Comcast’s decision to move product design in-house scored some prestigious kudos from the design community as three of products tied to the company’s X1 platform came away with Red Dot Design Awards.

Comcast netted Red Dot awards, which are evaluated by an expert jury, for three products tied to its X1 platform – the Xfinity XG1V4 (a 4K set-top box ); the Xi5 (an HDR-capable wireless set-top box); and a new, more compact voice remote called the XR15, which eliminates keys that are rarely used and employs keys that are “tactically differentiated and can be identified by touch” and light up when the remote is in the user’s hand.

RELATED: Comcast Starts to Deploy 4K/HDR X1 Box

Comcast has been deploying the Xi5 for a few months, recently started to deploy the new 4K box, and expects to launch the new remote control later this year, the company confirmed.

In a blog post about the design award selections, Tony Werner, Comcast’s president of technology and product, recognized the work of Tom Loretan, the company’s SVP and executive creative director, and Fraser Stirling, Comcast’s SVP of hardware development.

“We love these designs, not just because they are simple, attractive and elegant, but because they reflect the journey we have taken as company to evolve our products,” Werner wrote. “And we’re getting great feedback from our customers too. In a world where people interact with a device like a remote every day, and display things like set-top-boxes in their busiest rooms, it’s not enough that they simply work as intended.”

For the 2017 awards, Red Dot recognized designs in 47 categories, including home and bedroom furniture, lighting and lamps, household appliances, sports equipment, watches, glasses, cars, TV and home entertainment, cameras, and mobile phones, tablets and wearables.

Comcast will be launching a beta version of its integration of Netflix on X1 in a matter of coming days, but the operator isn’t that far away from making it available to all its X1 customers. 

“We expect it to be [available] across the entire Comcast footprint before Thanksgiving,” Brian Roberts, Comcast’s chairman and CEO, said Tuesday at the Goldman Sachs 25th Annual Communacopia Conference.

Roberts demonstrated the X1-Netflix integration at the investor conference, noting that Netflix has content that Comcast subs don’t get with their traditional pay TV service.

Notably, customers can sign-up and sign-on to Netflix via X1. “This is exactly the Netflix experience” that a consumer would find on a third-party device, Roberts said.

Rather than telescoping and treating Netflix as a separate silo, Comcast will be integrating Netflix’s library into the X1 search and recommendation platform and tying Netflix into results derived via the X1 voice remote (Comcast has deployed about 10 million of those, Roberts said.)

Among other examples, X1 will feature an “Available on Netflix” row on the X1 guide, as well as in the X1’s Kids section. To facilitate binge-viewing, the next episode in a series will be auto-played – similar to how Netflix apps behave on other types of devices.

Comcast and Netflix haven’t detailed the financial arrangement of the integration, but Roberts confirmed that the two sides “have a marketing relationship.”

“We sell a lot of content to Netflix,” Roberts added.  “We’re now going to sell the subscriptions to customers of Netflix. I think it’s a big day.”

“I’m really pleased with the relationship,” Roberts said, while acknowledging earlier that the two companies did not always see eye-to-eye but have mutual respect.

Roberts also opened the door to similar relationships with other OTT providers. “We’re in discussions of doing that,” he said, hopeful that the Netflix integration will offer a “nice template” for others to follow.

Comcast focused on Netflix first, in part, because “it’s the biggest one, arguably the most important one to get right…I think our organization has made a conscious decision that we're going to aggregate other people's content, some of which we sell directly, and some that we don't."

He said Comcast would’ve liked to do that a year or two ago, but said the company was not technically ready to do so, and didn’t yet have the scale.

“We didn’t have enough X1s out there,” he said. Comcast is now rolling out about 40,000 X1 boxes per day, and expects to have about half its video sub base on X1 by the end of the year.

CPE Update

Roberts also announced some deployment updates for Comcast’s latest line of set-tops and gateways.

He said Comcast launched the Xi5, the MSO’s first HDR-capable client box for the X1 platform, last week. Notably, it doesn’t need a wired cable connection, but instead connects to the primary box over WiFi.

RELATED: Comcast’s First HDR Box in Employee Trials

“I think this is the future of how we’re making cable boxes,” Roberts said of the Xi5’s wireless connectivity.

He added that Comcast has also launched the XB6, a DOCSIS 3.1-powered gateway, that he dubbed, “as the world’s fastest router.”

RELATED: INTX 2016: Comcast Previews New Consumer Gear

“We’re taking this to retail,” Roberts said of the XB6, adding that it will also allow for customer self-installs.

Comcast is currently testing the Xi5, the MSO’s first set-top box with support for High Dynamic Range (HDR), in employee trials and is still targeting customer deployments later this year.

The trials of the Xi5 are underway in a “few markets,” a company official said, but didn’t reveal those test sites.

Comcast showed off the Xi5, a device for its X1 platform, at the INTX in Boston, noting then that shipments were expected to get underway by July 4.

While those shipments are apparently going to employees first, they are getting out the door as corporate cousin, NBCUniversal, prepares to produce some content from the Summer Olympic Games in Rio in 4K and HDR. HDR is an emerging format that produces brighter, more colorful pixels and can be used to improve the pop of HD and 4K video.

Comcast, which plans to show off  HDR at some special screenings it will host during the Games, is also working on the Xi6, a device that will support both HDR and 4K.

Elsewhere, Comcast said it intends to rollout Xfinity Stream TV, its in-home IPTV skinny-bundle service that’s paired with a cloud DVR, across its footprint later this year or in early 2017.

That service, currently a mobile-first offering for cord-cutters and others that don’t want a full-freight pay TV service, is being tested in Chicago and the Greater Boston region, which includes eastern Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine.

How Comcast markets and sells that offering could change or expand when it reaches the commercial deployment stage.

In an interview earlier this year, Matt Strauss, Comcast Cable’s executive vice president and general manager, video services, said Stream “is not really just about a skinny bundle.”

“In many respects, it's us looking at new ways at how we market, how we activate a video subscription, and, for instance, if you're a high-speed data customer and you are in one of the markets where we've deployed Stream you can instantly add Stream,” Strauss said. “It doesn’t require a truck roll, it doesn’t require additional equipment. We're able to instantly activate it for you.”

Boston – Comcast plans to start shipping its first box with on-board High Dynamic Range (HDR) capabilities on July 4, according to Tony Werner, Comcast’s EVP and chief technology officer, said here Wednesday during a session with other industry CTOs.

That will ensure that the Xi5 will be available in time for the Rio Olympics, where NBCUniversal will be producing some coverage in the HDR format. Comcast also offer a taste of HDR during the games at some special screenings that will showcase the format. 

Werner said he has more personal interest in HDR, a technology that enables brighter and more colorful pixels, than 4K, a format that packs about four times the number of pixels than today’s HDTV images.

He said upconverted 1080p looks good, but HDR makes it “noticeably better.”

Here at the show, Comcast showed off the Xi5, its first HDR-capable box that will be wireless and work with the company’s IP-capable X1 platform. Comcast is also developing the Xi6, which will support both HDR and 4K.

Comcast plans to demo HDR in some hosted events it will arrange during the summer games in Rio.

As for 4K, Werner said Comcast won’t “roadblock” access to it, but said there’s need for more content in that format .

The wide-ranging discussion also touched on Comcast’s X1 platform, which is being licensed by Cox Communications and Shaw Communications and uses the Reference Design Kit (RDK), a preintegrated software platform for video and broadband devices being managed by Comcast, Liberty Global and Time Warner Cable (now part of Charter Communications).

Licensing X1 for Cox’s new “Contour” product, “was a key part of our strategy to gain scale, scale around innovation,” Kevin Hart, Cox’s EVP and CTO, said, stressing that there’s a need for more collaboration in the industry.

“The early success is off the charts,” Hart said of Cox’s new X1-based Contour product, which has been deployed to most of the MSO's markets. He added that Cox is looking to update its capital models next year in order to keep up with demand this year and into 2017.

“Once we got this locked and loaded, these guy went,” Werner said.

 The panel also discussed the evolving world of advertising and the shift to more targeted and interactive ads.

Comcast, Werner said, expanded on Comcast’s strategy to integrate interactive ads with the X1 guide environment.

Though advertisers weren’t interested in the early phases of X1 when few customers were on the service, that’s no longer true as Comcast aims to get 50% of its video base on it by the end of the year.  “They are doing the limbo under our door to get ad spots on there,” Werner said, noting earlier that he has “warmed up” to the idea of offering interactive ads on the X1 guide.  

Comcast has supported interactive ads on legacy boxes using EBIF (Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format) (EBIF), but plans to bring it back in a “big way” to X1 using more advanced technology.

Roku, meanwhile, is also pushing hard into this arena, and recently struck a deal with Viacom to help the programmer make its ads more relevant, said Steve Shannon, GM of content and services at Roku.

Darcy Antonellis, CEO of Vubiquity, noted that targeted advertising technologies continue to improve, but are still in the “nascent stages” when it comes to refinement, noting that her getting an for Deadpool is a “tell-tale sign” of that because she’s not in the demographic for that particular movie.

The talk also touched on the potential for virtual reality and 360 video.

Discovery Communications, which launched a VR unit last year, is “still searching for that consistent user experience,” company CTO John Honeycutt said.

And though mobile video is grabbing lots of attention and headlines, there’s a “revenge of the TV” occurring as more of those big screens get connected to the Internet, Roku’s Shannon said. “It is roaring back to be the predominant streaming platform.”

Werner said Comcast is finding tablets and other second screens to be accretive, and not a displacement of TV viewing. “They can fill gaps with it,” he said, noting that Comcast, for example,  has seen many viewers pause a show on the set-top at 10:15 p.m.  and then soon resume it on a tablet.