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Eric G. Hey, guys, Eric G. Around the house.

I wanted to share with you something a little bit different.

You know, many times I sit in meetings and I learn something really cool, and then I wonder, how do I want to get that out to you guys?

Now, this is not a paid segment here at all.

I just wanted to see what the new technology was.

And after talking with Comcast, I said, hey, guys, before, let's record this meeting so I can share it with you guys, my friends out there.

So if you're an Xfinity Comcast customer, this little meeting is for you.

They really changed some stuff for the super bowl on Sunday and for the Olympics, which is starting today.

And he gives me a walkthrough on it.

You're not going to have the visual, which I didn't record all of that because it was just a teams meeting, but I wanted to show you kind of what the changes they made to make your TV experience better for something you're already paying for.

So not a commercial here.

Not telling you to go buy their stuff or whatever, but if you have this system now, you want to listen to this because there's a lot of things, you can customize it for your own liking.

So if you want to watch the Olympics and you want to watch women's curling or something like that, and the hockey games on, you can watch whatever you want to watch if it's airing.

So they're going to be airing everything out there.

You can watch it live, you can watch it on streaming, you can bring it back up, you can use their AI to show you the parts you missed.

Really cool.

So take a listen.

Let's jump into the call with our friends from Comcast.

And yeah, I got their permission for this.

I just think it's cool and it's going to make your viewing experience so much better and way different than they've done it in the past.

You know, a lot of times, people, they get a little confused, which I don't blame them because if you go to a store, you see all these 4K stickers on boxes and you came home and you put this panel on the wall and it's so much better than what you had, right?

So and you're like, wow, this 4K is amazing.

Not realizing that it's still HD, right?

Yeah, but yeah, so we're going to, I could talk about how we're going to try to change that a little bit for our customers.

Nice.

But yeah, some background is we've been on this journey for the Olympics for a while.

Ever since Comcast acquired NBC back in 2011, we've been partnering with our colleagues over at NBCUniversal to create innovative Olympics experiences, really since 20 2012.

2012 with the London Games.

And we started pretty, you know, we had humble roots where we had every minute on demand, which at the time was, was pretty amazing.

You could watch any minute of the Olympics but, you know, recorded.

And even just a few years later by the Olympics in Rio, we had every minute live streaming on our X1 set top box.

So that's how quickly we were able to innovate.

We utilized the power of X1 because it is an Internet connected device to provide real value to our customers where they can get something that otherwise they'd have to at the time stream on their phones or on their tablets.

You know, those were the times when media streaming devices were just coming out and becoming known to the larger audiences.

If you fast forward a little bit to the Pyeongchang Olympics in 2018, that's actually we went through that same playbook where we were providing 4K coverage for the first time and it was on demand.

Right.

So it wasn't live.

And then during the Tokyo Olympics and then of course in the Paralympics, we've introduced live streaming of 4K and we went huge.

This, this time around, I'll show you what it's going to look like with this new innovation we have called Real Time 4K.

When you think about it, the problem we're trying to solve, Eric, for our customers is to help them just navigate the Olympics and sports in general.

Like we, we talk to our customers all the time and they tell us, you know, sports is really frustrating.

There's, I don't know from night to night, like what streaming service I'm on, what channel I'm on.

Oh my gosh, it just gets harder.

Yeah, right.

And what, what they tell us is, you know, for a show, I can kind of nail it down for a season.

Like a season might be in one service or a season another service.

And but for sports, you don't know from night to night where your favorite team is going to play.

Right?

Yep.

So we took a step back, we said, well, imagine if you can just have one simple, easy, you know, enjoyable place to watch everything.

We bring it all together.

So what if you had all your favorite teams, your favorite players, your favorite sports all in one place?

And wouldn't it be great if you just pick up your remote and say, sports, it'll be all in front of you.

So that's what we've created for our customers to make it super easy.

Now then you take that a step further for the Olympics.

Our customers have told us 3,000 hours of the Olympics.

Wow, that's amazing.

I could watch 3000 hours, and you're giving me the opportunity to watch whatever I want.

But it's also a little intimidating.

Like, it doesn't matter if you have 3,000 hours if you can't find the one you really want to see.

So we've taken that to heart and we said, well, what if you had every minute of the Olympics but all in one place, and it didn't matter if it was on traditional TV or if it was on streaming?

If we put it all together in one simple, easy to use interface where you can watch the Olympics and get caught up on everything else that's happening in the world.

So that's the background.

I'll show you, show you what we have.

But that's the.

When we, you know, start whiteboarding this a long time ago and thinking strategically about how we wanted to create an experience that's second to none, that's how we got there.

Nice.

Yeah.

For me, I just hit the C button on my remote and go, please tell me where it's at.

Well, I'm going to show you in the.

Here, I'll bring it up.

I feel like I keep teasing these and not actually showing it, but let me know, Eric, when you can see your screen.

Got it.

Yep.

Great.

So I'll show you a new innovation for that companion experience.

But, you know, just to ground you in your.

In the X1, it sounds like you have it and you use it and you know it.

So one of the things that we wanted to do before I get into some of the new things, we didn't want to take anything away from our customers.

We didn't want to have to have them learn how to watch the Olympics again.

So we've create.

We've kept some of the things that we had created in the past, such as our home screen, which acts as a shortcut to the live primetime show.

This will be on the super bowl and Super Bowl Sunday, of course, or our Olympic zone, which I'll show you in a minute, or the Streaming on Peacock.

We want to put these little shortcuts available for our customers.

But if you grab your remote and just said Olympics, we're going to give you that classic Olympics homepage that puts everything Olympics at your fingertips.

So this is nice.

Everything that's live.

I'm going to get into these little innovations at the top, these extras at the top that we have.

But we know our customers want the live show, right?

They want the live program.

They want to be there in the moment.

So we're bringing that right to the forefront.

Primetime show, daytime show on NBC.

Gold Zone will be both on Peacock and NBC Sports Network.

We'll let our customers choose how they want to watch.

We'll have initially pointed to multi view, which I'm going to show you.

And because there's so much on on Peacock, we're going to give Peacock its own dedicated space.

We call these rows.

And you could sift through here.

There could be maybe 30 or 40 live events on at one time that you can watch.

And I'll show you how we're going to help you make sense of that.

Our upcoming row allows you to set your reminders, set your dvr.

I'll show you the payoff for setting your dvr.

We're going to have tons of highlights.

We have a new way that we're showing highlights in short form, video.

And we also wanted to make sure that we're not forgetting about some of the extras, the shoulder programming around the Olympics.

Whether it's podcasts or documentaries, full feature films are bringing that into the fold as well.

We know customers want the live action and the competition that definitely takes center stage.

But we want to also give you that always on approach.

So you could listen to these podcasts and more and more are coming every day and see some of these documentaries and these full feature films.

So this is what we had done in the past.

And again, we wanted to make sure that customers still had that available.

But here, now we get into what I think is the fun stuff.

We created a brand new companion experience that we call Fanview.

So I'm not sure if you've seen this yet in your home.

We have.

No, we have been.

We started creating this for the NFL and college football season and then we, we upped it a little bit with the NBA.

And now we're going even further with the Olympics because this new companion experience for the first time will be personalized.

And for the Olympics, what we're allowing you to do is personalize it by these categories at the top.

So the prime time show or the top highlights.

You'll get a notification anytime the primetime show starts or we get a brand new highlight that you just have to see into our system.

But you can also favorite some of these sports here on the, on the right.

So in this example, we're going to favorite alpine skiing, bobsled, figure skating, ice hockey.

So then once you do that, X1's going to take just a second to think about it, and then it's going to give you a fan view that's centered on your favorite sports, the ones that you told us you want to watch.

You know, over the years, we've thought about what's the best way to favor it.

Is it by event, is it by athlete, is it by sporting?

We found that favorite favoriting by sport really has the biggest impact for our customers because sometimes they'll say, well, well, I know there's Michaela Schiffer and I know there's Lindsey Vaughn.

I don't exactly know what race they're in.

Right.

So we take that guess away.

Just favorite alpine skiing, for example.

Right.

And you'll have it available for you.

So we have those shortcuts that you see at the top.

Those again, kind of taking some of that, that idea and those paradigms from that home screen into fan view.

But then when you get into it, again, these are just your favorite sports.

So your fan view will look a little bit different than my fan view because of the sports that you favorited.

But one of the things our customers told us, you can see the watch now, that's everything else that's happening.

They said, I want to be able to personalize my experience, but I also want to be able to see everything else that's happening in the Olympics.

I don't want to miss out on.

I don't want to miss out on a breakout athlete, a viral moment, fantastic finish.

I won't be able to see it.

So you could come here to all sports and get anything you want.

So that's just a way to ensure everything is available to you.

One of the other things we know our customers love is the metal count.

We've always had a full screen metal count.

Yeah.

But we were like, well, why not have it here so that you can watch the action and see the metal count at the same time.

Why make customers choose one or the other?

So that's what you're getting here.

And you know, because our customers like it so much this time, we're allowing them to sort it by gold, silver, bronze.

Then you can take a Deep dive into some of these countries.

And this is where a brand.

Another new innovation is called.

I'm going to go back a little bit slowly so you can see that transition again.

I'm clicking on this.

Mikaela Shifrin moves into the finals video.

Yeah, in the past, like before, to be honest, Eric Monday, this whole experience would be torn down and you would be put into a different video player.

Then you'd have to come back to Fan view and fire it up again.

So what we did is said, well, why can't you just watch it here?

So when you click on that Mikaela Schiffrin video, then that plays right within Fan view and you could see those little toggles on the bottom.

We were very.

Our design team was really inspired by what you see on socials, whether that's, you know, TikTok or Instagram reels, something like that.

We can flip from one video right to the next seamlessly.

And you can go back and forth if you want.

So you can say, this is illy Malin and definitely have an eye on him because he's supposed to be the quad God and pretty amazing figure skater.

So you can see his.

His performance again.

You can go back to Michaela.

It's very easy to navigate.

So brand new pattern that we're putting on X1.

The other thing that we have in Fanview is these Xfinity athletes and we brought their stories into the fray.

This is exclusive content because we sponsor Olympians and Paralympians.

So here, Michaela Shifrin, she's talking about her performance in Beijing and how she's wasn't happy with those results and how she just can't wait to get on the slopes of Milan.

And then we have some of our Paralympians that we sponsor, Noah Elliott here talking about what the para games mean to him and help him overcome his disability.

Not shown here, but something that actually, again, just popped up on Monday.

We was a stretch goal for us, if I'm being honest.

Eric was all our socials.

So the at Xfinity social handle, they're doing a lot of fun stuff while they're in Milan.

We have a whole team that's already in Italy.

They're shooting video that's going to appear here in Fanview too.

So a really new and innovative way to follow the Games.

We're really excited about it.

That's awesome.

One of the other.

Awesome.

That's cool.

That's so easy.

Oh, my gosh, it's really easy.

And that was the point.

You know, we Say, like sports should be, you know, simple, fun, and enjoyable.

And we believe that this helps you do that.

You know, one of the other innovations we have is this multiview.

And we launched Multiview in the fall of 2024, and it was something that we would build the channels and the customer would control the audio.

And on day one on socials, the customers were saying, that's great, but I really want to be able to choose the channels that are available.

So we actually launched that last fall with the start of the NBA season, and now we're bringing it to the Olympics for the first time.

So you can watch three or four channels showing Olympics content at one time.

So the four channels that are broadcasting the Olympics are NBC, NBC Sports Network, USA Network, and cnbc.

So you can have a multiview with all four of those.

But we know there's not, and we love the Olympics.

But there's other things happening too, right.

I still want to watch New Carolina on Saturday night, Right.

I'm going to watch that while the Olympics are right.

So now our customers can go into multiview and they can choose the games that they want to watch.

So in this example, we're going to choose college hoops, we're going to choose the NBA, and we're going to also choose the Olympics.

Once I hit watch now, I'm going to get this experience where I have the Olympics and other sports happening at the same time.

So that is something that we're really looking forward for customers to be able to experience for the first time.

We didn't have this in the past.

It was available in Peacock and on our platform, but now this is.

This is new on Xfinity.

One of the other things not shown here, I should mention, Eric, is that our customers told us they want to be able to prioritize one of these screens.

So we have since given them more interactivity into multi view, where, let's say that Cincinnati UCF game, you can make that the big window on your screen, and these other windows would be a little bit smaller.

So if you just maybe want to keep an eye on them.

Yeah.

If that's your primary, and you're like, okay, I got to watch everything else just to see what's going on.

And I'll switch over when that gets good and you can do the bounce around.

That's exactly right.

And then you could also, if you want, follow a fifth game through.

Fanview is going to have live scores, stats, and betting odds.

So in this example, we're going to show the.

The hockey game is happening between the USA and Canada.

And you are still watching these other sports, but you want to get an update on what's the score, you know, what are the stats look like, how's the game going?

See, now you're keeping tabs on five games at once and even the real time betting odds that come in.

So we have partnerships with FanDuel and with DraftKings.

And if you scan one of those, if you hit okay.

On your remote with.

To one of those markets, we'll give you a QR code that you could scan with your remote and then you could just place the wager right on your phone.

It's super easy for us.

Again, coming back to that mantra of keeping it simple, easy, and enjoyable.

That is awesome.

This is starting to look like sitting in Vegas in the sports book, and you've got screens going all on your own tv.

So that's kind of cool.

That's exactly right.

You know, and you could be like, I feel like I'm at a sports bar.

I'm in Vegas.

We're also going to try to make it so that you feel like you're in Italy.

So we're going to bring all of these venues into your home.

So in this example, we're going to show you what the snow park looks like and.

Oh, sweet.

Yeah, we have these for all the different venues around Milan and Cortina.

I love how it starts with the map and then zooms in.

And then now with the snow park, you're going to see the actual.

Yeah, the actual courses that the snowboarders and the freestyle skiers are going to be competing on.

So that's cool.

That makes it so much more relatable when you're watching it because you're like, oh, this makes sense to me.

Like, if you were sitting there, you'd.

You'd totally get a kind of a better view of it.

But sometimes on television, you're like, I have no idea what corner that was, you know.

Yeah.

And.

And you don't realize, Nick, you know, how big some of these are.

You know, some of the other ones that we have going down the downhill, like, how steep the downhill is.

We.

Yeah, we had an element of this for the Paris Olympics.

It wasn't as cool.

Like, you're kind of showing buildings and stuff like that, but now you're actually showing the beauty of the mountains in Milan and Cortina.

So just trying to say, like, how would it all comes back to, like, how would we bring this to our customers?

And this is one of the ways.

That we can bring it to life.

Yeah.

Okay.

I'm showing you a lot, but I want to make sure, you know, and you can always just say Olympics back into your moat and you get back into the classic experience.

You know, we.

We've kind of seen.

I'll say at first, that voice thing, by the way, I kind of went, oh, why would I ever use this?

This is crazy.

And then now all of a sudden I'm just like, that's the only way I use it now.

And it's like, okay, I was wrong.

Yeah.

I mean, you could say olympics go back to our classic experience.

You could say recordings.

This is another fun one that we have for the opening ceremony.

Daytime show, primetime show.

If we record it, we're using AI technology, Eric, to point out the best moments in that feed.

You might not have three or four hours to watch the opening ceremony, but with our AI technology, we're going to tag these different segments and you can say, yeah, I definitely want to see Team Greece enter.

That's a tradition, right?

They're always the first country to enter.

And then you could watch that and you could skip ahead and say, well, definitely.

Where's Team usa?

The pray to nations is like two hours long.

Let me get to see Team usa.

And then boom, right there.

So we're really excited to.

That's trick.

Okay, nice.

Yeah.

And then lastly, I want to talk to you about our third big innovation, which is real time 4K.

So we're going to offer this for both the Olympics and the Super Bowl.

So really excited.

I'm sure that this is what you and your, your listeners are going to be excited about because of the Seahawks playing the Patriots on Sunday.

So we are going to create an experience.

Our goal is to get this feed into our customers homes as fast as possible, likely 30 seconds ahead of our competitors.

And the way that we.

Our objective, I should say, is that Xfinity customers are the first to see it in the US Outside of the people who are actually at the game.

Right.

So this feed is something.

Is the highest picture quality you can get with Real Time 4K.

You know, for people who are really into the tech, it's Dolby Vision hdr.

That's the highest level of picture quality you can get.

It's Dolby Atmos immersive audio.

That, that immersive sound that makes you feel like you're there in the venue.

We actually upped the bit rate, so, you know, nice.

When there's a punt or a long pass, you're not going to see Like a tail on the ball or anything like that's gonna be super crisp and clear to the viewer at home.

And again, trying to get this into customers homes as fast as possible.

I'll show you the difference here of how this is a real capture of what we did last year.

And I can talk about that for a second.

But you can see the colors are more vibrant.

You can see that it actually is faster.

So one of the things, Eric, last year, a lot of our engineers are working on this and they're getting kicked out of their family group chat because they were saying touchdown, Eagles and things of that nature before, you know, their friends and family even saw it.

So I was doing that to my brother because he's on another much lower quality thing in their town.

And so I was like, yes.

He's like, What?

And then 25 or 40 seconds later, it was like, oh, that's awesome.

You know, and so I was.

I was making so many people frustrated, I was like, oh, yeah, there is a difference.

Yeah.

We only half joke about the fact that, you know, we want to get you kicked out of your family group chat.

I want to get kicked out.

That's fun.

The precursor to Real Time 4K was something that we called Enhanced 4K.

And that's actually what we had for last year's Super Bowl.

We rated the number one place to watch the super bowl by PC World magazine because of all these enhancements.

And we brought it to the Paris Olympics.

Actually, Paris Olympics was first and then we brought it to the Super Bowl.

But I have a interesting, what I think is an interesting anecdote for the Paris Olympics.

I don't know if you remember the men's 100.

Noah Lyles won that specifically, but it was good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So maybe I want to explain.

You might remember.

No, no.

Lyles won by five 1000ths of a second.

Yeah.

So starting gun goes off, they leave the starting box, they run down the track in, you know, under nine seconds or whatever it is.

And it was so close that Noah and all his competitors are staring at the results board like nobody knew who won.

And they're waiting around, which seemed like forever.

And all of a sudden, post Noah Lyles gold medal, right.

He rips off his bib and he's like, I told you, America, I'm the fastest man in the world.

I told you.

And he grabs his bid, but he throws into the camera.

Our customers saw all that happen while customers in our competitors homes were still staring at the runners in the starting blocks.

They hadn't even left yet.

And the whole race was completed and the results were in on Xfinity home.

So it is a true innovation.

And people are saying, like, what is this thing?

Is it real?

It's real.

And we're super excited to use everything that we have.

We say our products are better together.

And we're really only able to do this, Eric, because we have the network that we've invested.

We have the full infrastructure.

We have the capability to handle all this capacity, and we have the device in the home.

When all that comes together, we can create an experience that fix wireless or nobody else can match.

Yeah, no question.

I mean, it's funny.

I've got my mom, she just.

I went over to her place here this last summer, and she lives over in eastern Washington, an area you guys don't serve, and walked in there and I'm like.

She's like, oh, I got a new box.

Can you hook it up?

And I'm like, I haven't seen this box in 20 years.

And that's your new box.

I hooked this up in Seattle, like, 25 years ago, and that's your new one.

Yikes.

Okay.

Got it.

Yeah.

I'm like, I love people recycling, but I don't want my technology that's supposed to be new.

Don't go give me the iPhone 4 when I'm.

Exactly, exactly.

You want the 17 Pro.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, that's cool.

I love that because, yeah, I was using the 4K all through football season, too, because, yeah, we had a lot.

That was cool.

And the multiview helped solve some football games because my girlfriend's really into the Chargers, and so it was kind of nice when we had no fighting on television.

We could kind of share.

So, you know, you were like the perfect use case of all.

Yeah, you are.

Yeah.

Exactly, Eric.

My wife likes multi view because it means that on Saturday afternoons, I'm not grabbing a TV from upstairs and putting on a makeshift TV stand in the.

In the living room.

I've been.

I've done that.

I've done that.

I've robbed the kids bedrooms before when they were younger.

And you're not playing games.

Why I need this.

So I've done that.

So, yeah, no, that's awesome for the sports stuff.

And I love the sports.

I mean, heck, I'm going down to the big builder show here in a couple of weeks, and I'm going to be going to the Daytona 500 because, well, I've never been.

And so I'm going to kind of go film it from my.

From My perspective for my channels to what's the first time not big NASCAR person going to the Daytona 500.

So I'm going to go do a kind of my own little channel stuff for my show of just hey, here's my user experience of the first time going to a NASCAR thing because we just don't get that in the Pacific Northwest.

That is cool.

I didn't realize that they don't race up there.

They do.

They have one little thing.

Sometimes they'll come into Portland, but really there's nothing enter up here.

We'll have the Xfinity series come in here and race at Portland International on the road course.

But it's, it's not the fan experience that you would get in the South.

It's that way.

No.

Understood.

Understood.

You know, so we are to, I don't have any news to break today, but we are working with all of our programming partners across the board to take, to apply, I should say real time 4k to other sporting events so you can think about, you know, right now we have the two of the biggest events happening right now at the super bowl and the Olympics.

But you know, in a, in a couple of months, there's another event that's argues that it's the biggest event in the world in the World cup and it's going to be here in the States.

And we're already thinking about everything that you saw scaling that for the World Cup.

And we built these experiences for the, we built them with the Winter Olympics and the World cup in mind.

And this is going back over here.

And that's how we did it.

So we're.

This is just the beginning in some, in some ways of these three big things.

Now Debbie might knock on my door and say, what's new for the World Cup?

And we'll try to figure that out.

But these three, three big things that we are investing in as a company because we know sports fans are our best customers.

Yeah.

And that makes it easy.

I mean, it's, it's.

I was so used to the Olympics just being okay, I'm going to get to see what they show me.

And now I have control.

Which is like a first.

Exactly.

So.

Exactly.

You know, that ability to personalize the experience really makes such a huge difference.

Otherwise you can't really make sense of the 3,000 hours.

Right.

So once you.

I don't have 3,000 hours to put into that, but I want to watch what I want to watch, you know.

So, you know, that makes it super easy to find.

Like, hey, if You're a figure skating fan or an ice hockey fan or skiing, whatever it is, just get there quickly, easily, and have a good time.

Enjoy.

Awesome.

Love it.

That's cool.

Technology.

That's exciting.

And being a user, I get it.

So I'm like, oh, yeah, I know how that is.

I know how that works.

So that's cool.

I can't wait for you to experience it.

It.

Yeah, it's going to be fun.

And for the super bowl, too.

That's going to be awesome.

So, yeah, it's.

So we have a big weekend, as I was mentioning earlier.

You have a big weekend coming up.

Nice.

Yeah, you do.

And.

And the cool thing is, if you can do the Olympics, that makes the World cup easy.

There's.

You don't have 42 things going on at the same time.

In some ways, it's.

It's more manageable.

The difference is that you have all these different teams coming in from around the world and trying to get coverage from them and.

And working.

Oh, yeah.

But what we do in with the World cup is creating what we're calling a bicultural experience, where you have the Spanish and the English together.

We don't want to create, like a cul de sec for Spanish and a separate destination for English because that's not everything in one place.

So that breaks really, the overarching strategy.

So we'll put it together for our customers and what we found, especially for soccer customers, like, look, I just want to see Messi's amazing goal.

Like, I don't care what language it's in, I want to see that play because everybody's talking about it.

Okay, you guys kicked ass this time.

Oh, thanks.

All right, I'm going to stop talking now because before I mess anything up.

Oh, no, you did great, man.

That's awesome.

I'm like, oh, cool.

You just threw all the technology at me.

And I went, I 100% get that.

Nice.

Thanks for checking out this special edition of the around the house show.

If you would like more of this, please let us know and hit us up on the website@aroundthehouseonline.com.

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