Comcast Enthusiast (Or XFINITY as they are now calling it): 2009

Saturday, December 19, 2009

New High Definition Channels Comcast Boston / New England - December 2009

Just last month I posted that Comcast had added a bunch of new High Definition Channels. It looks like Comcast had delivered an early holiday gift to their Boston area customers this week by adding another 39 channels. This brings the total number of available High Definition channels to 103.

Our current channel lineup is:

771 - HBO Signature HD new *
772 - HBO Family HD new *
773 - HBO Latino HD new *
774 - HBO Comedy HD new*
775 - HBO Zone HD new *
776 - More MAX HD new *
777 - Action MAX HD East new *
778 - 5 Star MAX HD East new *
779 - Thriller MAX HD East new *
780 - WMAX HD East new *
781 - Outer MAX HD new *
784 - Travel Channel HD
785 - Encore 1 HD new *
786 - G4 Video Game Television HD new
787 - Style HD new
788 - Lifetime Movie Network HD
789 - Fox Business Network HD new *
790 - Hallmark Movie Channel HD new
791 - QVC HD
792 - DisneyXD HD *
793 - Fuse HD new
794 - Bravo HD
795 - CNBC HD
796 - ESPNEWS HD *
797 - Biography HD
798 - Independent Film Channel HD new
799 - Women's Entertainment HD new
800 - HDPPV
802 - PBS - WGBH
803 - ION HD - WBPX (formerly PAX)
804 - CBS HD
805 - ABC HD
806 - FOX HD
807 - NBC HD
808 - CW HD - WLVI
809 - ABC - WMUR (New Hampshire Affiliate)
814 - WSBK 38
815 - Planet Green *
816 - TV One HD new *
817 - NBA TV HD new *
818 - MLB Network HD
821 - National Geographic HD
822 - NHL HD new
823 - Discovery Channel HD
824 - Disney HD
825 - Nick HD
826 - ABC Family HD
827 - MTV HD new
828 - Palladia HD
829 - VH1 HD new
830 - FX HD
831 - TBS HD
832 - HGTV HD
833 - TNT HD
834 - E! HD
835 - USA HD
836 - Lifetime HD
837 - A&E HD
838 - The Tennis Channel HD new *
839 - HD Theater
841 - Fox News HD
842 - CNN HD
845 - WeatherScan HD
846 - Univeral HD
847 - The Weather Channel HD new
848 - Golf HD
849 - ESPN HD
850 - ESPN2 HD
851 - NESN HD
852 - Comcast Sports Network HD
853 - NFL Network HD
854 - Food Network HD
855 - Spike HD
856 - CBS College Sports Network HD new *
858 - Comedy Central HDnew
859 - American Movie Classics HD
860 - Cartoon Network HD
862 - SciFi Network HD
863 - Animal Planet HD
864 - Country Music Channel HD new *
865 - Versus HD
866 - Science HD
867 - TLC The Learning Channel HD
868 - Cinemax HD *
870 - HBO HD *
871 - HBO 2 HD new *
872 - History Channel HD
873 - Starz Edge HD new *
874 - Stars Kids HD new *
875 - Starz HD *
876 - Starz Comedy HD new *
877 - Showtime HD *
878 - Showtime 2 HD *
879 - Showtime Showcase HD new *
880 - Showtime Extreme HD new *
883 - The Movie Channel HD *
884 - The Movie Channel Xtra HD new *
885 - The Big Ten Network HDnew *
899 - NFL Redzone HD
901 - MSNBC HD new *
902 - Tru TV HD new
904 - MGMHD *

* Pay or subscription channels

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Comcast Outage Board - Network Health

I was recently browsing around the Comcast help pages and noticed a link to something called the Outage Board. Follow the link and you get a page that looks like this:

Apparently the page is updated with the current status of various network components for a particular user/area. You seem to need to be signed in to your Comcast account to see your status. Some of the items are pretty obvious like Internet Connection, SmartZone, Video Services and Digital Voice. But there are a couple items on the list that I have no idea what they mean, things such as: Provisioning, Commercial, CSA Abuse/Security Issues and Other Features/Services. The page is currently showing that I have an outage alert in Other Features/Services since November 16, 2009. There are no links to explain what these things are, even a google search provides no answers.

Might be a useful page to see what is going on if I am having trouble with my service but then again if my Internet is down I won't be able to get to the page. If anyone can shed any light on the Comcast Outage Board post a comment.

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Weekly Verizon Fios Advertisement

I think I have mentioned it here in the past that I get a letter or postcard just about every week from Verizon FiOS trying to get me to switch from Comcast. Usually these letters tout some new feature that "Cable" does not offer. This week the new features they are advertising have me a bit intrigued.

FiOS has something called Widgets which traditionally allow you to access local information like traffic or weather in a ticket under the program you are watching. The new widgets apparently allow you to view Twitter, Facebook or ESPN Fantasy Football. I am not a big Twitter or Facebook user but it would be pretty cool to check my Fantasy Football scores while I am watching the game. Right now I either have to run into the other room to check my scores or wait for my extremely slow Blackberry Fantasy Football App to update.

The Gizmodo blog has a few screenshots here if you are interested.

New Smartzone Features - email and digital voice

When Comcast switched over to Smartzone one of the biggest complaints that many people had was that you could no longer see all of your email boxes in one place. Comcast apparently has been listening and has recently added this functionality to Smartzone. They went a step further as well and you can also add third party accounts like Yahoo and Hotmail.

I tried adding my secondary accounts last night and it worked great. My accounts showed up in my Smartzone homepage and also show up in the folders section of the email page. My only complaint is that when I imported the accounts all of the messages in those mailboxes showed as unread so I had to go in to mark the as read in order to easily tell that I have new messages. No big deal though. For instruction on how to add additional email accounts go here.

Comcast has also recently launched a feature that allows secondary account users access to check voicemail in Smartzone. Unfortunately it isn't completely working for me. I was looking forward to this as I have access to messages online and but my wife does not. In order to listen to messages online she needs to log onto my account, kind if a pain. I was hoping that this new feature would solve our issue but it does not seem to be working. After going through the instructions here, I had my wife log into Smartzone and the voicemail messages still do not show up. She can see the messages if she clicks on the voice tab on Comcast.net and logs in but it does not show unheard messages and she can not access voicemail from within Smartzone. If anyone else has successfully set up secondary access voicemail access or is having similar issues post a comment to this post

And just to keep us interested Comcast promises a couple new Smartzone features coming soon:

A Smartzone calendar tab
Additional Comcast Digital Voice online calling features
Reading pane preferences
Ability to send email to multiple contacts directly from your address book

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Verizon FiOS vs Comcast

At least once a week now I get a mailing from Verizon trying to get me to switch to FiOS. I do know a couple people with FiOS and from what I have seen and heard there are pros and cons for each service. I have no desire to switch to FiOS but I usually browse through the mailings just out of curiosity. An insert in the mailing this week was touting some of the FiOS features that Comcast does not provide which kind of piqued my interest.

PC meets TV

Use your TV to share photos and music on your computer.

Record it here, watch it there

The Home Media DVR allows you to record a program on one TV and watch it on up to six additional TVs in the house.

While neither of these features are compelling enough to lure me a way from Comcast they are pretty cool. Especially the Home Media DVR, Comcast has a similar feature with ON-Demand where you can start an OnDemand program on one TV and finish it on another. I think in order to do this with a DVR you need a centralized server of some kind so it may be a while before Comcast offers something similar.

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Clear Comcast TIVO Hard Drive

I noticed a couple months ago that I had a recording om my TIVO that seemed to be corrupted. I think Comcast refers to these as phantom recordings. I could not play it or delete it although it said that recording was in progress there was no light on the front of the box indicating something was recording. I called Comcast about it a couple months ago, they couldn't figure it out and told me that they would call in a specialized TIVO tech to get back to me. I never heard from them.

It wasn't much of an issue until recently where we started having an issue where recordings on our season pass were not recording and things that were recording were getting deleted after a couple days. I assume these issue are due to the phantom recording so I called Comcast back today for some help. I assumed that they would just send a tech out with a new box. But the tech wanted to try something new.....He said there was a way to delete everything from the hard drive which should fix the issue. For those having similar issues below are the steps I went through to wipe out the hard drive.

On the Comcast Box - Press the power button and then the select button. This will bring up a diagnostics screen
On the TIVO Remote - Press the replay button
Press the TIVO button three times
Press the Live TV button
Press the channel up button

After this sequence is completed the box will reboot. When it starts back up all of the recordings, season passes and other setting should be gone. Time will tell whether this fixes the issues I have been having.

Comcast Online Backup

Over the past couple months I have had a few friends tell me stories of hard drive crashes that caused them to lose thousands of precious family photos and other files on their computers. I thought well, their own fault for not backing it up. Then I realized that much of the pics, music, photos and videos on my PC are not backed up either. In the past I have backed up to CD but I now have so many files that would be too time consuming. So I decided to research backup solutions.

My first potential solution was an external hard drive. Hard drive space is getting so cheap you can now get a Terabyte external hard drive for less than $100. The downside to an external hard drive is that you are not protected against fire or theft. Also, after reading reviews for some of the drives, reliability seems to be a bit spotty as many customers were experiencing problems with drives overheating or just not working. Not going to do me much good if the drive doesn't work.

My next potential solution was online backup services. These services require a monthly fee and many will allow you to backup unlimited amounts if data. You install a small application on your PC which takes an encrypted one-time back up of all your specified files, then will constantly check for new files and automatically back them up as they are created.

This is a great solution. It is easy, secure and relatively inexpensive. I like the fact that you just install the product and it does all of the work for you. The two major players in the online backup industry are Mozy and Carbonite. The products that they offer are virtually identical, just have a little bit different pricing structure.

Mozy offers unlimited backup for $4.95 / month or $59.40/ year. If your backup needs are on the lower end they do offer 2 gigabytes for free.

Carbonite offers unlimited backup for $4.58 / month or $54.95 /year. They offer a free 15 day trial.

While researching these options I came across an article from Jan 2009 that said Comcast would soon be offering an online backup service to their customers. I searched high and low on the Comcast website and could find nothing regarding online backup. So either Comcast has not rolled the product out to my area or they have decided not to roll it out at all. I am leaning more toward the latter as based on the article the pricing of the product was just not competitive.

The article states that the product will offer several storage plans:

10 GB - $49.99 per year
50 GB - $99.99 per year
250 GB - $239.88 per year

For less than the price of the Comcast 10GB plan you can get unlimited storage space from Mozy or Carbonite. I am guessing that Comcast realized this and scrapped the product. Out of curiosity I did a quick search to see if any other ISP offers online backup to their customers and found that Comcast's major competitor Verizon does. They offer plans based on storage space as well but are more competitive that Comcast's theoretical plan.

Verizon Online Backup & Sharing

Online Backup & Sharing/5 GB - $1.99 / month
Online Backup & Sharing/25 GB - $4.99 / month
Online Backup & Sharing/50 GB - $6.99 / month
Online Backup & Sharing/150 GB - $12.99 / month
Online Backup & Sharing/250 GB - $19.99 / month

Verizon's plans are still more expensive than Mozy or Carbonite but they are ahead of Comcast by offering a product. I feel that Comcast is really missing the boat here by not offering competitively priced online backup to their customers. Ultimately I would love to see them partner with Mozy or Carbonite and offer the product to their customers for free like they do McAfee Anti Virus. That would save me the $49.95 /year I am now paying for Carbonite. This would probably also help Comcast retain their customers. If a customer has all of their precious files backed up with the price of Internet service they would be less likely to leave for the competition that does not offer the service for free.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Comcast Universal Caller ID

In various places over the past few years I have seen Comcast advertisements about the ability to see incoming calls on your TV. A couple months ago I got an email from Comcast about a new feature coming soon called Universal Caller ID. This product allows you to see incoming calls on your TV or your PC. At the time the product was not available in all areas and apparently my area was one of the areas that it was not available in, as it was not working.

To enable the cable TV caller id you need to go into the interactive menu. A few months ago when I tried to do this I had no interactive menu. They must have since released a new version of the Guide software, when I went in yesterday a menu selection for Interactive TV was there. So in a few seconds I went in and enabled Caller ID. We tested it out today and it works as advertised. A box comes up at the bottom of the screen with the name and number of the person calling....see below

The second piece of this feature is Caller ID to PC. In order to get this to work you need to install some software. After the software is installed you need to log in using your Comcast account and you get an icon running in the lower right hand corner if your PC. It works pretty much the same as the TV version. See below:

The PC software and additional info can be found at the Link below:

http://www.comcast.net/callerid/

Of course you need to have Comcast Digital Voice in order to get this feature to work. I though the feature was pretty cool but my wife wasn't impressed. I asked if she wanted the software installed on her laptop and she told me no....when I inquired "why" she told me the phone is right next to her laptop she can just look at who is calling there. Oh well, I still think it is cool.

One disappointment was that it did not work on my TV where I have the Comcast TIVO software installed. This is where we do 95% of our TV watching. No info on the site regarding whether they will be updating the TIVO software to include the feature anytime soon.

I continue to be impressed by the new "free" features that Comcast continues to add to their product line. I love to see the products integrating and working together. The features probably will not impress the masses buy we geeks out here really appreciate them.

Monday, August 31, 2009

Comcast iPhone Mobile App

I am usually an early adopter of new technology but one area I have always lagged a bit behind was with a cell phone. I have had a cell phone for almost ten years but I only use it to make calls. I had a very basic plan with the minimum amount of minutes you can get. I was an early customer of the short lived Comcast Pivot/Sprint Cell phone plan which kind of made me hate cell phones in general for a while

With the recent popularity of the iPhone and other Smartphone devices we recently started researching upgrading our current plan to a data plan so we could surf the Internet and check email. We decided to stick with our current provider (Sprint) and picked up two Blackberry Curve Smartphones this weekend.

I have to say I love the phone. I can check my email, get news updates and listen to music. I have been really missing out on some great technology. One of the great features of these Smartphones is all of the apps that you can download. I noticed a few weeks ago that Comcast was offering an iPhone app that allows you to check Comcast email, check Comcast voicemail and check TV and OnDemand listings. The app looks pretty slick and it is free, click the link below to check it out:

http://www.comcast.net/iphone/

Unfortunately Comcast has only built the app to work on the iPhone. I realize that the iPhone is the new hip thing to have but it would be nice to have the Comcast app that works on other platforms as well. Blackberry has been around for much longer than the iPhone and they must have a much larger user base. I would think it would be worthwhile to build an app for the Blackberry users out there as well. If anyone at ComcastCares is out there is listening I for one would love to see the Comcast app for my Blackberry.....and while you are at it include some functionality so I can schedule recordings on my Comcast TIVO DVR from the app.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Comcast Tivo Online Scheduler

Back in June I got a postcard from Comcast advertising some new features for the Tivo on Comcast. One of the features that I was really excited about was the online scheduler. This feature will allow you to schedule tivo recordings from any computer. A very nice feature if you are not at home and realize that you have forgotten to record something. The postcard just said the feature was coming soon and pointed to this page: http://comcast.net/tivo to check for availability. At the time the feature was not available for me and I kind of forgot about it.

Earlier this week I decided to check the website again and was presented with a page allowing me to activate the TIVO online scheduler. You click on the button it verifies your TIVO box and you are good to go. In order for the feature to work I think you need to be logged into http://www.comcast.net/ using your Comcast ID. Then you need to access the TV listings for your area. The TV listing Guide with the TIVO Online scheduler is below.

It is pretty simple to use, just click on the show you want to record and a little box pops up on the right allowing you to schedule the recording or set up a season pass.

If you click on the little Tivo Online Scheduler Button on the upper right another box pops up (above) that allows you to view or cancel your upcoming recordings and season passes.

There is also a DVR selector page that will appear if you have multiple DVR's. I assume this page did not appear because I have only one DVR.

First Impressions:

The interface was easy enough to use and I think is a great new feature. This is a feature that is included if you buy a real TIVO box so it is time that Comcast added it.

Issues:

The TV Listing page can take a while to load. Not all of the time but a couple times when I went into it I thought my screen had locked up.

The Online Scheduler screen seems a little buggy. When I cancelled a recording the list of programs got all crunched together and I could no longer read them. See below:

Not really an issue but something to keep in mind. You need to give the DVR some time to sync up with the online changes. So if you need to record something that starts in 5 minutes you probably will miss it.

I wish Comcast would notify their customers where these features are available. I got the initial postcard in June but it was not available at the time. Some time over the past couple months they turned this on and did not notify me. I have a friend who also has the TIVO box and he was not even aware of the Online Scheduling functionality

Overall:

Despite the few issues I have I am very happy that Comcast continues to add features to its products. The online scheduler is not something that I will use that frequently but will be nice to have when needed.

Monday, July 13, 2009

WeatherScan on Comcast

About little over a year ago I noticed that Comcast had added channel 845 (Weatherscan) to the HD grouping of channels. At the time the channel just displayed a message stating that the channel required a subscription. I assumed that the channel was just not part of the package I am subscribed to. No big deal.

Then a few months later I started noticing that when I was scrolling through the 800 level channels when I got to 845 (WeatherScan) I would be automatically be redirected to 245 which was the digital version of Weatherscan. This was a little annoying as I could no longer just scroll through the HD channels. I called Comcast to report the problem and was told that a new version of the Guide software being released in the next couple weeks would fix the issue, which it did.

Just this weekend I noticed that I am now getting the live channel WeatherScan on channel 845. The channel is identical to Weatherscan on 245 so I am not sure why it is included with the rest of the HD channels. It is definitely not being broadcast in HD and since it is just a loop of the current weather, forecast, traffic, etc I am not really sure it needs to be in HD. With limited bandwidth being a concern with cable providers I would much rather have one of the many other HD channels that Comcast doesn't currently carry than this one.

Monday, June 29, 2009

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

DVD Rental vs Netflix vs Comcast On Demand

I will preface this post by saying I haven't seen a movie in a theatre in about 5 years. I spent thousands of dollars on my HDTV and surround sound system so we happily watch all movies in the comfort of our family room couch.

Up until about a year ago all of the new movies we watched were rentals from Blockbuster. At the time it was a good deal for me. I used points on my rewards card to get 8 free rental certificates every few months so I basically was not paying anything out of pocket to see new releases. Our local Blockbuster was in a pretty convenient location so it was not too out of the way to stop by and rent/return movies. Then suddenly our local Blockbuster closed and it was no longer convenient so no more blockbuster for us.

At the time it was not that big a deal because of the writer's strike there was not a whole lot of new movies out that we wanted to see. We also added a baby to our family so our movie watching time was fairly limited. When there was something we really wanted to see we would watch in on Comcast On Demand. Usually when we did this though we had a free coupon. Since the ON Demand rentals are $4.99 and I was used to renting movies for free we probably only ever paid for 2 or 3 movies in total.

A couple months ago we noticed there were a bunch of new movies out that we were really interested in seeing. A couple of our friends have been using Netflix for a while and are really happy with it so we decided to give it a shot. We signed up for their one at a time unlimited plan for $8.99/month. We usually only have time to watch movies on weekends and with our schedule we usually only watch one movie a weekend. Given this we still get 4 movies a month for a cost of about $2.25 a movie.

Compare that to Comcast On Demand's cost of 4.99 a movie and the choice was pretty simple for us to stick with Netflix. The one advantage that Comcast On Demand has over Netflix is that you can order using your remote rather than needing to mail the DVD back. But to me that is only a minor advantage. The only way Comcast On Demand is going to compete with Netflix is if they offer some kind of monthly plan structure similar to Netflix where you get 4 OnDemand movies for around $10/month, 5 movies for $12/month etc. I am sure Comcast has thought about this and my guess is the movie studios are preventing them from doing it. Another hurdle may be that they would need to rewrite the cable box software to allow for the operation of a plan structure. So something like this is probably a way off but in my opinion it is the only way On Demand is going to gain market share form Netflix. I look forward to what the future holds for Comcast On Demand but for now I am staying a Netflix customer.

Monday, June 1, 2009

Comcast DVR with TIVO New Features

I got a postcard in the mail today from Comcast regarding some new and upcoming features on the Comcast Tivo DVR.

Reminder to Pad Live Recordings - When you schedule a recording for a live program, you will now get a reminder to add extra recording time in case the game or event runs long. I guess this is a nice feature but I think it may get a little annoying to be reminded every time I schedule a recording.
Recently Deleted Folder - If you accidentally delete a recording you can now recover it from the recently deleted folder. I noticed this folder a couple weeks ago. Nice feature but it is pretty difficult to accidentally delete something with the TIVO interface.
Saved On Demand Programs - If you find an On Demand program that you want to watch later you can just save it to the Saved On Demand folder in the Tivo Recording List. This is should be a pretty useful feature as it will save time navigating through the menus to get to Saved On Demand
TIVO Online scheduler - Soon you can schedule your recordings away from home - even manage your Recording schedule and Season Pass Priorities. This is the feature that I am pretty excited about. On a couple occasions I have forgot to record something and was not home in time to set it. This is a feature that the full-blown TIVO has so it is about time that Comcast gets it out there. There is no time frame on the postcard regarding when it will be available. It just says that an email will be sent to my Comcast Account. Based on previous rollout schedules I have to assume that the feature will be available within the next couple months. There is also a website link http://comcast.net/tivo but it just says that the feature is coming soon.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

NFL Network

The National Football League and Comcast announced yesterday that they have reached a deal to make the NFL network available to 10.8 million of its digital subscribers. The parties have been battling it out for the past couple years. A few weeks ago it wasn't looking too good but it appears the NFL commissioner Roger Goodell finally stepped in and got the deal done.

The channel was previously carries on Comcast's Sports Tier which subscribers paid extra for. As of August 1st the NFL Network will be available as part of the Digital Basic package. It sounds like the sticking point in negotiations was cost. The NFL reduced the monthly cost from 70 cents per subscriber to about 50 cents per subscriber.

Considering I pay close to $100 for my monthly cable bill it will be nice to now have the channel included.

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Comcast / TIVO Issues in Boston Area

Last week a happened across this article written by a Comcast customer in the Boston area that was/is having issues with his TIVO box. According to the article it isn't just him but many other customers in the area that are experiencing issues. I didn't think much of the article as my TIVO has been working fine......until tonight.

A couple shows we had a season pass set up for did not record.
I can not manually record any shows
I can not delete any previously recorded shows.

I can watch saved shows but that is pretty much it. I first tried the standard restarting the box procedure which did not fix the issue. So I got on the line with Comcast Customer Service who seemed to hint around that they had been seeing some issues but did not come right out and say it. She had me restart the box again which again did not fix the problem and she sent some codes to the box which apparently told her that the box was functioning. Since not of that fixed the issue she had me unplug the box and then plug it back in which also did not fix the issue.

So I now have a problem ticket open with Comcast and a technician scheduled to come out to my house on Sunday. I guess I will have to just wait and see what happens. Interested to see if any other customers are experiencing similar problems and what the resolution was. I have a feeling though that I will be getting a new box on Sunday.

Monday, March 2, 2009

Comcast Town

While watching 24 tonight I happened upon a new Comcast commercial. The commercial appears to be animated and the characters are singing a song about all you can do with Comcast and how great it is. At the end there is a link to a website: http://comcasttown.com/. I thought the commercial was pretty cool, my wife thought it was kind of creepy.

So of course after 24 was over I popped onto the website to learn that Comcast has created their own little virtual world. Once you register you are given a room to furnish with products to use Comcast services. Kind of like Sims but you earn money by watching Comcast shows or inviting friends. The seem to be teamed up with facebook so you can somehow link your room to your Facebook account.

I am not really into this type of thing but the commercial did suck me in and get me to visit the website so I am sure some people will be into it. I am trying to figure out how Comcast is going to make any money on this but I guess it is just another form of advertising for them. It doesn't seem to be fully functional yet, all you can really do is buy stuff for your room and look at other rooms so I got bored pretty quick. When I was registering there was something about being able to play games so that may make it a bit more interesting but there doesn't seem to be much to do there now.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Secondary Email Accounts in SmartZone

I wrote in a previous post that I was a little disappointed that in Comcast's new SmartZone email software you can no longer view email from a secondary account. My workaround was to forward all email from my secondary accounts to my primary account. It works well for me but I got some comments on the blog post that it was an ideal solution for everyone.

Interestingly I got an email from Comcast the other day entitled "Answering your questions about the SmartZone Communications Center. One of the FAQs in the email was how to see all of my Comcast email in one place. The solution is to add the secondary email accounts as External POP accounts using the below steps:

Go to the Preferences tab
Select the Email Manager sub tab
Select Add External Account
Enter Unique Account Name to identify the account (e.g. Sandra-Sec1-Ext)
Enter the Secondary account's email address (e.g. Sandra-Sec1@comcast.net)
Select POP3
Enter Email Server: mail.comcast.net
Enter password
Click Test Settings to make sure the external account setup is correct
Click Save

I went through the above steps with one of my secondary accounts and it does work although not exactly how I expected. It adds the account as a new folder within the folders list. You can see all of the emails in that account but when you send an email from that secondary account comes from your primary account. So I guess this solution is a little better but not quite as good as webmail where you could access all of your accounts and send email from those accounts separately. I do look forward to a future SmartZone release where I can access all of my accounts as I did in Webmail.

Still to me is a minor inconvenience for all of the new features that SmartZone has included. I have had much more time to use SmartZone since my original post and the more I get used to it the more I like it. Comcast can't make everyone happy but I think once customers get used to SmartZone they will like it as well. I think Comcast is trying hard to address customer concerns and questions by sending out emails, FAQs and Tutorials to attempt to resolve customer issues.

Sunday, February 1, 2009

SmartZone

This morning I was upgraded to Comcast's new email software called SmartZone and I have to say I really like it. I first heard about SmartZone back in November when I got an email from Comcast informing me that in a couple days I would be upgraded. A couple days, then weeks passed and no SmartZone. Around the end of November I got another email from Comcast staying that my upgrade was pending. Not sure what "pending" actually meant I went to the Comcast Help Forums and found that the servers where having some capacity issues and that they were suspending all upgrades until after the 1st of the new year.

So now here it is 3 months later and I am finally upgraded so I figured I would talk about what I like and don't like about SmartZone

What I like:

The interface is designed to work like Microsoft Outlook. So there is now all of that cool drag and drop and right-click functionality. Very intuitive and easy to use
I can still access my old address book and saved email folders.
My email box in now increased to 10 Gigabytes in space.

What I don't like:

I can no longer access secondary email accounts from the main page of my primary account. I have heard they are bringing back this functionality in a future release but it is not really that big a deal for me. I just turned forwarding on in my secondary account and have emails forwarded to my main account.
There seems to be a bit more advertising on the interface. I remember a little ad within the old interface but there seems to me more of it with SmartZone.
When I was logged on this morning the interface seemed to be a little slow. It seems fine now so I am now sure if it was a connection issue or an issue with the Comcast servers.

I think just like any new software it is going to take a little while to get used to SmartZone. Some things work a little differently like needing to double-click an email rather that single-click to open. Of course with all of the new functionality I am sure that SmartZone is going to be really slow on older computers. My two home PCs about a year old and my work PC is newish as well so I have seen no performance issues. Luckily, Comcast has released a SmartZone Lite version of the software for this very issue. I haven't used it yet but it can be accessed under preferences.

So overall I am very happy with SmartZone. After reading the comments in the Comcast Support forum I was expecting issues but for me the upgrade has been pretty painless. Working in the software industry myself I know how hard it is to keep everybody happy when you release new software but I think Comcast has done a pretty good job with this one.

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Anyroom OnDemand

I was watching TV this morning and the below commercial came on advertising a new Comcast feature called Anyroom OnDemand

The gist of it is if you are watching an OnDemand program in one room you can stop it and continue watching the show where you left off in another room. I am not sure how long this has been available as this was the first time I have seen the commercial but my wife said she has seen it a few times.

Wanting to learn more about Anyroom OnDemand I went to the website (http://www.comcast.com/anyroom/) at the end of the commercial. The website basically explains how it works and says all you need to get the feature is to subscribe to digital cable. But there was a buy button at the bottom of the screen so I was not sure if there was an extra charge. I was also a little unsure that it would work with my setup as I have a standard DCT700 box upstairs and a DCH3416 with HD and TIVO downstairs. The DCH3416 has a different type of software installed so I was doubtful that it would actually work. Only one way to find out....

I went to my upstairs TV and started to watch one of the free movies and then made sure it went to my saved programs. Then I went downstairs checked my saved programs and there it was, I selected the program and it started playing where it left off. Pretty cool!!!

Not sure how much I will actually use this feature but it is nice to know that it is there and is free. My only complaint is that Comcast did not notify me of this new feature. I am on all of their new product release email lists and was not aware of it until now. Seems like it would be cheaper to send out an email to customers rather than buy commercial time.