I really had no clue what the point of having Comcast on my XBOX. I figured maybe somewhere in the world where the starving children were that people didn't have On Demand. (But they had XBOX) I mean if have your Xbox online and a Comcast account I figured you had to have On Demand. Apparently the Xfinity app offers a lot more than On Demand.
I saw a preview for a show that was headed in to season 2 soon and I wanted to check it out before the season started. I checked On Demand and it had nothing. I checked out the Xfinity App and it had the entire first season as well as endless amounts of other shows. It's definitely worth checking out.
Isnt it cheaper for cable companies to put content online and stream it?
Imported from Canada
Brampton Wrote:Isnt it cheaper for cable companies to put content online and stream it?
Imported from Canada
I hadn't heard about the cost of doing it, I just always figured that was the future of "cable TV"
Chip Wrote:Brampton Wrote:Isnt it cheaper for cable companies to put content online and stream it?
Imported from Canada
I hadn't heard about the cost of doing it, I just always figured that was the future of "cable TV"
You figure its easier to run an online service, than expanding on the cable services. Less settop programming and broadening the signal strength
Imported from Canada
Brampton Wrote:Chip Wrote:Brampton Wrote:Isnt it cheaper for cable companies to put content online and stream it?
Imported from Canada
I hadn't heard about the cost of doing it, I just always figured that was the future of "cable TV"
You figure its easier to run an online service, than expanding on the cable services. Less settop programming and broadening the signal strength
Imported from Canada
That way they can continue to give out the settop boxes from 1989 and not have to worry about upgrading. I burned through one in the last year and my father got rid of Comcast after his third box blew up in like 6 months. I went from like 90 hours of HDDVR with direct TV down to like 19 with comcast.
The only thing that would worry me is running my Xbox for extended periods of time. I would imagine that they'd crap out after a while like cable boxes do.
MattInMinnesota Wrote:The only thing that would worry me is running my Xbox for extended periods of time. I would imagine that they'd crap out after a while like cable boxes do.
I've had the same Xbox since 2005.
I heard a podcast last week about this... what Comcast is doing is using a band within the current cable for delivering their ondemand content to the xbos that does not count towards their bandwidth usage cap. That is the biggest advantage. If you watch a lot of Netflix and other online content you can hit their cap pretty easy.
As far as the streaming vs live content. They have been doing this for a while where they have servers caching and streaming the "long tailed" channels for a few years. These are the channels that do not get a lot of viewers so the STB will call to the specific server and stream rather than give dedicated channel bandwidth to a seldom watched channel. It makes sense, you may notice that on these channels the STB will take longer to access and display that information than a more popular channel like the networks and sports/news channel.