Comcast Focusing On Smart Homes With Current Strategy |VERIFIED|

Plus, if you think your soffits and sidewalks look nice now, wait until you upgrade these fixtures with smart lighting options. In the last year alone, almost every major smart lighting vendor has added outdoor-rated bulbs and accents to their lineups. These new bulbs and systems give you the ability to schedule when your lights come on, and their color and animation settings will make your home the hit of the block during the holiday season.

Our smart home security guide continues in one of the most cherished areas of the home: the living room. As the high-traffic spot where families gather to relax, watch TV, play games, and entertain, it plays many roles. It must be fit for gathering with guests, building a pillow fort with little ones, and binge-watching your favorite shows, all in one.

When you look for smart products, make sure that all of the smart features come with traditional controls as well. For instance, if you can only control smart lights from a smartphone app, your family is likely to get frustrated.

Roy and his team also added live chat capabilities in the Xfinity Home mobile app allowing customers to connect with a specialist to ask questions about their service or get tech support. Additionally, he and his team added short videos that teach customers how to use many features such as remotely arming/disarming their home security system; adding a smart home device to the Xfinity platform; or setting up rules or a string of automated tasks. They also developed self-help articles for customers to review at their leisure to better understand all the innovative features and how to make their home do some of the mundane tasks such as turning on lights, locking doors, adjusting the temperature when no one is home, and more.

Cablecos could directly monetize smart-home products and services by reselling existing hardware products and bundling them with connectivity. In some cases, companies may consider acquiring an existing player in a high-value vertical (such as home security) to capture market share immediately.

ZDNet interviewed the executives behind Comcast's digital transformation, AI, and machine learning efforts. What we found is a massive company moving quickly to roll out software updates at least every two weeks, monitoring call center requests to inform services tweaks and interface changes, and a hardware strategy that dovetails with its AI efforts.

Comcast's product portfolio is getting smarter with the May launch of xFi platform, which features family-friendly tools to manage networks and AI that will eventually adapt to your daily routine. Home security and automation services are also growing. Technically, Xfinity xFi is a Wi-Fi router, but software is the linchpin to usage and the anchor for home security and automation growth. xFi, which reached more than 10 million homes at launch, also builds on the success of Comcast's X1 platform, which landed in 2012.

In addition, Comcast is focused on delivering a platform and ecosystem that can integrate various partners. By focusing on the platform, Comcast can extend its reach via application programming interfaces and partner with everyone from Netflix to smart home device makers. "We want everything you put into your home to work well together," said Solur.

Cable companies such as Comcast are trying this strategy of upselling their remaining subscribers into smart home packages. Those same companies are leveraging their significant number of employees to install those packages for customers who choose to purchase them.

ADTRAN, one of the leading global providers of next-generation open networking and subscriber experience solutions, announced a partnership with Plume in late April. I believe this collaboration could potentially ratchet up the smart home experience several notches for a number of reasons.

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Both the Self or Pro-monitoring plans enable you to stay connected with the Xfinity app or Xfinity Home app, where you can check in and control your devices. (You can also connect them to your TV with the Xfinity Voice Remote.) It is also easy to combine Xfinity products with other popular smart home devices.