Verizon at Home

[#1]

You may have already read some of the stories out in the last 24 hours about all the cool new stuff coming to FiOS.  As always, we wanted to provide you with the details here.

Verizon CIO Shaygan Kheradpir hosted an event yesterday in New York City for a small group of reporters and offered a sneak peek of new features coming soon for FiOS customers as well as some of our longer-term plans for FiOS TV.

The biggest news is that we’re taking the TV experience beyond the living room with the introduction of Flex View, a new feature coming this year that gives customers the ability to rent, purchase and watch programming on FiOS TV, the PC and select mobile devices – any time, anywhere, and on any device.  Flex View will initially support RIM's BlackBerry Storm 2, the Droid 2 and Droid X and all Windows Mobile 6.5 devices, with more devices following soon. Videos can be streamed over Wi-Fi, 3G and 4G.  When we launch Flex View this fall, we will have 3,000 movie titles available, many in both SD and HD, with rental and purchase prices ranging from $2 to $18.  TV programming will follow soon after.

You may be thinking, how am I going to store all this new content?  Customers will be able to store their content on Verizon’s Media Manager cloud, which will have 70 GB of allocated storage at launch and will likely increase as media requirements for customers grow. This extends to personal content as well, including all of the photos, music and videos that you upload to the FiOS Media Manager.  Any content stored on the cloud can be viewed or listened to anywhere with an Internet connection.

We also had some exciting news for customers who have been asking for more storage on the FiOS DVR, and blogger Dave Zatz has some details here.

The next big development is a “software set-top box” in the home for access to your FiOS TV on tablets and potentially other devices.  While this feature won’t be available right away, a lot of the reporters at yesterday’s event thought it was pretty cool and wrote about it extensively.  It’s clear we’re changing the dynamic for the TV experience with Flex View, and we’ll do it again when we introduce a software STB.

We’ll be telling you more about Flex View soon.  We’re excited to roll this out and see what all of our customers think.  . Once again, Verizon is taking TV to the next level.  As Shaygan said yesterday, “This is not your grandfather’s cable TV.”

[#2]

How about a Youtube video showing off all the features of the new UI and Flex View?  Also, will the Droid 1 be supported?

[#3]

Heather

Thanks for the release of some information on the New software being discussed on the Web. Along with the new software for the STBs. Engadget has been posting screen shots and right ups regarding new software and hardware all week. Let's hear it here first.

Regards, Mark

[#4]

One question. Will these changes increase the ability for more HD content that people have been asiking for?

[#5]

Perhaps you should have announced this at the same time. Google recieved it Three hours ago from PR NEWS WIRE.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/verizons-fios-tv-online-gets-more-new-content-from-time-warn...

[#6]

BigPete82,

Thank you for the comments and feedback.  We are looking to add the Droid1 to the list of compatible devices, and we are already planning a video to show you some of Flex View's features.  We'll see if a UI video is possible too. 

prisaz,

Your feedback about posting information first at the Verizon at Home blog is much appreciated.  In the past, we have tried very hard to post information at the blog first.  The Flex View announcement was a bit different because we wanted to actually show it some reporters, and the news broke with those in attendance.

We did follow up this morning here at the blog, which meant holding the Time Warner/FiOS TV Online post a few hours so that we didn't throw too much at our readers at one time.  We went ahead with the news release on PRNewswire this morning so that reporters would get the news fairly early in the news day Eastern Time.

Your reaction to our timing is helpful, and it will definitely play a role in the timing of future blog posts.

As to adding specific HD content, we've heard our customers and we are already working on it. 

Heather

[#7]

Thanks Heather. Your Great!

It just gets annoying when I read something somewhere and say to myself, why didn't Verizon tell us that. All good. I know there are big things coming, and the higher ups, make the calls. Ha ha. No Emoticons here. Well I brought my own if it works.

[#8]

Great stuff coming down the line, especially the cloud based storage and the updated guide. I'm curious about the upcoming 1.9 update and the limit of 1TB of eSATA storage. Why exactly is that? 2TB eSATA drives are close to $100 now, and with HD video the more storage the better. Please don't limit to 1TB only if possible.

[#9]

I wish Verizon could come up with a way we can watch our dvr recording on-line.

[#10]

How about a lot more action from Verizon with less talk and no empty promises?  Better yet, why not fulfill old promises before making new ones?

The spiffy new technology could be interesting, but frankly I'm skeptical about seeing any of it actually implemented and working.  Why, you ask?  Many of us have been waiting two years for Verizon to figure out how to enable a simple eSata connection for external hard drives on HD-DVRs.  How could they possibly handle something genuinely complex?

I refuse to switch over to FIOS until the HD-DVR external drive fiasco is resolved with a solution that's actually deployed and readily available.  And I'm certainly not going to switch based on the latest round of vaporware announcements from Verizon.  I'm hardly a fan of Comcast, but at least I've been able to use an external hard drive with my Comcast-supplied HD-DVR for nearly three years.