Comcast Opens Up on OpenStack

A little more than a year after first investigating OpenStack, Comcast Corp. has gone on the road to promote the open-source cloud-computing platform as the engine behind its X1 video service. In a keynote presentation at the OpenStack Summit in Portland last week, Comcast senior vice president Mark Muehl demonstrated an X1 set-top running live in an OpenStack production environment. Muehl said Comcast has worked closely with Cisco Systems Inc. to build its private OpenStack cloud, and that the company is developing numerous video applications on the platform for X1 subscribers. Comcast expects to have X1 deployed to the majority of its markets before the end of the year. (See Comcast's X1 Comes to Colorado.) Muehl showed off several applications at the OpenStack Summit including an enhanced search feature, movie reviews from Flixter's Rotten Tomatoes site, and a sports app listing the broadcast channel for an on-air game. Said Muehl, "All of the communication that we're sending back and forth from our set-top box to our network is going through stuff that's running on top of our OpenStack production cloud." In a blog post published yesterday, Muehl also noted that as Comcast and Cisco continue their work on OpenStack, the two companies plan to contribute much of what they generate back to the open-source community. — Mari Silbey, Special to Light Reading Cable