 of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering Comcast Innovation Day. Brought to you by Comcast. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center. It's a really cool space right off of Moffitt, and they're doing a lot of new technologies here. It's not the only innovation center in the country, but it's one here in our backyard, and we're excited to be here. Comcast is having a special event talking about really CX, customer experience. They brought together a bunch of super smart people invited us to stop by, and we're gonna share some of it with you, and we're excited for our very first guest. He's Preston Smalley, the VP of Product Management of Comcast. Preston, great to meet you. Good to meet you too, Jeff. So really cool event today. We talked about a lot of different things about customer experience, and really all the applications that are on the front edge that define that customer experience, and you guys are doing a ton of innovation there. No, we are. I mean, I think it's, we were talking just this morning about all the different ways that we're trying to meet customers where they're at and building products really around those needs, right? Yeah, so I think the one of the ones that doesn't get enough credit and not enough conversation is the voice, and I've got the voice remote at home, and it's really fascinating, especially in the context of there's so many places that what I'm looking for might be, and I don't really know what the licensing arrangements are that you guys have set up with Hulu or with Netflix or with HBO, or if it's on HBO in demand or HBO. Live. So to be able to have kind of a single pointer reference to just push that button and say Stanford football and have it show up, it's amazing. No, it really is. And I think the voice remote has been one of those big hits where people always love their TV remote, but a number of years back we started exploring, could we put a voice search capability directly into that remote? And I think what's great is people, they're really leaning into it. So we're seeing a billion voice commands happening a month. A billion. A billion, one B through the remote, and I think it's just become a part of their life, right? And I think it's everything from the simple to saying NBC into the remote to the more complicated things like Notre Dame football or what's my Wi-Fi password or whatever the things they might be asking out of their device. So I'm curious on the development side, we'll talk about features, but what were some of the real hurdles that you guys knew you had to overcome and what were some of the surprise hurdles that you didn't necessarily anticipate? Sure, I mean, I think the ones you knew about were we've got to be able to translate speech to text and there's existing infrastructure that allows for that and doing that with high accuracy. But the good news is we actually had a head start on organizing the content. And so we already had dealt with text-based searching of all the different TV shows and movies and such. And so we had all that base of knowledge that we could then tap into. We're now at a stage where that kind of covers the basics, but we're trying to understand how do you both increase the breadth and depth of the kinds of commands that you will do through the voice remote. And so you mentioned some of the beginning, things like being able to search, not just the content that we bring, but things like Netflix or Amazon Prime or Soon Hulu. And so partnering with those companies to get all that information in a way that works very well with the voice remote. Right, and then you even have it bilingual, right? You even have Spanish and English. That's right. And it can switch back and forth on the fly. That's right, yeah. So we support both those languages, including a mixed mode where in households where you're seeing both Spanish and English be interwoven, it'll actually even work in those contexts. And then recently we've also introduced Canadian French. And so we licensed our technology to Rogers and Videotron up in Canada. And so we've now introduced that capability as well. That's great. A long time ago, we interviewed Domino's and it's when they first introduced app ordering. And at first you think, well, app ordering. But there was all these second order benefits that Domino's replied in terms of accuracy of the orders and supply chain impacts. Curious if there's some kind of second order benefits that you guys are realizing with voice that maybe you didn't think. What are some of the surprises that have come out of that? Well, that's a good question. I think in terms of surprises, it's the types of things that people are looking for. You now have the ability to figure out what kinds of things people are interested in, which you wouldn't have been able to know in a typical browse setting. So for example, we support now over 150 apps on X1 as far as third party streaming apps. But we know the ones that we don't support because people are saying it into the remote. Whereas we wouldn't have got that information prior. And so now we can actually go and try and meet those needs. Now it's interesting, you talk about meeting people where they are. And one of the things that's happening today is people have all these options, right? They can get it through their Comcast service if they're doing that. But they may want to have a direct relationship with Hulu as one that you picked out or with Netflix or these historical ones. You guys now are enabling an option for those people that choose to directly engage with those content providers and just use Comcast as an internet provider. Tell us a little bit about what you guys are doing there. Yeah, sure. So obviously we've had strength in the TV space and being able to organize and aggregate all that streaming content with your traditional television content. What we've done now is take that investment in X1 and pivot it into a new product this year we call Xfinity Flex. And what that product does is it's a streaming device that should be comfortable for an internet only subscriber that they hook up to their TV. It's 4K, HDR, wireless. And through that device, they're able to aggregate all of that streaming content in one place. So whether it's app content that they may already have an existing subscription from or it's ad supported internet content or maybe they wanna buy some more content from us, right? And so we'll bundle and sell those subscriptions directly and include that as well. And we've actually been pretty surprised. You take something like Netflix which is highly penetrated in the United States. We're pretty surprised how many people are still signing up new as a Netflix subscriber in our service. And so by just making it easy and just one click away, we found that people are opting to do that. Right. I'm sure they're happy to hear that in Los Gatos just down the road. Exactly. No, they're a great partner and either way, we're helping them. Right, right. I mean, they're trying to reach what they call kind of the Netflix nevers people that maybe just hadn't gotten Netflix prior. Right. And so we're helping them with that. It's really interesting, kind of TV versus computer used to be in the TVs kind of your passive experience, you're sitting on the couch and you're just kind of watching where the computer was more two-way and then there was dual-screen kind of activity. But you guys are bringing a lot of the stuff that was only available on your PC or your phone now directly into the Comcast experience, whether it's YouTube or whatever. So it really, it's kind of blurring those lines. But I want to shift gears a little bit about kind of the role of the internet in homes today has now expanded beyond entertainment. It's expanded beyond information and IoT now is entering the home. Probably the biggest one is Nest and connected thermostats and connected doorbells and ring and we're seeing videos from people's rings all over the place. You guys are sitting again right in the middle of that ecosystem. So how does IoT and connected devices and thermostats and refrigerators and doorbells impacted the way do you guys think about delivering internet into the home? Well, I think it's really been a watershed moment for the company moving from if you go years back to bringing internet to the wall and making it available in the home to saying, look, we've got to actually really control the coverage of that Wi-Fi in the home and make sure that it reaches all the corners of the home but then also providing the control that people want of the devices in there. We know that for power users we're seeing today 20 connected devices on the home network and I know at my house I'm up to 50, right? And I think what customers don't have and don't want is an IT person directly in their home. They want it to just work naturally and easily. And so one measurement of success that I know is how often my mother-in-law gives me a call saying, hey Preston, this thing's not working in my house. It's got to be really easy and straightforward. Right and then just in terms of just being a back hauler and the internet traffic that you guys are carrying because all those connected devices or your kids' devices they all want. 4K streaming, they're watching movies and you know, come down and watch TV on the big screen. No, no, no, I'm watching it in the room. How has that kind of changed the way you guys think about delivering bandwidth? Because 4K is a lot more, go to NAB you're just going to assume it'd be 8Ks and 12Ks and all kind of crazy stuff. So your role in actually just delivering bandwidth has changed significantly over the last over years. Absolutely, I mean there was a stat on bandwidth that surprised me even just to look at it which is in the last 18 years Comcast has increased bandwidth 17 times. And it's just every, we just keep increasing that because the demand is there. 4K takes more than your 1080p, then did your SD and the more streaming that's happening, it's requiring more bandwidth. So we're happy to provide that. We now offer one gig internet across all of our homes. We've reached 56 million homes. I think it's the most in the United States as far as one gig availability. And so regardless of how much bandwidth you want to take, we're going to bring that to you. And I think recognizing that we also need that coverage in the home and out of the home through Xfinity Wi-Fi hotspots, just trying to bring that there. But you mentioned kids too, I wanted to build on that which is I'm a parent and being able to control how and where my kids go on the internet is important. And so being able to put limits, whether it's bedtime limits on their devices or we've recently introduced and are testing app-based limits. So you could say they can't use Instagram or they can only use it 30 minutes a day. And so being able to have that kind of control puts you in the driver's seat as the parent of kids in the home. Preston, I think you're going to be busy for a little while here at the Innovation Center. We are, for sure. All right, well, thanks for spending a few minutes. We could talk all day, but we'll have to leave it there. All right, thanks, Jeff. Thanks a lot. He's Preston, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center in Sunnyvale. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.