XFINITY Streampix Free Preview

I got an email from Xfinity today that they are having a free preview of their Streampix service from May 22 through May 28th for Xfinity Customers.  You can watch the first season of 10 of the top TV shows including:  Lost, Desperate Housewives, Heroes and Rescue Me.  They are also offering 24 Movies including: Ocean's Eleven. Ghostbusters and The Big Lebowski.  Below link will bring you to the preview:

Streampix Free Preview

For those that are unfamiliar with Streampix it is Xfinty's Netflix killer.   If you subscribe to XfinityTV Phone and Internet you get Streampix for free.  Everyone else (like me) has to pay and additional $4.99 a month for the service.  I have to say I am a bit confused by the service as it seems to be a similar product as OnDemand.  Which I can watch on my TV, PC or mobile device but I don't have to pay extra.  But I guess content is key with Streampix.  They offer more popular movies and TV series with full seasons of some of them.  For me though definitely not worth the extra $5 a month to watch Ghostbusters and Superman.

Will be interesting to see where they go with it.  I think Xfinity can see that the cable industry will eventually go the way of the dinosaur with streaming becoming more popular.  This is Xfinity sticking their toe in the water early so they don't get left behind.

Xfinity TV for XBOX 360

Xfinity recently announced that they they are making their OnDemand content available on XBOX for existing Xfinity customers.  Looks like a cool little interface that allows you to stream their content to the gaming console.

Requirements for this new service are:

1. XBox 360 Gaming Console
2. Xbox Live Gold Subscription
3. Xfinity Internet
4. Xfinity Digital TV

Not sure what the advantage of this service is except you can watch OnDemand content without having to plug in an additional cable box.  Maybe good for the kids room.  My guess is this is the distant future of cable TV.  No more cable boxes, just apps that run on any device that will allow you to stream all content.  Looks like a direct shot at Netflix to me.

An interesting feature is that with Kinect  you can change channels, pause and rewind with hand or voice commands. 

No word on a similar app for other devices like the PS3 (which I have).  Wouldn't be very useful for me anyway as I already have a cable box.

Xfinity TV Mobile App

The Xfinity TV Mobile App is a nice little add on for the Xfinity Mobile App.   Not sure why they couldn't have added all of the functionality into one app but I am sure there is a good technical reason.  The app has the following features:

• Watch OnDemand shows on your iPhone, iPad or iTouch
• Search OnDemand and TV Listings
• Use the App like a remote to change the channel on your TV or schedule your DVR
• It's Free!!!

I have been playing around with this app a bit over the past few weeks.  The quality of the OnDemand content is good.  I didn't experience any buffering while watching using wireless.  I have not yet tried to watch anything using the 3G connection.  I do have a tough time going from watching content on my 55" HDTV to watching something on a 3.5" screen.  But in a pinch it will suffice.

The big issue that I have is that the remote scheduling app does not work with the Comcast TIVO cable boxes.  It would be great to be able to schedule programs remotely but the functionality just isn't there.  I don't think it will ever work with the TIVO boxes as I read a while back that Xfinity will eventually end support for TIVO.  Might be time to go back to the standard Comcast DVR.

Xfinity Mobile App

Well I finally got rid of my old run down Blackberry and upgraded to an iPhone 4S.  Pretty impressive piece of hardware this iPhone is, the greatest thing is all of the apps that I can now play around with.

Xfinity offers two Mobile apps for the iPhone, the Xfinity TV Mobile App and the Xfinity Mobile App.  I will be be discussing the latter in this post.  The Xfinity Mobile app provides the following functionality:

• One place to view all email and voicemail messages
• View Xfinity voice call logs
• Access your Xfinity Address book
• Send and receive text messages
• It's Free!!

This was one of the first apps that I installed on my iPhone and I was a bit disappointed when it locked up on the login screen and would not go any further.  My wife was able to install the app on her iPhone without a problem though.  I eventually reinstalled and was able to get in.  It is a nice little app but it turn out to be a little overkill for me.  I have a bunch of different email addresses on GMail, yahoo and hotmail that I have set up on the iPhone.  It seemed a bit silly to use one app to get my comcast email and the iPhone mail program to get the rest of my email.  So I ended up installing the app.  We dropped our land line this month so maybe if we still had xfinity voice the app would be more useful to me. 

My wife on the other hand loves that app.  She only has one email address so the app works great for her.  One of her complaints with the iPhone mail software was if she deleted a message from the iPhone it still remained in her Xfinity account on her PC.  With the Mobile app once she deletes the message is is gone from the phone and her account on the PC.

Overall a nice little app even though it is of no use to me.

Showtime Free Preview on Xfinity

This coming weekend, January 6, 2012 through January 8, 2012 Xfinity will be having a Showtime Free Preview. Based on the Showtime website it looks like this free preview will include On Demand Content.

Xfinity Readable Voicemail

I got a service announcement email from Xfinity the other day that they added a new feature to their voice phone service called Readable Voicemail.  It basically takes a voicemail that has been left, converts it to text and sends it to you in an email message.

To enable this feature:

1. Sign in to XFINITY Connect
2. Click on the Email button
3. Click on the Preferences tab in the top navigation bar
4. Click 'Notifications' from the Preferences box on the left
5. Input your email address into the email notification box
6. Check 'Send transcripts via email'

The first time I tested it it sent me an email saying that the audio quality was to low to convert but it has been working pretty good since then.  You also can have the emails sent to multiple addresses.  Pretty cool.

 

Xfinity Internet Speed Increase

Got an email from Xfinity yesterday that they have increased my Internet speed by 25%.  Haven't really noticed that it is any faster but it is nice to see that they are still investing in their network to make things faster.  According to the fine print my new download speed is 15 mbps.

I did a quick test on speedtest.net and it registered 16.17 Mbps.  So even better than they claim.