The end of the year is upon us and it’s been a great one for X1. We’re excited to be closing out the year with a few new updates sure to bring some holiday fun. For all those family gatherings, we launched a new mobile app under our "Comcast Labs" umbrella that lets customers send photos on their phone – including those on Facebook, Instagram and Flickr - directly to their X1 (download in App Store or Google Play). We also launched a new interactive web-based experience on the platform, called Santa Tracker, to get families in the holiday spirit with games, sing-alongs, read-alongs and more. On Christmas Eve, kids will even be able to track Santa live as he makes his way across the globe.    

And what would the holidays be without a "best of" list? Netflix on X1 and the X1 Olympics experience headlined the year, but here’s a look at eight more of the most-loved (and used!) enhancements that came to the platform in 2016 and some interesting stats behind them:

  1. Improved voice integrations: throughout 2016, we continued to enhance the functionality of the voice remote to get to content quicker, perform more actions and even begin to integrate across other Xfinity products in the home. This amounted to a staggering 3.4 billion voice commands uttered just this year alone.

  2. X1 Sports App Additions: built on the success of the visual stats offered for football and baseball we added NASCAR, NHL, Soccer and Basketball in 2016 including for the first time rosters by athlete. Over 565 million X1 sports app sessions were started in 2016 and it’s growing in popularity this year with a quarter of our customers using it every week 7 times on average.  

  3. DVR Auto-Extend for live sporting events: this is one of our most-loved features from sports fans. X1 will automatically keep recording a live sporting event if it goes into overtime. About 13,000 games were extended in 2016 – that’s a lot of relieved sports fans!

  4. DVR In-Game Highlights markers for NFL games: another great one for sports fans, this feature lets customers jump to important plays in recorded sports events, making it easier and quicker to catch up on the game. We added more than 4000 highlights to NFL games in 2016, with more sports to come in 2017.

  5. New video playback controls: after testing this out in Comcast Labs earlier this year, we rolled it out to all customers a few months ago. The updated design of the playback bar features a simplified UI that makes it easier to keep watching episodes and also access features such as SAP, closed captioning and voice description – accessibility tools that are used by our customers more than 1 million times per day!

  6. Reminders: this much-requested feature gives customers the ability to set reminders for upcoming programs they don’t want to miss. And boy did it do its job – 310 million reminders were delivered to X1 customers this year alone!

  7. More web-based interactive content: whether its enhanced extras for movies (101 released movies to date), streaming video, or even the Santa Tracker mentioned above these types of experiences are paving the way for us to develop a more robust interactive experiences on the platform.

  8. Simplified set-up and remote pairing: compared to X1 installs before these new features, simplified set-up and remote pairing are saving techs and customers a lot of time when setting up X1 – an estimated 11 minutes saved per home install, which is more time to spend setting up Netflix, installing the Xfinity TV app on devices and setting up parental controls.  

And while all that was happening, the teams were cranking on lots and lots of foundational work on new enhancements to come in 2017!