For as much as people talk about living in a connected world, the reality is that we’ve just scratched the surface of what is possible. Speaking to this point, Comcast on Friday announced that it was making one of its coolest features available to all subscribers.
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Here’s the scoop.
Starting today, Comcast subscribers who download the Xfinity Share app can stream video in real-time to either their own TV or to the TV of any other Comcast subscriber. I don’t think it’s overstating things to declare that this is a game changer. Sure, it’s nice to stream media content from your smartphone or computer to your HDTV, but being able to seamlessly transmit video footage from anywhere in the world directly to the HDTV of someone else is completely next level. This is like Periscope and FaceTime on steroids.
In a press release announcing the widespread availability of Xfinity Share, Comcast said that the service’s initial limited rollout has proven to be extremely popular with users, especially on weekends.
“Whether a child’s baseball game, a graduation or just a beautiful sunset, Share lets users broadcast whatever they see in real time to the biggest screen in the home,” Comcast boasted not too long ago. “So now a grandmother in San Francisco can watch along on her TV at the exact moment her grandson in Philadelphia blows out his birthday candles.”
This is what the future looks like; you can be anywhere in the world and still be everywhere.
Of course, there are some technical requirements worth going over. For starters, the Xfinity Share app is currently iOS and Android only. Sorry Windows Phone users, you’re out of luck. More restrictive is that live video can only be transmitted to Comcast subscribers who happen to have the company’s X1 DVR.
So while you might want to make sure that you don’t exceed your monthly data cap, the Xfinity Share app gives us an exciting glimpse into what the not-too-distant future is going to be like. Especially once 5G networks become more prevalent circa 2020, transmitting live video to your friends’ HDTVs may be as commonplace as video chatting is today.
