Light Reading Mobile – Telecom News, Analysis, Events, and Research

9:35 AM -- After an apparent false start late last week and an earlier battery of tests involving a controlled pilot group, Comcast Corp.'s initial On Demand Online effort, recently rechristened as "Xfinity," appears to be up and running this morning on a national level... though it still carries the beta label. (See Cable Catchup and Comcast Web TV Trial: 10,000 Being Served .)

Here in the Denver suburbs at least, this customer page is back up with the Xfinity branding, directing Comcast digital TV and high-speed Internet subs to sign in and partake in the Web TV goodness.

It's Alive!!!!

Those that do go ahead and sign in are then prompted to authorize PCs by downloading and running "Comcast Access," evidently the company's authentication platform. The 1.0 version is a 17.5 megabyte file.

Comcast then asks users to download the Adobe Systems Inc. Air app and the Move Networks Inc. Media Player. Later users are asked to reenter their user name (their Comcast email address) and password and name the PC. Comcast initially is allowing customers to authorize up to three PCs for Xfinity.

After that process, which took about 10 minutes, I then tested it out by firing up an episode of HBO's The Sopranos, and it appeared to be working just fine, though the video window seemed to be a bit disconnected from the video control console. But we'll keep playing around with it.

We've asked Comcast for more detail on the launch, including how much premium content is gracing the platform now, but we haven't heard word back yet. We'll also have more details about the launch, more screen grabs, and our first impressions of Xfinity, later this morning (gotta split... damn dentist appointment!).

UPDATE:A Comcast official confirmed that Xfinity is available nationally to customers that take the company's digital TV and high-speed Internet services. It's expected that Comcast will provide more detail about the new Xfinity offering during a press call scheduled for later this morning.

— Jeff Baumgartner, Site Editor, Cable Digital News

9:35 AM MSO's Web TV service, and its initial stab at the 'TV Everywhere' concept, appears to be available on a national level this morning UPDATED 11:25 AM
December 15, 2009 | Jeff Baumgartner |


Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Network Computing encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Network Computing moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. Network Computing further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

 
Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
 
Related Videos
Most Popular
Read
White Papers SPONSORED CONTENT
Featured
Resource Library SPONSORED CONTENT
Spanning Tree
An Ethernet protocol that checks a network for loops