In a final Imagine Park session, Tony Werner of Comcast led a conversation about the cable company’s announcements and developments at the Show. Werner was joined by Leslie Ellis in the discussion. Werner elaborated on Comcast’s Xfinity hotspot initiative, explaining that the effort adds a second SSID to your home gateway – so the service will not compete with your home network for capacity or bandwidth usage – to provide a massive national hotspot network. Noting that Comcast already has more than 100,000 capable set-tops, and the potential more many, many more, the network will immediately create a substantial array of hotspot options for roaming users. Werner also spent some time discussing the cooperative arrangement among cable operators to create a broad, shared network for cable users to roam. To give users more options, Comcast also unveiled new Cloud tools that make things like parental controls more granular – allowing users to even adjust on a scale their language sensitivity.
Following Werner’s presentation, he and Ellis led a series of demos of other new technologies. Leading off, Eric Schrag – also of Comcast – explored near-field communications (NFC) under the title “Tap Into Awesome.” Schrag demonstrated the interaction of NFC with Comcast content, tapping his mobile phone against a sign on stage to immediately download apps and videos.
Aurangzeb Khan of Altia Systems walked the audience through PanaCast – a 200-degree, streaming HD panoramic camera. The PanaCast system incorporates six cameras and stitches the images together. The Panacast system sells for $599 and allows multiple visitors (50-100 were mentioned) to have individual control of the stream –providing multiple camera images from one device.
Next up, Preston Smalley showed off an app called Movie Night that makes picking the next movie you watch with your friends or family a little more fun. Participants can choose movies and particular actors or actresses they are interested in. Movie Night then takes all of that input and uses the criteria supplied to provide movie recommendations. Once everyone votes on the movie, your options for viewing – including VOD and Streampix – are presented for the movies that are recommended.
As the session came to a close and the audience headed home, they were left with the sense that innovation is in full bloom here at Imagine Park and in the industry.