A Significant Comcast Upgrade

The new Comcast Xfinity X1 Entertainment System

A few days ago, our Comcast box required another hard reboot which, of course, erased all of our recorded programs. This is something we needed to do far too often... upwards of ten times each year. This is frustrating, time consuming (you need to gain access to the cabling in order to pull cables and power for a hard reboot and then the reloading requires another five to ten minutes), and unnecessary for today's electronics.

Worse yet, Comcast's interface has been clunky... sort of like 1980's-style graphic design... slow... dog slow... and the menus were insane! Comcast has been in need of a major upgrade for many, many years... decades, actually.

So, our box was not working correctly yet again and needed a hard reboot. Oh, and I should point out that, up until now, we've installed more 'new' boxes (because of burned out components) than years we've had Comcast service. Those older HD Comcast boxes were junk... oftentimes not even working when connected for the first time! Even when the service technician would come to the house, he would go through three boxes before getting a box that worked!

I pulled all the cables to start the reboot process and as I was waiting the required minute or so before plugging all cables back into the box (geez... doing all this nonsense is so frustrating and archaic), I remembered an advertisement I saw about the new X1 Entertainment Operating System for Comcast...  I decided it was time to look into why we have not yet been 'upgraded' as seen in countless commercials. Sheila certainly pays enough each month to deserve the best Comcast has to offer! I was thinking that things could only improve with a new system so I needed to research it.

First I visited Comcast's Xfinity website... also quite frustrating to navigate... why should I expect anything different?

I logged into our account... noticed there was a link under our television service heading for upgrading our service... I clicked on it... and was brought to a page with all the X1 Operating System packages. I noticed three things right away... the equivalent package to our current package was significantly less expensive than what Sheila is paying currently... we would even get more channels... and it included the new X1 Operating System which meant also getting a cloud based DVR system allowing much more versatility and, supposedly, a far better remote. 

Long story short... the website wouldn't allow us to upgrade online (no idea why)... Sheila called a rep over the weekend... she was able to easily upgrade to this new and significantly improved X1 system and yet it will save us money. They had arranged for Sheila to drop off the old box at the local Comcast office where she could pick up the new X1 Xfinity box. Easy peazy.  

Sheila arrived home tonight with the new X1 system in hand... I connected the cables (also very easy after all the practice I gained over the years with constant hard reboots of the old system)... the X1 Operating System loaded by itself... accounts updated... time to test it out...

"Wow!" was the first response. This operating system's graphical interface is much sleeker than the old one. It looks very much like our Amazon FireTV graphical interface which is very nice and easy to navigate.

I needed to adjust some settings to match our television... easy. The zoom setting was set to 'On' for non-HD stations... I'm a resolution nut and hate the zoom setting so I turned this option off...  now non-HD stations are viewed at normal size with a small black border around the outside of the frame...  there is only one non-HD station we watch... TVLand... so this setting only affects that station. This setting was easy to find and easy to change regardless of how you may want to set this up.

The new system is much faster than the old system... significantly faster! Even scrolling through channels in the 'Guide' is a much smoother and faster experience. Navigating 'OnDemand' is a joy now compared to the old clunky, frustrating way. Even sorting the 'Guide' is easy with multiple ways to sort.

I set up the new remote and activated voice recognition... also an easy task. Sheila and I tested the voice capabilities and it worked flawlessly. This, too, reminded me of our Amazon FireTV. A note here... this new remote operates slightly differently than the old remote so my advice is to check out the 'Tips' in the menu and view the few tutorial videos that are available online.

We had to wait for our online Comcast account to update, but we managed to set up Pandora and Flickr too. Now all we need to do is to say, "Launch Pandora" into the remote and my music starts... or, "Launch Flickr" and my photo albums open. Even though I can do this with our Amazon FireTV, it is nice to be able to do it from Comcast as well. 

Overall, this X1 Entertainment Operating System is a major upgrade providing a sleek interface which mirrors our Amazon FireTV interface. Switching from one interface to the other is smooth, painless and seamless and the interfaces even match each other in many ways.

So, now our Comcast service has been upgraded from approximately 1980's technology to technology and graphical design of this new millennium. And, it costs us less money! And, it looks and operates just like our Amazon FireTV which we love!

This upgrade was significant and long overdue.






Incidentally, we have a satellite television service at the lake house and that service was marginally better than the old Comcast HD service... the satellite television interface was slightly nicer than Comcast's old HD service interface but it was just as slow... perhaps slower for some features. Finding programs to watch in that 'Guide' was always a frustrating experience which required ten minutes just to scroll through once! Now, Comcast's X1 Xfinity makes the satellite service look clunky, outdated and extremely slow. There is no comparison. 

The next big question, however, is whether this Xfinity X1 system is ready for 4K service and 4K viewing... and, are any other competing services ready for this? There is no doubt in my mind that 4K will be mainstream by 2020. (4K is four times the resolution of 1080 high definition... a massively significant increase in resolution.) Time will tell...