Verizon at Home

[#1]

A recent survey supports what many FiOS customers already know – having interactive widgets on your TV makes viewing even better and a lot more fun.

Citing an Ernst & Young report, the Hollywood Reporter last week said that consumers like the concept of widgets – applications on the TV screen that let viewers access weather, news and other content with the click of the remote.

Of course, we’ve taken that concept much further than most by offering an entire Widget Bazaar marketplace that will continue to add new widgets as we and other developers produce them.

We also make it easy for customers to get widgets on their TV screens.  No need to buy a special Web-enabled TV, which is the only way to get widgets from some other providers.  Just subscribe to Verizon FiOS TV, and you get widgets on every TV connected to our system.

Which brings me to our latest widget that we’re announcing here on the At Home Blog – the WeatherBug.

The days of waiting for the weatherman’s forecast or weather on the 8’s are over.

With the free WeatherBug Widget, subscribers can customize weather reports by any ZIP code and pull up hourly or seven-day forecasts.  In addition, FiOS TV subscribers who also subscribe to FiOS Internet service can access onscreen radar images, which are displayed on the right side of the screen or can be launched in full screen mode.

WeatherBug provides the high and low temperatures for the day, chance of precipitation and level of humidity for the day or week.  It also offers subscribers a favorites list where they can enter up to 10 ZIP codes for additional weather information from anywhere around the nation.  The best part is all the information appears on one side of the screen while the program you’re watching appears on the other.

We’d love to hear what you think.  Check out the video and images of WeatherBug and comment here.

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

[#2]

It's great how you're adding a bunch of widgets but I think you can make them easier to access.  Rather than going to the Widget Bazaar each and every time I want to use Weatherbug, Facebook, etc. it would be very helpful if we could customize the widget "bar" or whatever you call it... the one with traffic, news, etc.  That way I could remove the widgets I'm not interested in (horoscope) and add weatherbug etc.  It's too cumbersome selecting them from the Widget Bazaar.

Also... parental controls are a problem.  My family is allowed to access Twitter and Facebook on FIOS.  Why do we all have to enter the parental control password each and every time?  There should be an option to enable/disable this "feature".

Keep up the good work.

[#3]

Both great points -- thanks!   On the first, it is definitely something we're looking at.  You'd pick from all the Widgets available sort of like you can do now with channels to create a list of "Favorites."   As you can imagine, with dozens or someday hundreds of Widgets, a way to pull out the ones you use and like best becomes even more important.  On parental controls, we opted to start by forcing the password for Twitter and Facebook for now to avoid having the wrong person posting away on your account.  But for some families or someone living alone, eliminating the password makes some sense.  Happy to pass both these thoughts along! 

[#4]

Another irritating feature of the Facebook and Twitter widgets is that even if you tell it to "remember" you, it still forgets your username and password after a while.  Then you have to go through the whole process of typing in your email and password, quite cumbersome on a remote.  Please fix this as soon as possible!!!

[#5]

The Weatherbug widget works really well.  It took me a minute to realize I needed to push the red 'c' button to see the radar.  Finally I was not able to figure out how to see the weather bug radar full screen?  How do I do that since you mentioned the radar being full screen in the blog above.

A single button to pop up full screen radar and another for the default forecast would be ideal.   A help page on TV or on the web for each widget would be great to show all the supported options.  I also noticed I can scroll the radar with the arrow buttons.

[#6]

After some more trial I figured out pressing the OK button while viewing the radar does switch to full screen.  

[#7]

Eric,

I like the new WeatherBug Widget but I didn't realize you were going to remove the old Weather Widget.  The old Weather Widget was much easier to quickly access and see what the weather is and what it will be.  With the new WeatherBug Widget we have to go into it and press more buttons (more complex).  I don't like the "Do you really want to Exit?" when you are trying to exit.  Annoying!

[#8]

Eric,

Thank you for removing the "Do you really want to Exit?".  Much better!!! 

Thank you for listening!

[#9]

nascar,

Glad you're happy with the change.  Any time we add features or make changes to FiOS, we're looking for reactions from folks who are using the system.  We're always glad to get your thoughts.

Eric

[#10]

Eric,

I like the new Doppler Radar better than that Bing map.  But there is never any wind speed and most importantly the Weather data is not too accurate.

Overall I feel it is good but it certainly is not what it could be.