The free tier's biggest feature, the malware and phishing blocking, is invisible. Customers never see it work. No alert, no moment, nothing to point to. What they can see is the paid tier, and that's one camera and one sensor for $15 a month, more than Ring charges for full professional monitoring on an unlimited system. It only runs on our gateway, so the customers most likely to leave us are excluded from the thing meant to keep them.And we're not a company people rate highly right now. Cable ISPs sit at the bottom of the satisfaction rankings, well behind fiber and 5G. Free doesn't fix that. It just adds something invisible to a bill people already think is too high.
I think it's a fine retention product. I don't think it's a new category, and I think we should be honest with ourselves about the difference.
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@f4 I understand the cultural relevance we’re going for, but I wonder if the zombie concept is working against us in a couple of ways. As a brand, it doesn’t naturally reinforce the technology and innovation we’re trying to build for Xfinity. And as an employee, I’m not sure portraying our own people as zombies sends the right signal, even if it’s intended to be playful. Zombies typically communicate mindlessness, exhaustion. If employees are represented as zombies, you have to work pretty hard creatively to overcome some fairly negative associations.
Absolutely no way I would ever use this in my home.
Completely creepy.
(And speaking of creepy what genius thought zombies are how to market us?)
20+ year HQ employee here.
Been reading through the reaction to this and honestly, people are not happy. Nobody's calling this a "smart home feature." They're calling it what it looks like: surveillance. The comparison I keep seeing is people saying it's basically a low-res camera that can see through walls. And the "it's opt-in" defense doesn't land with anyone, because the opt-out isn't real when Xfinity won't even give you unlimited bandwidth unless you're running their box.But the thing that's actually getting people worked up is the fine print. Comcast can hand this data over in "any dispute" they're a party to. So miss a payment, and suddenly there's a log of when you were home and moving around, and it's not on your side.
You get push notifications when threats are blocked and you can view blocked threats by clicking on CyberSecure in home tab. There’s other enhancements coming to make it more cyber secure more visible.
One of our biggest problems is most of our employees don’t use our products outside of their Internet connection or X1.