We want to be the enabler” of those services, Cash Hagen, WOW’s chief technology officer, said. “They [consumers] are going to look to a partner or a service provider such as us to bring that to them.”

Charter is still a wild card among major U.S. cable operators. It will continue to support home-security and home-automation customers who came on board through the Bright House and TWC acquisitions, but has halted new sales.

“Intelligent Home is a new business for Charter and we are in the process of assessing it,” the company said in a statement. “While we assess the program, we are reducing the focus on sales.”

INTRAOPERABILITY CHALLENGE

Though Comcast, AT&T and others are integrating their platforms with some third-party products, a major challenge in the years ahead will involve the support of new and emerging connectivity and control protocols.

One company hoping to help with that is Zonoff. The Malvern, Pa.- based IoT startup is pitching an agnostic approach that teams middleware and a cloud-based management platform that allows for the use of multiple devices relying on a wide variety of protocols.

“There’s myth around interoperability,” Kevin Garton, Zonoff’s chief marketing officer, said. “We believe that what we have is intraoperability.”

Zonoff has said its approach already works with several protocols, including Bluetooth, WiFi, Z-Wave, ZigBee and Lutron’s Clear Connect technology. “In theory, we could do more,” Garton said.

He said Zonoff is in discussions with Universal Electronics, the remote- control giant that entered the home security and automation market last year through the acquisition of Ecolink Intelligent Technology, which uses a proprietary protocol.

Zonoff launched a white-label IoT platform for service providers in January, but hasn’t announced any cable deals. “We have several things in the works,” said Garton, who thinks Zonoff could add value to MSOs by incorporating its software in smart-home hubs or cable boxes.

Comcast says its move to acquire of a big piece of Icontrol will enable the MSO’s Xfinity Home division innovate faster, gain access to a talented group of engineers, and open up wholesale opportunities as other operators look to expand their home security and automation businesses, or enter that marketplace.

“We’re focused heavily on the connected home security market and disrupting that market,” Dan Herscovici, senior vice president and general manager of Xfinity Home, said Thursday, soon after Comcast and Icontrol announced the deal.

He said that disruption is about “creating innovative user experiences and capabilities supporting or evolving what people might consider traditional home security.”

He noted that the overall market is growing at 2% to 3.5% (Comcast has more than 500,000 Xfinity Home customers), but that there’s a big opportunity in front of Comcast as some customers upgrade their systems while others are ripe to switch providers or are looking to take a smart home service for the first time.

“The opportunity in front of us is that there's 25 to 30 million households that have a monitored home security system, and of those, 70% are on an older, antiquated home security system,” Herscovici said. “We think that the solution we’re creating and the one that Icontrol unlocks, will allow us to give  consumers an amazing new set of features that will do two things… convince traditional home security subs to switch and convince people to jump in we provide  a lot more value.”

Comcast is buying Icontrol’s “Converge” platform, the piece of Xfinity Home that provides the service’s fundamental security “state machine,” which supports the engines, rules and requirements for that component.

Icontrol’s ZigBee-based Converge platform (Alarm.com is buying Icontrol’s Connect platform, which leans on Z-wave, is more focused on dealer installs, and counts ADT as its biggest customer) has already been working in concert with home-grown Comcast’s platform that supports a broader set of smart  home products, including those developed by Comcast as well as third-party devices from partners such as Nest, Chamberlain (garage door controllers), August (door locks) and Lutron (wireless light controllers and dimmers).

When put together, those platforms provide Comcast with a unified user experience and one app to control all of security and automation elements, but Comcast felt that buying the Icontrol piece will enable it to go faster and deepen that integration.

Icontrol, Herscovici said, “does a lot of things really, really well…Building everything yourself doesn’t always make a lot of sense…especially when you have a talented group of engineers that have been thinking about this for ten-plus years.”

Beyond Comcast’s own Xfinity Home product, Herscovici said the company is also excited about the wholesale/white-label business that the Icontrol acquisition will open up.

“Our hope is to grow both businesses,” he said. “They should be generally complementary, but we are prepared to support unique requirements of each of our customers just like any platform provider would do.”

Cox Communications, Rogers Communications and two MSOs just acquired by Charter -- Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks – have been using Icontrol for both security and their larger home automation platforms. Charter said it is still mulling how home security and automation services will fit into its longer-term strategy.

Of that group, Cox is already syndicating/licensing Comcast’s X1 platform for its next-gen Contour video platform.

In a move that shakes up the home security and automation market, Comcast and Alarm.com said they have struck agreements to buy different pieces of Icontrol.

Comcast is in line to buy the Austin division that built the platform powering the MSO’s Xfinity Home service, and Alarm.com set to acquire Icontrol’s Silicon Valley and Ottawa business units, which together include a platform used today by ADT and Icontrol’s retail-focused, do-it-yourself Piper product line. Alarm.com is paying $140 million to acquire its portion of the Icontrol assets. Comcast and Icontrol did not reveal the financial terms of their agreement. 

The announcement comes about two weeks after Stacey Higginbotham reported that Icontrol was in talks to sell its assets to Comcast and Alarm.com.

Comcast, which continues to expand on its own Works with Xfinity Home initiative for third-party connected-home products such as the Nest Learning Thermostat, has been using Icontrol’s platform since it launched its home security and automation service in 2010.

“The main business we are acquiring is Icontrol’s 'Converge' software platform,” Dan Herscovici, SVP and GM of Xfinity Home, explained in this blog post about the deal. “That platform powers the Xfinity Home touch-screen panel and back-end servers, allowing them to communicate with and manage security sensors in the home, as well as supporting home-automation devices like cameras and thermostats."

In addition to Comcast, Icontrol’s platform is also being used to power similar services from  Cox Communications, Rogers Communications, and Bell Aliant. Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks, recently acquired by Charter Communications, have also relied on Icontrol for their respective smart home services. Charter confirmed last week that it is reducing its focus on sales of those products as it assesses that line of business, but that it will continue to support existing customers.

“We look forward to continuing to serve customers using the Converge software platform and to growing Icontrol’s wholesale business by accelerating the development of new services and features,” Herscovici noted, adding that Comcast will continue to invest it Icontrol’s technology for Xfinity Home subs as well as “enterprise-level” Converge customers.

He added that Icontrol employees in Austin who are joining Comcast will underpin a new Comcast “engineering center of excellence”  there, and work closely with Comcast’s engineers in Philadelphia and Silicon Valley.

Meanwhile, Alarm.com, which counts Suddenlink (now part of Altice) among its customers, will snap up Icontrol’s Connect and Piper business units for $140 million, and expects to close it before the end of 2016. Connect provides security and home automation services for provides that include market-leader ADT, which has about 1.6 million subscribers. Piper, the Ottawa-based unit, makes and sells video and home automation hubs that was spawned by Icontrol’s 2014 acquisition of Blacksumac.

"This acquisition will enhance our research and development scale so that we can continue to deliver long-term value to our partners through innovative technology," Steve Trundle, president and CEO of Alarm.com, said in a statement. "We look forward to welcoming the Icontrol team and to building upon the solid relationships within their customer base." 

Raymond James acted as the financial advisor to Alarm.com on the deal. 

Comcast is pushing ahead on a plan to take Xfinity Home, its home security and automation platform, to the next level in part by broadening a curated mix of devices that work with the platform while also adding elements that drive more value into the service and reduce service friction. 

“First and foremost, we have over the past year and a half focused heavily on disrupting the home security market,” Dan Herscovici, senior vice president and general manager of Xfinity Home, said in an interview soon after he keynoted the Parks Associates Connections conference in San Francisco on Tuesday (May 24).

But Comcast is now pushing well beyond connected home security and is now shooting to "reinvent the way consumers think about home security, to redefine what their expectation is from their home security system," he said. 

That means extending to other areas of the connected home, such as security cameras, door locks, garage door openers, doorbells and enabling them all on a common platform that simplifies the process for the consumer.

In that area, Comcast has been building its own smart home products while also extending a bridge to third-party products via its Works With Xfinity Home Program. About a dozen partners are on board, with four – Nest (smart thermostats), Chamberlain (garage door controllers), Lutron (smart lighting), and August (smart locks) – already integrated.

And Herscovici was clear that the program will provide customers with a “curated” blend of what it deems as best-of-breed third-party devices. The program uses APIs for integration, but products also must pass core functionality tests to determine if they are among the top options in their market and if they can be trusted to provide the necessary levels of security and reliability. Based on that process, the idea is to offer two to three options in different categories that offer a range of pricing and functionality.

During his keynote, Herscovici said Comcast is working to help drive the penetration of smart home services to “20%, 30% or 40%” of homes and to focus on four areas – life safety (security), peace of mind (access control), saving money (reducing energy use), and lifestyle (such as lighting and shade control).

As part of its game plan, Comcast also hopes to pump adoption by removing some of the friction by redefining what a platform means to customers and to rethink how it uses devices that are already in the home, such as routers and gateways, to “unlock and connect” various connected smart home products.

Comcast announced last year that it has more than 500,000 Xfinity Home customers, but has not yet updated that figure. “We are very happy with the growth of our home security product,” Herscovici

At the Parks Associates event, he said 75% of Xfinity Home net adds over the past 12 months were new to the category, and that about 80% that do have home security are using legacy systems.

“We are at the start of a massive upgrade cycle,” he said, likening it to a shift from flip-phones to smartphones. The question, he posed, is  who will win that “jump ball?”

There will be plenty of companies leaping for it. Comcast is trying to expand its share amid surging competition in the smart home and home security market. In addition to facing competition from AT&T, Verizon, ADT as well as a new retail-focused, DIY product from EchoStar called Sage, Comcast must also deal with new products and services from Google and Amazon.

As for Google and Amazon, Herscovici said Comcast views them as “frenemies,” referencing Xfinity Home’s integration with the Nest smart thermostat, and the potential to link Comcast’s service with Amazon Echo.

Working with Amazon’s platform is a theoretical at this point, but “there’s no reason why that voice interface [from Amazon Echo] couldn’t also interact with Xfinity Home,” he said in an interview. “It’s not something outside the realm of possibility. The point is we're open to best in class experiences. We're open to seeing things through the eye of the consumer and having the consumer drive what they want to be part of the ecosystem.”

Voice control appears to be a potentially valuable addition to that ecosystem. Comcast currently offers voice navigation on its X1 video service with its XR11 remote and has been noodling on ways to extend that functionality to Xfinity Home.

“We have working prototypes that allow you to arm and disarm [Xfinity Home] with your voice and turn the lights on… with the XR11 remote,” Herscovici said. “So stay tuned for news on that.”

And, as is the case for its video service, don’t expect Comcast to look outside the MSO’s  traditional service area for growth opportunities for Xfinity Home.

“We think there’s a lot of untapped potential in the footprint we serve today,” he said. 

Comcast Cable has hired former Hewlett Packard exec Sridhar Solur to the post of SVP, product development for Xfinity Home and Internet of Things  (IoT).

In that role, Solur will lead product development for the Xfinity Home business, which includes devices and services in the IoT, home automation, and home security categories. He is also coming on board as the MSO continues development on its own line of smart home products and integrates third-party products via “Works with Xfinity Home” initiative.

Xfinity Home, which provides security and home automation services and recently added 24/7 video recording capabilities, has more than 500,000 subs.

At HP, Solur was the founder and GM of the company’s wearables and IoT business, as well as the founder and World Wide director of HP’s cloud and mobile printing business (HP ePrint).

Solur reports to Chris Satchell, the former Nike and Microsoft exec who joined Comcast Cable last year as EVP and chief product officer, as part of the MSO’s Product Leadership Team. Solur will also work closely with Daniel Herscovici, SVP and GM of Xfinity Home, and Fraser Stirling, Comcast’s SVP, product & hardware management, the operator said.

"Home automation, IoT, and home security are increasingly important product categories for Comcast,” Satchell said, in a statement. “Sridhar’s extensive experience in the fast-evolving, high-growth business of connected devices will be a strong addition to the Comcast team. We look forward to leveraging his knowledge and vision as we explore emerging technologies to ultimately create the best experience for our customers."

"Sri will add a valuable perspective to our product development work and be a terrific partner as we continue to grow our home security and automation business,” added Herscovici. 

Adding some video muscle to its smart home and security platform, Comcast said it has launched 24/7 video recording capabilities to its Xfinity Home service in several of the MSO’s major markets.

Comcast, which has more than 500,000 Xfinity Home subs, said the new cloud-powered security and monitoring feature will enable customers to review past footage for up to 10 days via the Xfinity Home app or a computer Web browser. Those customers can also tap into the platform to download and share video clips of up to 1 minute in length with family, friends or law enforcement, and locate “key moments” by scrolling through a list of video clips captured when Xfinity Home cameras detect motion.

A video analytics capability also reduces false motion events, such as falling leaves or lighting changes, Comcast said.

Comcast has introduced 24/7 video recording in most of its major markets, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Miami, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., and expects to make it available to all Xfinity Home subs in the next few months.  Xfinity Home customers already have the ability to view live video and schedule the platform to record 15 second video clips or take photos to save or share.

The 24/7 offering is included the Xfinity Home - Automation package, and it can be turned on in the camera settings via the Xfinity Home app or web portal. Customers on the Xfinity Home – Secure tier can add the feature for $9.95 per month per camera. Customers may have to upgrade their camera to enable 24/7 video recording, the MSO said.

“As home security and automation technology evolves, people want simple solutions that are easy to use and give them peace of mind,” said Daniel Herscovici, senior vice president and general manager, Xfinity Home, in a statement. “Continuous video recording has consistently been the most requested feature by customers, and the use cases span a wide range of interests from keeping an eye on an elderly parent or waiting for a package to checking in on your pet or watching your home while you’re away.” 

Comcast said its Xfinity Home platform will enable customers to reduce energy use and lower costs after integrating Earth Networks’ WeatherBug Home optimization software.

Under the deal, WeatherBug Home will provide the data and analytics for Xfinity Home’s energy-saving tool, EcoSaver, which learns the heating and cooling patterns of a home and makes automatic, incremental adjustments to the thermostat.

Comcast said Earth Networks processes 25 terabytes of “hyper-local, real-time, proprietary weather data” each day for 20 million consumers.

“Smart home controls are not just about convenience, they help home owners save money,” said Daniel Herscovici, SVP and GM of Xfinity Home, in a statement. “The cost of heating and cooling a home can account for almost half of a household’s overall utility bill, and over the past three years, our EcoSaver feature has helped save Xfinity Home customers $2.3 million. We think this new partnership with Earth Networks will inform our smart home platform with more data than ever and help our energy tracking tools become more accurate and effective for users.”

“The smart home is quickly becoming a reality, and when it comes to energy efficiency, knowledge is power,” added Earth Networks CEO Bob Marshall. “Our unique intelligent learning, coupled with our superior big data and modeling seamlessly delivers significant energy cost savings to consumers and energy efficiency and demand response to meet utility mandates.”

Comcast has more than 500,000 Xfinity Home customers. Of recent note, it has added several partners to its Works with Xfintiy Home certification program --  including the August Smart Lock, Chamberlain MyQ garage controller, Lutron’s Caseta’ wireless light controller and dimmer and the Nest Learning Thermostat --  and expects to add more to the mix later this year.

Comcast was put on the defensive last week when a security research firm said it found vulnerabilities in the Xfinity Home platform that could let outsiders hack in and wreak havoc.

Philadelphia-based Comcast, which has more than 500,000 Xfinity Home customers, said it is looking into the findings, but noted that its platform uses the same industry-standard systems as other providers. That means it could be an issue for the entire smart home and security sector, not just Comcast.

Rapid7, the company that put out the report, said would-be hackers could easily target the ZigBee-based wireless platform Comcast uses in the 2.4-Gigahertz band, which, Rapid7 claims, can be jammed to block communications between the Xfinity Home hub and other components of the home automation and security system, such as door sensors.

Xfinity Home “does not fail closed with an assumption that an attack is underway,” Rapid7 said. “Instead, the system fails open,” meaning that the sensors would believe that all sensors are intact, all doors are closed and no motion is detected. That improper state can last from anywhere from several minutes to three hours, it said.

There are a number of techniques available to cause interference or deauthenticate the underlying ZigBee-based communications protocol, Rapid7 said, including commonplace radio-jamming equipment.

“By creating a failure condition in the 2.4-GHz radio frequency band, the Comcast Xfinity Home Security System fails open, with the base station failing to recognize or alert on a communications failure with the component sensors,” the researchers said. “In addition, sensors take an inordinate amount of time to re-establish communications with the base station, even if their ‘closed’ state is switched to ‘open’ during the failure event.”

There are “no practical mitigations” to resolve the issue, Rapid7 said, holding that it might take a software or firmware update to the base station to determine how much and how long a radio failure condition should be tolerated, and how quickly sensors can re-establish communications with the base station.

Comcast said it will look into the findings, and intends to work with others in the homesecurity and automation sector on ways to handle the situation.

“Our home-security system uses the same advanced, industry-standard technology as the nation’s top home-security providers,” the operator said. “The issue being raised is technology used by all home security systems that use wireless connectivity for door, window and other sensors to communicate.

“We are reviewing this research and will proactively work with other industry partners and major providers to identify possible solutions that could benefit our customers and the industry.”

And it would seem that other systems could also be exposed by similar vulnerabilities.

In 2014, Oak Ridge National Lab and Qualys found similar jamming issues on systems from suppliers such as ADT and Vivint that also rely on radio signals between door and window sensors and control hubs.

The good news is that it’s still a relatively small problem. CNET reported last year that the odds of hackers bypassing a security system remain small enough that the FBI does not track those statistics.

But it’s an issue that will need to be solved as more consumers sign up and install these smart home platforms. The Consumer Technology Association predicts that the smart-home tech sector (including connected thermostats, cameras, smart locks and lighting) will reach 8.9 million units sold in 2016, a 21% increase, alongside $1.2 billion in revenue.

Marking a milestone for its “Works with Xfinity Home” initiative, Comcast said its new smart home platform is now compatible with four third-party products – the August Smart Lock, Chamberlain MyQ garage controller, Lutron’s Caseta’ wireless light controller and dimmer and the Nest Learning Thermostat.

Those products are now compatible with Comcast’s Xfinity Home apps for Android and iOS.  Comcast said its customers will eventually be able to control all of their smart home devices via the TV through its X1 platform and voice remote.

“This is the start of a long list of devices that will follow,” Dan Herscovici, SVP and GM of Xfinity Home, said.

The integrations with the first four come about five months after the MSO announced its smart home certification program, which is powered by a home-grown software development kit.

Other announced Xfinity Home partners include Cuff (smart jewelry); Leeo (maker of a smart home devcie that listens for smoke and CO detectors and sends alerts if they sound, plus a secondary nightlight function); Rachio (sprinkler controllers); Netgear (the Arlo wireless HD camera),  Automatic Labs (car adapters); SkyBell (video doorbells); and Whistle (pet monitors).

Comcast’s new smart home platform relies on open protocols and APIs that hook into the MSO’s backoffice systems, Herscovici said, noting that the all-IP system currently supports connectivity over WiFi, Bluetooth and Zigbee.

“There’s a cloud-based rules engine that drives interaction across these devices, but it’ a Comcast-developed home automation platform,” he said.

Comcast’s new Xfinity Home platform for the MSO’s own smart home gear and third-party partners currently doesn’t support systems such as Brillo (Google’s underlying OS for the Internet of Things), Weave (Google’s IoT communications layer), Apple’s HomeKit, or the Open Interconnect Consortium. But Comcast is keeping its eyes and ears open.

Comcast’s platform “can support additional standards as we find ones that are valuable to make compatible,” Herscovici said. “It’s early in the market today. We want to lead and deliver value to the consumer and do so in a conscious way to gain credibility and reinforce trust to the consumer first." 

Comcast has set up a developer’s site for the Works with Xfinity Home program. There are no fees to join the program, but Comcast decides who makes the cut.

“You have to be in the top of your category and offer a valuable experience that can integrate with the platform,” Herscovici said.

Comcast is taking this angle, believing that consumers will want a single interface and a single user experience for home security and automation, rather than having a mishmash that runs on multiple apps.

“The more devices you connect to the platform, the more valuable the platform becomes,” Herscovici said.

In addition to providing a new revenue stream, MSOs are also looking for home automation and security services to add stickiness to service bundles. Comcast has more than 500,000 Xfinity Home subscribers.

Comcast has a dedicated customer care team for Xfinity Home that factors in its support for the new third-party partners.

He said Comcast’s long-standing partnership with Icontrol remains intact, noting that they will continue to serve as Comcast’s “security state machine and security engine,” providing the heart of the Xfinity Home touchscreen and the alarming system tied to the service’s security ecosystem.

“Icontrol is a component of the larger solution,” he said.

That larger solution will also be comprised of a new line of smart home devices developed by Comcast.

Herscovici said Comcast is about 12 to 16 weeks away from the launch of its own integrated camera product, with a thermostat to follow early next year.

“We’ll start to see all of these devices in Q1/Q2 of next year in a meaningful way,” he said. 

Building on its Internet of Things initiative, Comcast said it will soon add two new third-party partners/products to its Xfinity Home platform – the Chamberlain MyQ garage door controller, and the Netgear Arlo wireless HD security camera.

Those devices, Comcast said, will join a growing list of third-party devices and systems that can be managed and controlled by the Xfinity Home platform, which includes mobile apps. Comcast expects MyQ to be integrated later this month, and Arlo by early next year. Comcast said it has more than 500,000 Xfinity Home customers.

The Chamberlain and Netgear components are being added to the mix as Comcast moves forward with a plan that will enable Xfinity Home, its  cloud-based smart home/security platform, to work with outside vendors as well as with a new line of next-gen products that Comcast is developing in-house.

In May at the INTX show in Chicago, Comcast announced it was building a software development kit for Xfinity Home and would later launch a “Works with Xfinity Home” certification program. At the time, Comcast also announced plans to integrate with the Nest smart thermostat; August, a maker of smart locks and car adapters (Comcast Ventures is an investor); Cuff (smart jewelry); Leeo (maker of a connected nighlight); Lutron (dimmers, remote controls and battery-powered shade); Rachio (sprinkler controllers); Automatic Labs (car adapters); SkyBell (video doorbells); and Whistle (pet monitors). Comcast Ventures, the V.C. arm of Comcast, also participated in a recent $24 million “B” round in Automatic Labs.

Comcast also continues to work with Icontrol, the MSO’s original Xfinity Home technology partner. At the show, a Comcast official said that the SDK will feature a broad, “super-set” platform that will encompass Icontrol, Comcast’s new internally-developed products, and its grander third-party integration initiative.

“While there are more connected devices available than ever, consumers continue to struggle with the best way to make them work together,” said Dan Herscovici, SVP and GM of Xfinity Home, in a statement. “We’re going to aggregate the best home automation and security features and bring them together in one common, easy-to-use and seamless experience. We’re excited to partner with best-in-class manufactures like Chamberlain and NETGEAR and look forward to adding them to our Xfinity Home platform.”

Comcast has gone outside the cable realm to find the exec who will head up its consumer product strategy.

Chris Satchell, a former Nike and Microsoft executive, has joined Comcast Cable as executive vice president and chief product officer, where he’ll lead the company’s product team in Philadelphia, Denver and Silicon Valley to develop and design Comcast’s consumer products. Satchell succeeds Charlie Herrin, who is now Comcast’s EVP of customer experience.

At Nike, Satchell served as the sports footwear and apparel giant’s consumer technology officer, where he was responsible for the strategy and execution related to all consumer-focused technology and digital asset, and led a team of 1,600 employees within Nike’s Consumer Digital Technology unit.

Before Nike, he was chief technology officer and EVP of R&D at IGT (Internal Game Technology), a global gaming and lottery systems company; and, before that, was CTO for Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business, where he was responsible for product and technical development across multiple areas of the gaming business, including Xbox, Games for Windows, Xbox Live and Microsoft Game Studios. At Microsoft, he also held other roles, including General Manager and Chief Software Architect for Microsoft XNA, the unit responsible for developing tools that facilitate video game development and management.

He joins Comcast as the MSO continues to put its own stamp on the development and design of consumer-facing products, including its coming DOCSIS 3.1-powered “Gigabit Home Gateway,” an emerging line of next-gen smart home products, and devices that run Comcast’s X1 platform, including a 4K-capable client device called the Xi4. 

Satchell is also coming on board as Comcast gets more heavily involved with connected wearables (it introduced an X1 app optimized for the Apple Watch in April) and the broader Internet of Things. Of recent note, Satchell told a tech conference in Las Vegas why Nike pulled the plug on its FuelBand fitness wearable in 2014 and opted for a broader partnership strategy. "There was nothing when we started, but now there's sensors everywhere," he said. "We're doing it to build a connection to our consumers." 

Notably, Comcast is in the process of opening up its Xfinity Home platform to a broad set of device partners in the form of a coming software development kit (SDK) and a “Works with Xfinity Home” certification program. Comcast has already identified several partners, including August (smart locks and car adapters); Cuff (smart jewelry); Leeo (maker of a connected nighlight); Lutron (dimmers, remote controls and battery-powered shade); Rachio (sprinkler controllers); SkyBell (video doorbells); and Whistle (pet monitors). Comcast is also working on integrating Xfinity Home with Google's Nest Labs. 

“Chris is a world-class technologist with a track record of creating products that consumers love,” Neil Smit, president and CEO of Comcast Cable, said in a statement. “Chris and his team will work across the company to create, design and build exceptional product experiences for customers, and I am thrilled to have him on board.”

“Chris’s depth of product development experience across a variety of leading technology companies makes him uniquely qualified to lead this important work,” added Tony Werner, Comcast’s EVP and CTO. “There’s never been a more exciting time for product innovation, and I look forward to continuing to build on the great foundation that our product team has established.” 

Comcast’s flurry of technology and service announcements this week at INTX also included what’s on the horizon for Xfinity Home, the MSO’s home security and automation platform.

Xfinity Home is about to get a big facelift in the form of a new software platform that will run a variety next-gen products developed by Comcast alongside integrations with a batch of third-party devices, including Nest, the popular smart thermostat that’s now part of the Google empire.

Amplifying a broader strategy that’s well underway in which Comcast is developing and designing its own consumer products such as set-top boxes, gateways and remote controls, the MSO showed off a suite of internally developed Xfinity Home products, including smart thermostats, indoor/outdoor cameras with night vision, sensors, and a revamped touchscreen controller (see picture above). Some of those products will feature the same low-power E Ink Corp. technology used in Amazon’s latest line of Kindle e-readers.

Comcast has not announced when it will launch the new products, but they will be made to support a range of wireless connectivity protocols, including WiFi, Zigbee and Bluetooth, according to an exec who was demoing the products.

Comcast also announced that it will open up Xfinity Home to a broad set of device partners, noting that the MSO later this year will release a software development kit (SDK) and a “Works with Xfinity Home” certification program.

This week, the company announced several partners, including August, a maker of smart locks and car adapters (Comcast Ventures is an investor); Cuff (smart jewelry); Leeo (maker of a connected nighlight); Lutron (dimmers, remote controls and battery-powered shade); Rachio (sprinkler controllers); Automatic Labs (car adapters); SkyBell (video doorbells); and Whistle (pet monitors).

Comcast is  separately developing an integration with Nest Labs through the Works with Nest program.

“We want to help people unlock the potential of their smart home,” Dan Herscovici, SVP and GM of Xfinity Home, said, in a statement. “Whether it’s through the television, an app or a voice command, we’re giving customers one easy-to-use experience to control all their favorite devices, seamlessly on the same platform.”

A Comcast official said the MSO’s relationship with Icontrol, its original Xfinity Home technology partner, is unchanged.

However, the coming SDK, an exec at the Comcast booth explained, will established a broader, “super set” platform that will encompass Icontrol, Comcast’s new internally-developed products, and its grander third-party integration initiative.

Comcast’s Xfinity Home is evolving as the platform starts to scale up. Speaking on the company’s first quarter conference call on Monday (May 4), Comcast Cable president and CEO Neil Smit said Xfinity Home has more than 500,000 customers.

“That business is really starting to catch on,” Smit said.

Comcast will concentrate on the accelerated rollout of X1, its next-gen video platform, and keep its video plans focused on the MSO’s traditional footprint.

“We feel very comfortable in our own footprint...We'll be focusing there,” Neil Smit, president and CEO of Comcast Cable, said Monday on the company’s first quarter earnings call when asked about the operator’s interest in developing an over-the-top video service.

And much of that video focus will remain on X1, which accounted for nearly half of video connects in a first quarter in which Comcast lost about 8,000 basic video subscribers.

Smit said X1 is seeing a 20% to 30% lower churn rate than subs on Comcast’s legacy video platform, and that VOD usage among X1 customers is 20% to 30% higher.

“Right now, getting X1 rolled out is still the best opportunity at the company in the short run,” Brian Roberts, Comcast Corp.’s chairman and CEO, said.

Comcast has not announced how many customers are on its X1 platform. Last fall, the company said it had deployed more than 5 million X1 boxes so far. Based on the MSO's earlier estimation that it was shipping about 20,000 X1 boxes per day, Comcast should have more than 9 million X1 devices deployed now.

With more than 25% of Comcast’s triple-play customers currently on X1, that translates to at least an estimated 2.49 million customers with X1, MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett said in a research note issued Monday, adding that Comcast has also opened up access to X1 to non-triple-play customers.

“Their X1 platform remains at the center of their success,” Moffett said.

Comcast has been lowering the “upgrade fee” of X1, another move that should also help to accelerate the deployment of the new platform. 

On the wireless side, Smit said Comcast’s WiFi footprint (a mix of deployments in public and business locations and in home-side routers) now covers about 8.6 million hotspots.

“We’re still working on our wireless strategy and how that will manifest itself,” Smit said, noting that Comcast has MVNO deals in place with Sprint and Verizon Wireless.

Smit said Comcast now has more than 500,000 customers on Xfinity Home, the MSO’s home security and automation service. “That business is really starting to catch on,” he said.

After halting enrollments for an “Energy Rewards” pilot earlier this year in Pennsylvania, Comcast has relaunched the initiative with a new partner, Crius Energy, while also expanding the offering to Xfinity customers in Illinois.

Marketing for the commercial debut of Energy Rewards started on April 16, and is currently available to Comcast customers in Pennsylvania and Illinois, according to a Comcast spokesperson. 

Similar in some ways to the program Comcast tested with Independence Energy Group in Pennsylvania, the newly launched version of Energy Rewards supports two service options with 24-month terms:

-SafeSwitch Fixed: Offers a lock-in rate for 24 months, plus a $100 savings rebate if the customer does not save money over the terms of the plan. Comcast noted that this tier is for customers looking for long-term price certainty. Customers taking the SafeSwitch Fixed tier are subject to a $100 early termination fee.

-SafeSwitch Flex: Starts at a rate 5% below the local utility’s current supply rate, and a guaranteed rate cap. Comcast said this is for consumers looking for lower rates, plus longer-term price protection. After the 24-month term, customers on the “Flex” tier will be notified of renewal plan options.

As the FAQ points out, Comcast is not selling of electricity and natural gas, but has partnered with Everyday Energy, a licensed supplier that is a wholly owned subsidiary of Crius Energy. Comcast subs who opt for Energy Rewards will continue to receive their energy bills from the local utility.

While the financial terms of Comcast’s agreement with Crius Energy are not known, the program puts a different spin on the service bundle, and could serve as a customer retention tool. 

A Comcast bill insert distributed in Pennsylvania about the program notes that Energy Rewards is available for customers of Met-Ed, PECO, Penelec, Penn Power, PPL and West Penn Power. ComEd is one of the known energy suppliers that are supporting the Energy Rewards program in Chicago.

Energy Rewards customers are also eligible for “Comcast rewards on a periodic basis,” which could include free movie tickets and other “perks” from the MSO.  In the early going, Comcast is offering Xfinity TV subs who sign up for Energy Rewards three free months of HBO, Showtime or Cinemax.

Comcast began to pilotthe Energy Rewardsprogram last yearwith Independence Energy Group, a unit of NRG Energy, offering fixed and variable energy plans that included perks such as prepaid Visa cards, discounted movie tickets via Fandango (the service Comcast acquired in 2007), and three months of HBO, Showtime, or Starz. The pilot program also featured periodic, six month “milestone” rewards that included free movie tickets, and Smart Thermostats for customers who were taking Comast's Xfinity Home security/home automation service.

During the initial pilot, Comcast and Independence Energy Group limited the program to areas served by Duquesne Light, which covers portions of Allegheny County near Pittsburgh and Beaver County.

Comcast cited “upcoming changes” when it halted new enrollments in the program earlier this year, noting then that NRG and Comcast had mutually agreed to no longer market the program to existing Comcast customers. Comcast also said it was “evaluating our options.” 

Comcast has added its first third-party lock to its Xfinity Home platform – the Kwikset SmartCode 914 – which customers can access remotely via the Xfinity Home app for iOS or Android mobile devices or from a Web browser.

The Smartcode 914, being sold online by Comcast through Best Buy for $219.99, features keyless entry and a backlit keypad, supports up to 30 user codes (and a master code), and 128-bit encryption. Time Warner Cable recently began to support a range of new smart home devices, including the Kwikset SmartCode door lock, via BestBuy.com, as well. Comcast and TWC, like several other MSOs, are using Icontrol to power their respective home security/automation products.

“Now our customers can get in and out of their house without carrying keys,” Dan Herscovici, SVP and GM of Xfinity Home, explained in this blog post about the smart lock addition. “They’re also great for those rare (or not so rare) times when you leave your keys at the office or lock yourself out of the house. And you can also use the app for remote locking and unlocking, to let relatives, neighbors, friends, or the dog-walker into the house when you’re not there.”

Comcast’s Xfinity Home service also supports a range of remotely-accessible devices, including thermostats, lights and cameras. Comcast recently integrated Xfinity Home with X1, its IP-capable, next-gen video platform.

Notably, Comcast Ventures, the V.C. arm of the company, participated in a $38 million Series B round for August, a maker of smart locks founded in 2012 by entrepreneur Jason Johnson and designer Yves Béhar. Comcast, however, has not announced any plans to add August to its Xfinity Home lineup.

Comcast doesn’t break out how customers subscribe to the Xfinity Home service, but the category is considered a key growth driver for Comcast, other MSOs, telcos and satellite TV providers. 

Las  Vegas -- International CES -- EchoStar formally launched SAGE here this week, showing off a platform that is anchored by a TV-connected set-top-like device, called the SAGE Hub, apps for Android and iOS devices, and a mix of wirelessly-connected components elements that will let consumers monitor and use their lighting, cameras, locks, cameras and thermostats remotely.

One way EchoStar will try to differentiate is through the SAGE Hub, a Linux-powered device that lets users manage the system via the TV while still watching their shows through a scaled down video window. The device accomplishes this by securely passing through the pay-TV signal through an HDMI cable that links the SAGE Hub to the set-top box. Comcast recently integrated its Xfinity Home product with the TV, though that application is currently limited to customers who are on the MSO’s X1 platform.

Among other features, the SAGE mobile app will support  a feature called “My Local 911” that's designed to ensure that security alerts are patched through to law enforcement authorities that are tied to the customer’s home address rather than basing it on the physical location of the user’s mobile device.  

EchoStar officials said the company is still determining SAGE’s retail pricing and which components will be included in the starter pack. SAGE is designed to be easy enough for self-installs, but will offer a professional installation option.

David Lett, EchoStar’s VP of engineering, said SAGE will offer two primary tiering options – those that includes the equipment alongside a monthly fee, and a “self-monitored” option whereby customers purchase the equipment but won’t pay a recurring monthly fee.

The plan is “to challenge the marketplace with a very affordable price,” Lett said.

Retail will be SAGE’s primary focus, where it will match up with services such as PEQ, a service from SmartHome Ventures that is powered by Icontrol’s platform, which relies on a customized version of Android. EchoStar is also open to partnering with cable operators and other types of MVPDs, but has not announced any deals. Of course, the most obvious candidate for a such a partnership play is EchoStar corporate cousin Dish Network.

If EchoStar pursues the MVPD path, it will lock horns with Icontrol, which is already working with Comcast, Bright House Networks, Time Warner Cable and Cox Communications, among others. Verizon Communications and AT&T have also launched their own home security/monitoring platforms.

Following initial integration with tablets, smartphones and Web browsers, Comcast’s Xfinity Home service has forged a connection to the TV screen thanks to the formal launch of an app for the MSO’s IP-capable X1 platform.

The new X1 app for Xfinity Home lets customers manage and monitor their home systems, including video cameras, lights and thermostats, Dan Herscovici, VP, product management, news business for Xfinity Home, explained in this blog post.

Comcast hasn’t announced how many customers have signed up for Xfinity Home, but the MSO did note last month that it has deployed more than 5 million X1 boxes.

Xfinity Home expands on a suite of native apps developed for X1, complementing the operator’s integration of sports and news widgets, and support for third-party Internet apps such as Pandora, Facebook, Instagram and Flickr.