Comcast's Xfinity Spectrum DVR Shown Off At The FCC

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Well, you’ve got to hand it to Comcast, you really do. When they set out to do a job, man, do they ever do it up right. While you may be seething over their ham-fisted handling of various internet issues, it’s still tough to deny that they can do some pretty awesome things with television, as evidenced by their Xfinity Spectrum DVR, which recently survived a trip through the FCC.

The Xfinity Spectrum DVR is packing a metric ton of features with it, not least among them is fully 500 gigs of storage. You’ll also get fully four separate tuners, a new style of guide with listings set up like the IMDB, and a software redesign that pops up notifications based on your access on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. And it’ll only actually pull new information when the people you follow provide that new information (pictures, video, or links, reportedly), and of course, you can be the one to put out the information about your television pastimes.

It’s clear that one of the big new trends in television is television discovery–instead of just waiting for people to blunder across new programming (like I did with Auction Hunters–normally I don’t watch Spike too much, but man, Allen and Ton are just awesome), and given that television networks often like to release a variety of themed shows at the same time (Auction Hunters came out right about the same time as Auction Kings and Storage Wars, as far as I can tell, which were largely the same show but in slightly different settings), it makes some sense for the average viewer to spot all the similar shows on different networks, instead of expecting them to just sort of dig them up on their own.

When this particular set-top box will show up on our set tops is as yet unclear, but when it does, it should be a lot of help for people who only have so much time to watch television in the first place.