Comcast AnyPlay Streams Live Cable TV Programs to Your iPad

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Television has changed a lot with the advent of tablets and mobile devices. Not only do we users want to sit in front of the boob tube all day watching mindless programming, we want to do it while mobile, too. With this in mind, Comcast will soon launch an iPad streaming service that shows live TV content.

The country’s biggest cable and internet provider is just about to make TV more interesting for iPad users. The service, which is built to compete against the likes of Time Warner‘s and Cablevision‘s own streaming services, will let users stream live content to their iPads. While Comcast already offers Xfinity for iOS and Android, the value-added of AnyPlay is that content will no longer have to be pre-recorded or stored in the DVR, but it can be streamed in sync with the cable broadcast. AnyPlay can show any programming included in a user’s current Xfinity service except for pay-per-view and on-demand programming.

The catch is that AnyPlay users will have to be within their home networks in order to play live TV on the iPad. The service involves a special box — rumored to be the Motorola Televation CATV-to-IPTV box — that will convert the live cable TV feed to IPTV and push the content through the local (wireless) network. This is in contrast to competing services that stream the live video mainly through IPTV. As such, Comcast’s solution conserves bandwidth, but at the expense of limiting the viewing experience within the user’s home network.

Comcast AnyPlay will let users register up to 10 tablet computers, although only one device can watch live TV at any given time. No word on when the service will launch, although Comcast is likely to make it available in limited markets initially, with an eventual roll-out to all Comcast subscribers. The company actually used the AnyPlay name in 2008, but was not able to release any product with the said branding.