Every four months, the geeks on Comcast’s Viper team on Wynkoop Street in downtown Denver get one week to build something cool outside their typical purview. This was one of those weeks. On Friday, 16 projects demonstrated what could be next for customers of the nation’s largest cable provider.
“We missed a whole minute of content,” said Martin Trang, a Comcast software engineer, who showed how slow closed captioning can be, a bummer for the deaf and hard of hearing.
But by combining optical character recognition and IBM Watson, Trang matched up the speed at which captions appeared on TV. “Sometimes, it’s even ahead,” he said.
The Viper team develops many of the new features for Comcast’s X1 set-top box, its cloud DVR that intersperses live TV, recorded shows and other features.
And it’s based in Denver because of Allen Broome, who lived in Denver and didn’t want to move. Broome, Comcast’s vice president of IP video engineering, began working out of his home six years ago and within the first year, his team grew to eight. Today, there are about 250 people at the downtown location. Plus there’s about 25 job openings.
“The unique thing we’re doing with Viper is instead of licensing technology from vendors, we’re building it mostly in-house,” Broome said.
Comcast controls nearly the entire technology process of getting TV shows to customers. Hence, it’s much easier to roll out a new feature. And the company has become known for the faster rollouts, said Phil McKinney, CEO of CableLabs, a non-profit organization in Louisville that helps the cable industry with research and development.
“Comcast is a rare beast. Brian (Roberts, CEO) made a bet on the X1 for five years. I can count on one hand how many CEOs are willing to make a five-year bet. The attention span of executives is usually much shorter,” McKinney said. “But now having that control, if you look at the X1, they’re releasing new features every month. And they can actually do live tests. With the X1, they can use it as a live sandbox and respond to the market much faster.”
Some projects from past Comcast lab weeks have already been rolled out to customers. Kid Zone, which launched last year, started during a Denver lab week. The feature adds parental controls while allowing kids to choose shows based on favorite channels or themes, like talking animals.
Others may never go beyond the lab. One team on Friday had created a way for users to pick their top channels. And when a favorite channel cuts to a commercial, the technology switches to the next favorite channel. That probably won’t fly with advertisers.
A number received the encouragement of Comcast’s president of technology and product Tony Werner, who was visiting from the company’s Philadelphia headquarters.
There was a social media sharing feature that inserts a poll or advertisement or quick way for customer to Tweet while keeping the TV show onscreen. A “personal channel” tracked viewing habits to create an ideal lineup, including switching the channel automatically to preferred shows. Another project offered a massive, searchable database to find live and recorded clips on specific topics, like Obama or Beyoncé. The demo showed search results, some with Obama, some with Beyoncé and one with both Obama and Beyoncé.
“You come to one of these (lab weeks) and you come up with hundreds, maybe even 300 to 500 (ideas),” Werner said. “A lot of these will turn into real products.”
