Comcast Shows Off New Web-based TV Program Guide and Navigation Platform

In what’s becoming something of an annual tradition, Comcast Chairman & CEO Brian Roberts demonstrated the new cloud-based guide, known as ‘Xcalibur,’ at a Cable Show keynote session on Thursday. Standing on stage at the McCormick Place convention center, Roberts used a new RF-based remote control to show off the mix of channel guide, search tools, highlight videos, recommendation engines and Web apps and widgets that Xcalibur offers. They include those for weather and traffic information, social networking links with Facebook and access to the Pandora music-streaming service. Roberts highlighted a new social networking feature called “Friend Trends,” which will enable viewers to exchange text messages with viewers elsewhere while watching TV programming. “The guide becomes what your friends tell you to watch, not what the alphabet soup wants you to watch,” said Roberts, who showed off the first iPad application for cable at last spring’s Cable Show during a similar keynote session.

The development of the Xcalibur guide, still in the testing stages, represents a major advance for the cable industry because it’s both IP-based and Web-based. As a result, it allows cable operators like Comcast to break away from their dependence on set-top-based guides, with what some consider their clunky channel grids and limited video highlights and other capabilities. “Moving to IP finally frees navigation and the programming guide from the tyranny of legacy set-top boxes, a problem that has dogged the industry for a generation,” analyst Craig Moffett of Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. wrote clients Friday.

This advance also allows cable operators to put a uniform TV program guide on any video display device, including tablets, game consoles, smart phones, laptops and new connected TVs, Roberts said. The network-based nature of the guide allows operators to update it as quickly and often as they like, he said. “It’s the beginning of the next generation by taking the guide and putting it in the cloud.” He noted that the Xcalibur guide’s user interface and the apps that run on it “can be innovated and changed on the fly and in the cloud and changed all over the country instantaneously."

Comcast has been testing a service, called Xcalibur Spectrum, on a new, advanced HD-DVR set-top box in a few dozen cable homes in Augusta, Ga. It hasn’t offered any details on deployment plans. Earlier in the conference, Comcast revealed its first four vendor partners for the Xcalibur project, which has been shrouded in secrecy for the past 18 months. Breaking its long-time silence on the project, the company announced that its initial partners include its thePlatform subsidiary for content management, Pace for the hybrid QAM and IP set-top boxes, Intel for the chips and Facebook for the social networking piece.

Besides demonstrating the Xcalibur service, Roberts used his time in the spotlight to show off a set of DOCSIS 3.0 cable modems acting together to download videos at speeds faster than 1 Gbps over Comcast’s Chicago coaxial cable plant. In a video presented during his stage appearance, Roberts showed how the custom-built modems, supported by a Cisco CMTS, downloaded the entire 23-episode fifth season of NBC’s “30 Rock” series in a 1 minute and 39 seconds. He then showed a meter measuring the throughput of the download, which indicated 1.1 Gbps.

Roberts briefly addressed Comcast’s recent acquisition of control in NBCUniversal, in a panel discussion that followed his twin presentations. Asked whether the deal shows that Comcast believes “content is king,” he shrugged off the question. “I've never bought into who’s king or who’s queen,” he said. “You start by saying, ‘What’s a great business?’ We wanted to get larger.” Roberts added that he feels better about the deal now than he did “18 months ago when we shook hands.”