Fun
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Curious
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Weird
Comcast announced this afternoon that Sling TV will soon become available as an app on its popular Xfinity X1 cable set-top box.
Sling TV and Comcast are direct competitors who offer similar packages of broadcast and cable channels, but the two companies said in their announcement today that the goal of their new partnership is to provide Comcast customers with access to Sling TV’s extensive Sling International packages, which begin at $10 a month and offer international programming in 19 non-English languages.
“Sling TV’s debut on Comcast’s X1 is another step forward in our promise to consumers to be available on their favorite platforms,” Ben Weinberger, Sling TV’s chief product officer, said in the announcement. “For the first time, millions of Comcast customers will have access to new multicultural programming options as well as the full suite of Sling TV programming.”
Added Javier Garcia, Comcast’s senior vice president for multicultural services: “Our customers are becoming increasingly diverse and this is a fantastic opportunity to quickly deliver even more customized and multicultural programming to them, on an X1 platform that’s smart, fast and easy-to-use.”
Sling TV joins Netflix and Comcast’s Watchable streaming app on the X1 set-top box, and upstart services like Buzzfeed, Fullscreen and Machinima are preparing their respective launches on the platform. According to numerous industry sources that Decider has spoken to over the last several weeks, this is the beginning of a wave of streaming services that will become available on the X1 platform over the next year.
For Comcast, deals to put Sling TV, Netflix and other streaming services on its X1 platform act as something of a hedge against customers gravitating to a Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV or Google Chromecast to acces streaming services. Many of the roughly 1 million U.S. households who have cancelled their traditional bundled TV services this year have gravitated those other platforms.
Sling TV launched in January 2015, has evolved into a series of customizable channel packages that begin at $20 a month, and the service has an estimated 710,000 customers. Sling TV and Sony’s Playstation Vue have become the two major alternatives to to traditional bundled TV providers like Comcast and DirecTV. Sling TV is a division of the Dish Network satellite provider but has positioned itself as a cost-effective alternative to $100-a-month cable plans.
Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider and is also a contributing writer for Playboy and Signature. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.
