康卡斯特公司 Keynote Looks to the Future of Connected TV

“我无法预测未来,马特·施特劳斯说, senior vice president and general manager of 康卡斯特公司 Interactive Media, at the start of the second day keynote for the 流媒体 West conference in Los Angeles. Yet, for the next hour, he gave attendees an exciting look at what 康卡斯特公司 is doing now for connected viewing and what's to come.

"I feel like we all have glimpses of it by looking around our home," Strauss said. 为他的四个儿子, watching TV on a tablet or smartphone is no different than on an actual television, which prompted Strauss to realize that TV is simply video and a display merely a piece of glass. Those pieces of glass are now everywhere, including taxicabs and gas station pumps.

The future of television means untethering the TV from the living room, 他说, but viewing on multiple devices is only the beginning. It will be up to developers to improve that experience with better social viewing and easy, 个性化的体验. Viewers in the future will have infinite choice over what they can watch. That's overwhelming, so TV providers will need to help them manage those choices.

在接下来的6到12个月, viewers will see live TV added to their connected viewing experience, so that streaming viewing will be more like that on a standard television. DVR功能也将得到改进, so that viewers will be able to access and play stored programs and movies from anywhere.

Social viewing tools will improve and play a greater role in people's viewing, Strauss said. While not everyone will gravitate to social features, viewers will get better recommendations based on their friends' viewing habits, and will be able to watch on-demand content as a group even when in different locations.

The coming Olympics presents an exciting area for social viewing, Strauss said. Tablet owners will be able to sync the content on their TVs with that on their tablets to get timely contextual 信息.

关于剪脐带的热门话题, Strauss said that the trend wasn't happening in a material way, but that cord shaving -- reducing pay TV extras -- was more of a factor. TV providers need to provide more value to entice customers, 他说.

施特劳斯展示了康卡斯特Xfinity iPad应用, 可以用来远程控制电视功能, 以及最近推出的Xfinity网站. The site builds the same remote functions into a browser. 用户可以用它来观看电视节目. 搜索 results give users the option to watch a show on-demand or record it.

在观众提问环节, 一位与会者询问点菜选项, saying that he wasn't interested in regular service but would still like to see the Olympics. Strauss answered that it isn't in programmers' best interests to break up their offerings, but that we'll see more experimentation in the future. As for a possible streaming-only package or other a la carte offerings, 他说 that most customers prefer everything in one easy grouping -- and they're willing to pay for it.

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