X1

I saw it and played with it over at a friend's house, which changed my mind about trying it for myself: Comcast's new X1 system with its voice-activated remote.

It is, no shit, slicker than snot.

The voice-recognition really works, and the flexibility/built-in AI is amazing. You can say an actor's name, a channel number, a program name, a type of program or the subject matter of a program and the search, nearly instantaneous, pulls up everything that matches.

Some of it is PPV. Most of it is free. If it's a broadcast program it tells you where and when it's on, and lets you set a reminder. If you ask for an actor or director it pulls up a bio with a current picture (many times unrecognizable from their heyday!) and then a list of shows & movies that person was in.

There is no built-in DVR but there appears to be some floating memory -- you can back up live TV programs. Not sure yet how far or how many, but say you had to answer a phone call during a show, you can go back to what you missed.

All this is provided free, or at the same price as my previous cable box.

Impressed I am, yes.

Well okay not everything works as advertised.  The new X1 service has some built-in apps like Pandora and Flickr but the procedure for linking the X1 system to your existing accounts is shite.  Spent twenty minutes on the phone with somebody in India and he couldn't figure it out either.  They're escalating to a senior tech and will get back to me within 24 hours.

There are procedures listed on the website, but they don't take me where they're supposed to go, but instead end up at an advertising website for upgrading my service.

There are conflicting instructions in different areas, but as near as I can tell, after an hour of futzing, none of them work.

Oh well, I have four other ways to access Pandora.

One of the problems -- I'm speculating -- is that Comcast requires a "Comcast.net" email address domain, but of course I have no way to access anything sent to Comcast.net.  Wasn't even able to set that up as readable from my mail portal. It's a black hole.

Which is fine.  I don't need another spam door.

Spent about an hour on the phone with Comcast tech support -- on a Sunday night -- because nobody ever followed up on my open ticket.  The first person I talked to was a non-native English speaker, but she transferred me over to an apps specialist who was American and very helpful.

We went through all the same steps I'd done on the 22nd, with the same result.  She escalated, got some help, eventually rebooted some stuff at her end and my box at my end, with the end result that we got Pandora working as an X1 app.

Now I can listen to Pandora:

• as an X1 app
  
• as a smart TV app
  
• as an app on my Blu-ray Disc player
  
• streaming to the TV from my iPad
  
• streaming to the TV from my iPhone
  
• streaming to the TV from my iMac
  

That's probably more ways than I really need.

There's also an X1 app for Flickr, and I'm getting the exact same error message there.  Unlike Pandora -- which she's fixed before for other people -- she's never done Flickr before (didn't even know what it was).  We went through the same procedures that worked for Pandora but it didn't fix Flickr.  After an hour I said forget it, it's not that important.

Funny, each of the six Pandora access methods has a slightly different GUI.

Other apps in the X1 suite:
PHOTO: Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Xfinity Share (display photos and videos from your mobile device on the TV)
DAILY LIFE: weather, horoscopes, traffic, stocks, sports
ENTERTAINMENT: Pandora
XFINITY: tips & tricks, my account, voicemail, home, accessories

Tips & tricks first tip is that there's a built-in picture-within-picture (PIP) when browsing channels, accessed by hitting the B button. Neat.

Much more to explore.