The Facts about Xfinity TV and Xbox 360: Comcast is Not Prioritizing

Your Xbox 360 running Xfinity TV On Demand essentially acts as an additional cable box for your existing cable service. This is an exciting development because it enables consumers to watch their cable service video-on-demand in their homes through a device other than a traditional set-top box — in this case, using a gaming console that delivers Xfinity TV On Demand over our managed network. Rather than delivering this content in the traditional way we deliver our cable services (which is often referred to as video over QAM) or delivering it over the Internet (as, for example, a Netflix or Hulu Plus would do), we are sending that cable service using IP technology to the Xbox over our managed network. Specifically, we provision a separate, additional bandwidth flow into the home for the use of this service — above and beyond, and distinct from, the bandwidth a customer has for his or her regular Internet access service. Our Xfinity TV content is provided through the Xbox over that separate service flow, and therefore does not use a customer's provisioned Internet service capacity. We use Differentiated Services Code Point ("DSCP") markings to mark the Xfinity TV packets to identify these packets so our network knows that these packets must be transmitted over the separate service flow from the CMTS to the customer's cable modem.

There's also been some chatter that we might be prioritizing our Xfinity TV content on the Xbox. It's really important to us that we make crystal clear that, in contrast to some other providers, we are not prioritizing our transmission of Xfinity TV content to the Xbox (as some have speculated). While DSCP markings can be used to assign traffic different priority levels, that is not their only application — and that is not what they are being used for here.