Xfinity is tired of it, tired of seeing TV cord cutters
wander over to play on their Roku
or Apple or Amazon devices.
So this is their attempt to keep some of that money
from strolling outta the door.
So how did they do?
Well, here's the quick TLDR, I only got to test drive
the Flex about halfway and that is a vital part of the story
of what it means to use the Flex but we'll get there.
But we can still talk about what Xfinity Flex is,
how you get it, how it works and whether we like it.
So let's dive in.
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So first off, what in the heck is the Xfinity Flex?
Well, it's this, this is it, this is the Flex,
this whole thing right here.
So how do you get it?
Well, this is free to Xfinity internet only customers
like me, hey, that's me.
Indeed, all I had to do was go online and claim mine
and it arrived on my doorstep a few days later.
But what if you're somebody else?
Well, too bad, this is an exclusive device
but since Xfinity provides internet service
to about a hundred and ten million people across 40 states,
Flex, yeah, it is pretty widely available
to a lot of people so we figured a video on it
would be worthwhile.
Now Flex is not going to bring anybody over to Xfinity.
Because it's an exclusive device,
it's just not going to do that.
What it is designed to do is make current subscribers
a little bit stickier, meaning that you'll have
a harder time jumping ship if you have
yet another Xfinity device in your rotation.
Included is the streaming box itself, the remote,
a power cable and an HDMI cable.
So it is ready to go right out of the box.
Now the device itself is fine, it's got all the ports
you would expect and it does include an ethernet connection
which I always recommend if you're able to take advantage
of it when you're doing streaming.
The remote is okay, it's all right.
It's a lot more like a cable remote than a streaming remote,
it's got tons of buttons, including a number pad.
A number pad?
Why does it have a number pad?
Well, yeah, that's so that if you decide to go back
to your linear TV, if you wanna get back
on that X1 platform, you quit Flex, the Flex device
and the remote will work on the X1 platform as well.
Now once I got it out of the box and I was setting it up,
oh boy, did I get frustrated right out of the gate,
I could not get my remote to work.
I spent about 10 or 15 minutes doing everything
I could possibly think of, I'm doing factory resets
on the remote, I'm doing everything I can think of
to get it to work, to get it to pair with the streaming box
and it wouldn't do it, I was getting so frustrated.
And I figured out what was going on
right before the customer service agent answered the phone
and it was because the box was directional
and I can't figure out why this is the case.
I don't see an infrared receiver anywhere on the box,
why would it be the case?
But sure enough, all I had to do is rotate it 90 degrees
so that the remote was pointing right at the front
of the box and it worked like a charm.
Well, then I got through setup and once I got through setup,
it worked through radio frequency just fine,
so I could point it anywhere and it worked fine.
I still don't know why that was the case during setup
but it was incredibly frustrating, hopefully that helps
somebody out there who's having a rough time with it.
Now as I moved through the setup process, it said that
the Flex will connect automatically to your Xfinity Wi-Fi
which is great, very convenient except that while I have
an Xfinity router, I actually route my network
through a secondary Google Wi-Fi router
so I had to do it manually.
No big deal except that the buttons on this remote,
not very pleasant to enter an email address
and password with, I'd love to see an improvement on that.
All right, now that we are into the interface,
everything is all set up, I've connected my Netflix account,
I've logged into my Amazon Prime Video account,
let's talk about how to navigate the interface
and what we see here.
The first tab on your front page says Free to Me
and this is exactly what it sounds like.
It's gonna show you content that you can watch for free.
Now at first I saw 35,000 movies available, wow,
is Xfinity giving me all that?
And then I realized, of course, it's pulling content
from Netflix and Amazon Prime, like I said,
I had logged into those.
So that's a lot of the movies that we're talking about
right there, it's not just Xfinity's generosity here.
Now, I will say that it is nice to have everything
right there in one place.
Well, okay, not everything but we'll get to that
in just a bit.
The next tab is Live TV.
The Live TV tab pulls channels and content
from pre-loaded free apps like Pluto TV and Xumo.
These are commercial supported free TV apps.
I've talked about them on other videos
like this one up here so if you wanna learn more
about those, you can check that out elsewhere.
The New tab has just that, new titles, it pulls them
from Netflix, Prime Video and YouTube but all of that
is buried under the new titles that you can rent or buy
from Xfinity and that's very similar to what you would see,
say on an Amazon Prime stick or something,
they're always gonna push you to spend more money
on their own platform, I don't really hold that
against Xfinity to be honest.
The music app is well, you know, music.
Now like video, this will pull from services you link up.
So YouTube, Amazon Music, et cetera.
Now, I found myself drifting toward video content
here as well.
I mean, I'm on my TV, right?
But I could watch music videos from YouTube
which was pretty cool and it does show up there
on the Music tab.
The Today tab, this is the last one and it does give you
what you might expect based on that little icon,
weather and news.
So you get politics, celebrity gossip,
late night roundups and so on. But this is also where
you can go if you are deeply embedded
in the Xfinity ecosystem.
So if you use Xfinity Home for smart home
and home security stuff,
this is where you can monitor camera feeds,
control thermostats and lighting and so on
and all from your TV.
You can also on this tab manage your xFi gateway,
that's your internet router.
It'll let you pause certain devices' access,
like if a kid has been watching too much TV that day
or on their phone too much, whatever the case may be.
But I say you have to be deeply embedded
in the Xfinity ecosystem because if you use
a third party router like me, like I said,
I use the Google Wi-Fi mesh system, then devices hooked up
through that router won't show up here,
they have to be connected to that Xfinity gateway.
Now as for the content that you get to watch here
on the Flex, let's talk about the apps that you get.
There is some good stuff, Netflix and Prime Video
like I talked about, Acorn TV,
that's a British TV streaming service, Streampix, Tubi, HBO,
Showtime and Starz.
Now with the exception of Netflix and Prime Video,
what they want is for all of your subscriptions
to run through Xfinity so any of those apps
like Acorn TV or HBO, instead of paying those directly
to the content provider, you can actually sign up for that
so that it will come out of your Xfinity bill
or rather be added on to your Xfinity bill.
But sharp viewers will notice that I left
a few names off the list here, there is no Hulu,
there's no Disney+, no CBS All Access, no Spotify for music
and so on and on and on.
There are a lot of apps missing.
In fact, it's probably faster to list the apps
that they do let you use.
It's worth noting by the way that last year,
Comcast agreed to sell its stake in Hulu to Disney.
So maybe that has something to do with that app
missing from the Flex?
I don't know, maybe, maybe not.
Now, I can think of a few reasons
why there would be a dearth of apps
but for our purposes today, the why might not be
that important.
What it means in practice, though, is that I'll never get
to make one of those best free apps videos for Flex
like we've done for Roku, Amazon Fire, Apple TV,
Chromecast and Android TV.
I mean, that's one of the joys of streaming, right?
Finding stuff that you never would have known about,
let alone watched if you didn't have it for free
right there on your Roku or whatever.
Like if all I had was Flex, I'd never have discovered
the Japanese dramedy "Pretty Proofreader" on Viki.
Now you can laugh all you want, it's fantastic.
(speaks Japanese)
As for what is there, as you use things like Netflix,
Prime Video and YouTube, Xfinity does its best to keep you
on their interface instead of sending you somewhere else.
So there's no obvious Netflix button to take you
to the app there on the front page.
Now you can find it but you gotta dig,
it's all the way at the bottom.
Instead, they give you a button called Explore Netflix
and that shows you Netflix titles
but keeps you on the Flex interface.
I rolled my eyes at first but then saw that
there might be some useful stuff like the option to see
what to watch on Netflix in February.
Great, let's see what's coming up.
Well, turns out it's a YouTube video.
Okay, well, now I'm in the YouTube app.
Okay well, let me just hit the back button
to get back to where I was.
No, can't do that, gotta go back to the home page
and then navigate back to Explore Netflix.
Okay, well technically I could just use the exit button
but it took me a while to figure that out,
it's not really intuitive, there is a learning curve
with the interface.
Okay, so let's talk about the bottom line here with Flex.
First, let's look at Flex as a cord cutting device.
If I was brand new to cord cutting and I mean brand new,
like I had never signed up for Hulu,
I had never even heard of Roku and I'm getting
my first ever streaming device,
then the Xfinity Flex would be okay, okay?
Yeah, it would be okay.
I mean, it certainly works, it plays high quality
video content and it does have
a good functional remote control
but with an extremely limited app selection.
As a cord cutter's device, I put this one pretty much
way down at the bottom of the list.
Now was there a lot that made me really dislike the Flex?
No, not a ton, it was pretty easy to use, honestly
but it was more about what wasn't there.
Because of that lack of available apps,
this is not a replacement for your Roku
or Fire Stick or Apple TV.
But the Flex is not just a cord cutting device,
the saving grace for the Flex might be
like I mentioned earlier, if you are really all in
on Xfinity's ecosystem, the Flex gives you
pretty good control over your Xfinity router from your TV
or like I said, if you use smart home
and home security features with Xfinity Home,
those can be integrated so you have on screen video feeds
from your security cameras, controls for your thermostat,
your lighting and so on.
So if that's you, if you are neck deep in Xfinity services,
maybe Flex is worth a look.
The only problem here is that's not me,
I'm not all in on the Xfinity ecosystem so I feel like
I only got to test half of what the Flex is capable of
and the half that I got to test, yeah,
didn't really impress me very much but I'm interested to see
what happens with the Flex going forward,
if there are any changes or updates or apps added on
and I am going to continue my testing once I get access
to the rest of the Xfinity suite of services
so that I can tell you what I think of that part of it
because the promise of it, it is pretty cool.
So let me know what you think in the comments.
If you've had a chance to use the Flex to its full extent,
go ahead and sound off with your take on the device.
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