As many of you may have noticed by now, we’re constantly pursuing ways to make the X1 user interface as easy-to-navigate as possible, and with this latest round of updates, we’ve made adjustments that make it simpler and more accessible to search for, rent and buy your favorite content. Here are a couple of highlights:
Buy & Rent Prices Simplified
We’ve heard from our customers that when it comes to renting or purchasing movies, they prefer watching in HD, so we’ve updated entity pages to display HD Rent and Buy prices first.
Here’s how the experience will work now: When you search for shows or movies to purchase, the browse pages will first display one of three options: "Rent," "Buy," or "Rent or Buy." When you make your selection, the default option will default to the HD option. Of course, you can still select SD if you prefer!
We’ve also enhanced the entity pages for show seasons, making episode pricing more understandable. "Buy" and "Purchased" season descriptions have been added to the episode guide to more clearly communicate which seasons are free, available to buy or already purchased.
Now, if a season includes some episodes for purchase and others available for free, the season will be marked "Buy" -- to let customers know up front that at least some of that content is transactional. Seasons that include all episodes for free will be marked "On Demand."
Scrolling Text Added to Mini Guide and Mini Search
This month we also enhanced the usability of the mini guide and mini search features. By adding scrolling text for all program titles in these features, you are now able to read the full program title from any search or navigation option on the platform.
In Comcast Labs: Recent Searches
New in our Labs section this month is a feature aimed at making search results more personalized. With this feature activated, whenever you select a search result, that result will be remembered, so you can quickly find it again without having to search all over again. We are evaluating this feature to determine how useful it is, and may make it a default feature in the future based on your feedback. To give it a try, go to Comcast Labs under Settings and turn on the option for Recent Searches.
Voice Guidance Expansion
As you may also know, we launched voice guidance technology on X1 at the end of last year. The "talking guide" is a feature on X1 that reads aloud selections like program titles, network names and time slots as well as DVR and On Demand settings, giving users the freedom to independently explore and navigate thousands of shows and movies.
With technology like the talking guide, we are helping to make entertainment just as fun and easy to access for people with a visual disability as it is for anyone else. Just last month, we launched a new national campaign to spark an even bigger conversation about how people with disabilities enjoy entertainment called "Emily’s Oz."
We’re working hard to enable the talking guide for all elements of the X1 experience, and we’re excited to let you know that in this round of updates, we’ve expanded Voice Guidance support for new areas including Mini Guide, Channel Info and Channel Collections (for example – a search result for "HBO").
Developing accessible products and services is a priority, and we’ll continue to keep you updated on all the platform enhancements our team is making to further that goal.