Comcast's TV Everywhere Service Goes Live, Poor Video Quality, Lots Of Buffering

Today, Comcast officially launched their much-hyped TV Everywhere service to customers who subscribe to the company's broadband Internet service and digital cable TV offering, which appears to be around 10-12M consumers. Comcast is doing a press announcement on the news now so hopefully there will be some more details to come and some more specifics on the numbers.

Users who want to access the content will have to download the Move Networks plugin and the Adobe AIR app. For me, the user experience is not a lot better than what I saw back in October when I got to get hands-on with it when it was still in the trial. While Comcast is rolling out the service nation wide, it's still being called a "beta" offering and it shows.

The quality of the videos I checked out today took up to ten seconds to buffer, with lots of pixelation and really poor frame rates. I'll keep checking out the service today but frankly, Comcast is going to have to do a lot better than this quality wise of they want anyone to take it seriously.

Comments

[Charles]

Dan,

Is it a Flash or Move Networks problem hindering the video? Also are they serving off of their own CDN or Akamai?

[Dan Rayburn]

Questions I want to know the answers to as well. Move Networks said they are only doing some of the videos, the rest are in Flash. I have not traced yet where they are coming from but I expect to have more details when I have the time to look into it.

[Greg]

Hey Dan,

Fancast's XFINITY TV is a combination of content for everyone (in FLASH), and content only available for signed in authenticated Double Play (HSD, and CABLE) customers. The entitled content is MOVE. If you have HBO/Cinemax/Starz, check out some of their stuff. Looks pretty good to me.

[Charles]

A lot of the Flash content on FanCast/ Xfinity comes from Hulu, btw.

[Jonathan]

This is really a nice post Vidio when I have see this everyone in FLASH This I enjoyed

[Fanfoot]

Agreed. Much of the content comes from elsewhere, and is labeled as such. For example, the Hulu stuff is clearly labeled as coming from Hulu when you click on it. That stuff is formatted however the originating site encodes it, so Hulu is RTMPE. The Comcast sourced content though, like HBO, is encoding using Move Network's codec. See for example posts here:

http://www.zatznotfunny.com/2009-12/to-xfinity-and-beyond-for-real-this-time/

from a couple of Comcast employees.

[batu permata]

The quality of the videos I checked out today took up to ten seconds to buffer, with lots of pixelation and really poor frame rates. I'll keep checking out the service today but frankly, Comcast is going to have to do a lot better than this quality wise of they want anyone to take it seriously.

[cara meninggikan badan]

service and digital cable TV offering, which appears to be around 10-12M consumers.

[PSM]

The quality of the videos I checked out today took up to ten seconds to buffer, with lots of pixelation and really poor frame rates. I'll keep checking out the service today but frankly, Comcast is going to have to do a lot better than this quality wise of they want anyone to take it seriously.

[RJ]

A lot of the Flash content on FanCast/ Xfinity comes from Hulu, btw.

[jesus]

Hey I have TV everywhere from my job at DISH, with a device called the Sling Link adapter. I can get TV and my DVR recordings on my android phone and picture quality is perfect. Check it out at dish.com.