Five years ago, Comcast started rolling out its tv everywhere initiative with the Vancouver Winter Olympics. And since that initial launch, we have made great strides as a company and an industry.
We understand people want to watch their favorite shows, movies and sporting events on the device that’s most convenient for them – and we’re working to make that experience more comprehensive and easier to enjoy. For example, in just the last year, we added:
- In-home automatic sign-in on Xfinity.com/TV
- More than 50 networks to our in-and-out-of-home live streaming networks to Xfinity TV Go website and app
- TV shows and movies from more than 100 networks
- 1,000 hours of content that was once "digital only" to the largest screen in your home during the Sochi Olympics with the NBC Sports Live Extra app on X1.
As an industry leader, Comcast is focused on how user experience impacts adoption, testing these best practices at scale with Xfinity TV Go, and sharing our learnings with our programing partners and other MVPDs in an effort to improve the tv everywhere experience across the industry.
At NCTA, I’m joining industry colleagues to discuss the ways we’ve raised the tv everywhere bar through a CTAM committee focused on researching tve everywhere best practices and turning them in to real standards. One example of something tested, in conjunction with NBCU, was the authentication language and call-to-action during the Sochi Olympics on NBCOlympics.com and the NBC Sports Live Extra app. Following the best practices our committee uncovered, we explained to customers the need to "verify" their TV provider in the messaging around entitled content and implemented a persistent call-to-action of "sign in." By using the same language and call-to-action on tv everywhere sites and apps throughout the industry, we hope customers begin to see the need to sign in as second nature – similar to how they view it when checking email or sharing on their favorite social networks.
In the coming months, we will be enhancing our tv everywhere sign-in page to reflect more of the CTAM best practices. We also aim to better communicate to our Xfinity TV customers that tv everywhere is included in their subscription and that it’s easy to set up or recover a username and password.