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Comcast loves its new name for TV Everywhere so much, it’s expanding it across all of its products and services in the coming months.
XFinity, originally Comcast’s online video on demand service, will now share its name with Comcast’s cable-TV, telephone, and broadband product lines.
The effort to rebrand itself comes at a time when consumers increasingly find blurring lines between services delivering video, telephone and broadband service. You can watch cable TV programming on your mobile phone, make and receive phone calls over your broadband connection, and watch TV shows online as well. XFinity could symbolize the convergence of technology, where content is ultimately more important than the way it reaches you.
Comcast’s blog gushed about the ‘exciting proposition’ of an industry game-change:
The folks at Gizmodo are lampooning Comcast's brand change
Today on Comcast’s earnings call Brian Roberts and Steve Burke talked about XFINITY, the new brand for our technology platform and products. Simply put, XFINITY is about offering our customers more — more HD, more speed, more choice and more control over their services. XFINITY is the culmination of years of work to transition Comcast’s network and products to a platform that will now offer 100+ HD channels, 50 to 70 foreign-language channels, approaching 20,000+ VOD choices, incredibly fast Internet speeds (50 Mbps growing to 100+ Mbps) and thousands of TV shows and movies online for our customers to watch whenever and wherever they want.
XFINITY represents the future of our company and it’s a promise to customers that we’ll keep innovating. When we launch XFINITY in a market, we’ll rebrand our products: XFINITY TV, XFINITY Voice and XFINITY Internet (our company, of course, remains Comcast). This transition is already well underway across the country. Next week, XFINITY will roll out in 11 markets including: Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Chicago, Portland, Seattle, Hartford, Augusta, Chattanooga, parts of the Bay Area and San Francisco, with more markets to come later this year.
Of course, consumers don’t have a choice about Comcast’s 250GB monthly usage allowance.
As far as new names go, reaction is decidedly mixed. The folks at Gizmodo promptly began ridiculing the thin coat of paint applied to an often despised cable provider landscape. XFinity likely targets a younger audience. I suspect older subscribers will be perplexed as to its meaning, if not its pronunciation.
This isn’t the first time the industry has tried name-changes. Cable modem service has long since been rebranded “High Speed Online” by some, “High Speed Internet” by others. Time Warner Cable calls its bundled services “All the Best.” Many others call it a “Triple Play.”
For consumers, the name is less important than the quality and price of the service.
Karl Bode of Broadband Reports and I are both glad that Comcast at least avoided the now-cliché “Extreme” in the new name. I hope they also registered the predictable xxxfinity.com before some porn merchant grabs it.
Other stories of interest:
- Comcast’s XFINITY TV Now Online, But Watching Counts Against Your Usage Cap
- CBS: The ‘Hulu Holdout’ Joins TV Everywhere Comcast Trial
- Americans Embrace New Ways to Watch TV Without Fundamentally Changing Old Habits; Providers Feel Threatened Anyway
- Breaking News: Comcast in Talks to Buy Major Stake In NBC-Universal: Cable Subscribers Effectively Foot the Bill
- Stray Bullet From New Year’s Revelry Cuts Comcast Fiber Line, Cable Service for 300 in Albuquerque
[...] try, Comcast. We’re not the only ones who caught on, [...]
So they can watch it whenever they want but if they watch too much they will go over the limit? That isn’t exactly fair, and you are not even allowed to have live TV viewing. The option with DISH Network allows customers to view and manage their DVR recordings as well as watch live TV. Also they won’t be restricted to their home network to watch live TV. As a DISH employee and very satisfied customer this is an easy choice for me.