X1-powered, voice-controlled
CALGARY – Shaw Communications upped the ante in Canada’s television and broadband market Wednesday, launching a new voice-controlled platform it has dubbed BlueSky TV.
Using Comcast’s X1 platform, Shaw BlueSky TV includes a remote that follows viewers’ voice prompts to access content, whether live, recorded on their DVR, available on-demand or offered through an over-the-top service. Customers may also use the voice remote to search for content by actor, genre, or a famous movie quote, or may ask "what's trending?" to activate its database of popular selections and what's trending on social media.
Comcast's intuitive, user-friendly platform is quickly becoming the industry standard as it has been launched by Cox Communications in the U.S. and will also be Rogers' platform come 2018. “It really isn’t about a guide or just about video, it really is a platform and a different way to interact with your home," Shaw Communications president Jay Mehr said in an interview with Cartt.ca.
Available now to customers in Calgary, Shaw said that it will expand the service to additional markets within its footprint in the coming months.
Comcast deployed the first generation of its platform two years ago and is constantly developing it. The company has 10,000 people just working on X1 and it has helped the company to 32 straight quarters of subscriber churn reduction and a net gain of 170,000 video customers in 2016, said Tony Werner, Comcast's president of technology and product, in the same interview. These are obviously exciting metrics for the operators deploying the system as everyone fights cord shavers, cutters and nevers.
BlueSky TV is priced at $99.90 per month for the first year when paired with Shaw’s Internet 150 service on a two year contract. The second year will be $172.90 per month, while the regular rate will be $208 per month, according to Shaw’s website.
The voice-powered remote is the sexiest aspect of the service and consumers love it, added Werner. Comcast has 14.2 million of the remotes in their systems, Stateside, and counted over 5 billion voice commands sent by its customers in 2016 and the company believes that will double in 2017. X1 customers also buy twice as much PPV and VOD titles than non X1 households, Werner added.
Choosing to go with X1 means doing things Comcast's way. The company has sent teams of people to Calgary (the same ones who deploy X1 in Comcast's systems) to ensure best practices for Shaw and make sure the backend is bullet proof. “On the network side, it was pretty easy. These guys have built a very consistent network to ours – it’s very solid," said Werner. “The back end is where it gets tricky because you always have different ways of doing authentication and some of the other things and that took a little work… But we also have the teams to work with them.”
“This is a rich strategic partnership on the technology side… and the Comcast team has made everything transparent to us.” – Jay Mehr, Shaw Communications
“We did have to look very carefully into Tony’s roadmap… and make sure that we are converting the design of our back office and network in a way that will enable the innovations coming from Comcast to seamlessly land on our network," added Zoran Stakic, Shaw's EVP and CTO.
While the voice remote is really the whiz-bang part of the service everyone will be talking about and which Shaw will be marketing hard ("If you ask it to find movies about marriage made in the '90s" it will make a playlist for you, said Werner), X1 is about going deeper than that. It wants to drive the smart home.
Comcast demonstrated a number of new features at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where, for example, users can tell the remote "I'm cold" and as long as they have a smart thermostat in their home, the temperature will be boosted two degrees.
One of the keys to the system from an operator's standpoint is the ease of install and ease of use for the consumer. Some other new platforms take operators hours for technical service reps to install and tweak and then consumers sometimes find the new gear confusing to use. In Comcast's territory, almost half if its Xfinity customers are doing self-installs and customer activation and authentication takes less than three minutes, saving multiple millions of dollars. In fact, it's newest, all wireless set tops, the Xi5 (seen here when we had a look at the 
Cable Show in 2016) only has one wire – the power cord – and essentially self-connects to the home Wi-Fi in minutes, pulling the network names and Wi-Fi password, encrypted, from the cloud. "The only thing it asks for is the last four digits of your phone number," said Werner.
Shaw executives couldn't be happier with the way its Comcast partnership has progressed so far. It was the first Canadian carrier to understand that as large as they are in a Canadian context, the company isn't big enough to have the resources to keep up to the world when it comes to broadband and video. It needs a huge, tech-driven partner like Comcast.
“We’re not going to overthink this. We’ve seen the Comcast playbook and we’re going to execute that path," added Mehr. “This is a rich strategic partnership on the technology side… and the Comcast team has made everything transparent to us.”
"We are proud to be the first in Canada to pioneer Comcast's ground-breaking technology and to be their first international partner", said Shaw CEO Brad Shaw, in the announcement. "By making it easier and more enjoyable for our customers, their families and friends to connect to the sports, shows, and movies they love, Shaw BlueSky TV sets the highest standard for Canadian television viewing. That's what Shaw is all about."
