Comcast has fired up its A28 Motorola program guide in Indiana, and in addition to new onscreen features, the guide also includes the Comcast Mobile app that allows iPhone and iPod Touch users to remotely interact with their DVRs.
The A28 Motorola guide is marching through Comcast’s divisions this year via a market-by-market rollout. Generally speaking, Comcast’s “AnyRoom” whole-home DVR service is launched around the same time as the new guide.
“We are committed to providing our customers with more value and convenience, and the addition of new onscreen program guide technology and enhanced DVR functions join a long list of features that make watching favorite programming easier and more enjoyable,” said Scott Tenney, senior vice president of Comcast in Indiana. “And now our customers can also easily program their DVR no matter their location with our Comcast Mobile app, which serves as a ‘one stop shop’ for our services while on the go.”
In addition to remote DVR scheduling, Comcast Mobile is a new downloadable app that allows users to access their Comcast e-mail accounts and visual voicemail, sync their address books, and view local TV listings and trailers of on-demand movies.
Additional new features for Comcast Mobile include push notification alerts, which automatically indicate new e-mails and voicemails have arrived, as well as TV show reminders. Comcast subscribers can also forward pictures and voicemails as an attachments, mark unwanted e-mails as spam and access external e-mail accounts (POP/IMAP) from their mobile device.
With the new guide, Comcast’s On Demand Skip Ahead/Skip Back feature lets customers jump ahead or back in five-minute increments during on-demand programming by using the “up” and “down” arrows on their remotes.
The guide also provisions a new “Watch in HD” button that allows customers to switch to the HD version of the program they are watching, which cuts down on scroll times of going from an SD channel to the HD version.
Comcast’s DVR History displays information on already recorded, watched and deleted programs, and there’s also a DVR Folders function for when customers record more than one episode of a series.