If you are a subscriber to Comcast’s cable service and use its Xfinity TV X1 set top box and are a fan of the upcoming Winter Olympics in Sochi, there is great news for you as the carrier has agreed to live stream all of the events.
NBC has been making a great deal of news with its big expansion of streaming Olympic events and extra programming, so this is really no real surprise since Comcast is the majority owner of NBC, but it had not publicly committed to live streaming the events to its customers.
It plays out pretty much as expected based on the previous NBC announcements. 1,000 hours of Olympics competition will be streamed live from the games in Sochi, Russia. The online content will be double that which is broadcast over the air by NBC and its four cable partners.. Then there will be 200 hours available on video on demand.
There are a few interesting wrinkles in the broadcasts. If you come late to watching an event you can get the video on demand to start at the beginning. An interesting social media hook is a feature called ‘SEEiT” that allows a user to tune into events that are generating large amounts of tweets by simply clicking on the SEEiT button embedded in some tweets.
Comcast has said that the streaming video will be available for phones and tablets as well as connected televisions.
While in the short term this is a great fan of Olympic sports, the bigger picture is even better. With a great number of sports broadcasts now handled by regional and national cable networks their ability to broadcast to remote mobile devices is very important.
Comcast has said that it is using this opportunity to both familiarize its customers with these capabilities and as a test bed to see what works well with its established customer base. Hopefully it can start branching out with other sports, but of course that will take some doing for the major ones that already have some sort of streaming services in place, at least for NFL and MLB broadcasts.
