Comcast is lining up the NOW TV online television brand developed in the United Kingdom for deployment in the United States. It will offer Comcast cable customers over 40 live television channels and the 20 online channels that are available through the Comcast Xfinity Stream app.
NOW TV will be a “great companion” to the Comcast broadband offering, according to Dave Watson, the president and chief executive of Comcast Cable. It is “a great starter video service, priced attractively, but still will be financially accretive to us,” he told the J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference. NOW TV “will be something we can have as a companion to broadband.”
NOW TV will be available to Xfinity Internet customers for $20 a month, with no long-term contract. The service is accessible through the Xfinity Stream app and includes a 20-hour digital video recorder and access on three concurrent streams. It will include access to Peacock Premium, that normally sells for $4.99 per month. Online channels include NBC News NOW, Sky News and genre-based channels from Xumo Play.
Built using cross-company technology from Xfinity, Peacock, Sky and Xumo, Comcast is presenting NOW TV as the first online video service to combine live television, online channels, and a premium subscription video service.
NOW TV will run on the same global software platform that Comcast uses for X1 and Flex and for Sky online video services in Europe.
It is not clear whether the NOW TV proposition will be extended to other cable operations, including Cox Communications, that use the technology platform that Comcast uses for its services.
At launch, NOW TV Live and Xfinity Stream channels will be accessible through the Xfinity Stream app on supported devices, including Xfinity Flex, Fire TV, iOS and Android devices, and via casting through Apple AirPlay and Google Chromecast.
Comcast lost 614,000 residential video subscribers in the first three months of 2023, ending the quarter with 15.53 million, down from 19.36 million in two years. In comparison, Comcast has 29.82 million residential broadband subscribers.