By J. Craig Anderson The Republic | azcentral.com Tue Jan 8, 2013 11:47 AM
LAS VEGAS – Cox Communications customers in metro Phoenix soon will have the ability to watch personalized cable TV programming on their iPads and other mobile devices, Cox executives said.
During a Monday night presentation at the 2013 International CES trade show in Las Vegas, Cox President Pat Esser was joined by cloud-computing pioneer Cisco Systems’ chairman and CEO, John Chambers, to announce a partnership between the two companies that has produced new services to be launched in the Phoenix market later this year.
Those services will include a mobile application that allows Cox customers to watch 90 live channels and access video-on-demand via their iPad tablet devices, along with recommended content tailored to their individual viewing habits.
The new iPad service also will integrate TVs and tablets in new ways, Cox executives said, including the ability to use the tablet as a remote control for Cox’s advanced TV program guide, known as Trio.
Launched in November, the Trio program guide offers each viewer in the household his or her own personalized video content recommendations based on their past viewing habits, Cox officials said.
“We are delivering a viewing experience that is more personal by putting customers in command of the content they most enjoy,” Esser said.
The services announced Monday, which already have been test marketed in Orange County, Calif., are the result of an effort by Cox to enhance “second screen” viewing, meaning screens in the home other than the primary TV set.
The new iPad service will be an evolutionary step forward from the company’s Cox TV Connect service, launched in 2011, which already allows customers to view live cable channels on their iPads, Esser said.
“This new app offers a user experience that is unlike any other in that it is intuitive and easily activated by a simple touch of the iPad screen,” he said. “The interactive content is driven by personal viewing history and individual profiles.”
Cox plans to integrate all of its mobile-viewing services into a single app, which has yet to be named, company officials said. It will be available initially for the iPad and will be upgraded to work on other mobile devices by the end of the year, they said.
The expanded mobile-device services are designed to work in concert with Trio, which offers personalized viewing recommendations for up to eight household members. Another recent enhancement to the Cox digital video recording service, or DVR, lets customers pause live programming from any TV in the home.
It also allows up to 6 terabytes of DVR storage, which translates to about 1,000 hours of programming that customers can record and save at a time.
J. Stephen Rizley, senior vice president and general manager of the Southwest region for Cox, said there is no set launch date yet for the new mobile-viewing service in metro Phoenix, but that he expects it to be offered soon.
“The company’s motivation to have this service out is very high,” he said.
Cox, like other cable and satellite TV providers, has been losing TV customers who have opted to watch video programming strictly via Internet-based services such as Netflix, YouTube and other websites.
Rizley said Cox executives believe making each customer’s viewing experience more personalized and offering TV on a variety of devices will help the company recover some of those video-streaming customers .
“We think this is going to bring people back to cable,” he said.
Information: http://www.multivu.com/players/English/59219-cox-communications/.
Follow Anderson’s live coverage of the 2013 International CES in Las Vegas at live.azcentral.com or follow him on twitter @craiganderson.

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