Comcast announced today that its AnyRoom On Demand service is now available to digital cable subscribers in the company’s New England footprint.
With the free service, Comcast’s subscribers in New England with Motorola set-top boxes (STBs) are now able to start on-demand content or movies in one room and then view them throughout the household in other rooms that are equipped with digital STBs.
AnyRoom On Demand doesn’t require subscribers to make any changes to their service or add equipment in order to use the service.
“We are excited to bring this feature to our digital cable customers throughout New England,” said Randy Waddell, SVP of sales and marketing for Comcast’s North Central Division. “We are committed to delivering our customers the ultimate TV viewing experience, and the addition of AnyRoom technology is yet another feature that allows them to view their favorite programming, whenever and wherever they want to watch.”
Comcast associates customer accounts with its video-on-demand (VOD) backoffice to start an on-demand offering in one room and then finish it in another room.
Comcast previously rolled out the service in New Jersey and said that AnyRoom would be available in other markets this year (story here). Comcast expects to provision the service on Cisco, or Scientific Atlanta, digital STBs later this year.
With AnyRoom, the “saved programs” list is shared among all digital cable boxes within a household registered to the same account, allowing on-demand movies or shows to be ordered in one room and then viewed in another. It also allows customers to watch the same program from two or more different digital boxes simultaneously.
To continue watching, or to restart a program in another room, customers go to the saved programs folder on their on-demand main menu and select the desired program, which will resume where it left off.
Comcast said that all on-demand programs more than 19 minutes in length are included in the AnyRoom feature. Any free, premium channel or paid programs can be watched during the “rental window” of the program on any TV in the home that has a digital cable box.
All program titles that are saved on one digital box will be displayed in the saved programs list on other digital boxes throughout the home.
Currently, Comcast has more than 10,000 titles available for on-demand viewing each month, with 90 percent of those titles available for free. Last month, Comcast announced that it had surpassed seven billion on-demand views since VOD was launched in 2003.
Next year, Comcast plans to offer more than 6,000 movies per month in its VOD tier, with more than 3,000 in high-definition (HD).
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