Do You Want an Early Peak at Peacock? You Need a Flex.

Peacock‘s preview launch on April 15 will be exclusive to Comcast’s nearly 30 million U.S. TV and internet households, and it will be free. Free free free free free. Every episode of 30 Rock, free. Jurassic Park, free. Next-day episodes of New Amsterdam and Superstore, free. Late Night with Seth Meyers three hours before it airs on broadcast, free. A live feed of NBC News Now, free.

The only catch for Comcast subscribers between April 15 and Peacock’s nationwide launch on July 15 is that the preview will be exclusive to Comcast’s Xfinity X1 and Xfinity Flex devices. X1 is in nearly 70% of Comcast’s 24 million pay-TV households, but Flex is a brand new thing. It’s Comcast’s competitor for Roku and Amazon Fire TV devices, and — just like Peacock — it’s free.

Comcast launched Flex in early 2019 to bring elements of X1’s user experience and robust voice remote to a connected-TV device for internet-only customers who want to watch streaming but don’t want the traditional cable bundle. Flex was initially $5 per month per device, but the first device per household is now free.

I’ve been demoing Xfinity Flex on my main TV for several months. The user experience is unparalleled among connected-TV devices like Roku, Amazon Fire TV and Chromecast. Hulu and CBS All Access are both launching soon on Flex, and Peacock’s arrival in April will add big-deal live and on-demand content from NBCUniversal.

Flex’s Interface Pulls It All Together

Flex makes it easy to add your logins for Prime Video, YouTube, etc., and you can subscribe directly on the device to Netflix, HBO, Starz, Acorn TV, DAZN, and other free and subscription services. Rather than silo those services into branded apps, though, Flex stirs them together into one big, smart, organized database.

The interface is built around the horizontal rows with titles like “New This Week,” “Free to Me” and “Live TV.” A Movies tab brings up an “Explore the 2020 Oscar Nominations” row with Joker, Parasite and other nominated films to rent, a “Movie Reviews” row of reviews from YouTube critics like Screen Junkies and Jeremy Jahns, and streamer-specific rows like “Best Netflix Movies.” On a single screen: VOD rentals, YouTube reviews and curated lists.

The “Free to Me” rows and tabs include all the content from the streamers you subscribe, plus live channels from Pluto TV, Xumo and soon Peacock, plus movies you’ve bought on Xfinity or synced from your Movies Anywhere account. If you subscribe to Netflix and Prime Video, you won’t see HBO titles. As soon as you add HBO, you get refreshed lists.

“One of the frustrations with other streaming devices is when it’s not clear what content you have access to through a subscription,” said Matt Strauss, who ran the Comcast team that developed Flex and now runs Peacock. “There’s a frustration when you find something you want to watch and then find out you have to pay for it. The ‘Free to Me’ section has been very popular.”

Tell the Remote What You Want

Xfinity Flex uses a handful of voice remotes — I have the one pictured above — that Comcast has been developing and improving for years on Xfinity X1. The brains of the voice remote are in the machine, and the machine is very, very smart. Where Siri is barely useful and Alexa takes a few tries to find the right words, Flex’s voice recognition is deadly accurate. Flex’s voice remote has one job — find stuff — and does it extremely well:

• “Play the new episode of The Outsider on HBO.” Almost instantly, the most recent episode starts playing.
• “Show me free romantic comedies.” I get 705 search results. The first row includes Long Shot (from HBO) and Overboard (from Prime Video), and you can sort by most popular, most recent, alphabetical or “For You,” a predictive ranking based on your previous viewing.
• “Show me Jennifer Aniston movies.” There’s 42 of those — some to rent or buy, some on streamers.
• “Show me free Jennifer Aniston movies.” Now there’s only nine titles. Yours will be different if you subscribe to different services.
• “Show me new movies on HBO.” Hellboy, Us, The Aftermath, etc.

“Our voice remotes get more than a billion queries a month, and that’s growing double-digits year over year,” Strauss said. “A customer may want to see only new releases or only movies on particular services, and the voice remote is sophisticated enough to understand that.”

Over time, Comcast plans to expand the voice remote to include Xfinity Home devices. “The TV has an opportunity to be the dashboard for your home to navigate your security system, your thermostat, cameras or other devices,” Strauss said.

Next Up: Peacock Gets a Flex Test

In several respects, Xfinity Flex users will be the ideal consumers for the Peacock streamer. For an internet-only Comcast customer, Peacock will be a free service on a free device that gets you a three-month head start on households that don’t have Comcast internet or TV service.

Peacock will actually be better for Comcast households, which will get both tiers of the service — Peacock Free (catalog content) and Peacock Premium (exclusive originals) — for free. Households that don’t have Comcast internet or TV service will get Peacock Free for free but will have to pay $5 a month to get Peacock Premium. Comcast and non-Comcast households will be able to pay an extra $5 a month to get the service without ads.

Xfinity Flex and Xfinity X1 will also be the premier platform for Peacock for the foreseeable future. Flex and X1 will get the streamer early, but they’ll also get the service on platforms built to integrate it with services like Hulu, HBO and CBS All Access.

Connected-TV devices are a transitional technology until most users have smart TVs, but for the near term Flex is the way for Comcast users who only want internet service. And a little bonus: Xfinity Flex doubles as an Xfinity X1, so you can upgrade it to the bundle for NBA games, live CNN, etc., anytime you like.

Scott Porch writes about the TV business for Decider and is a contributing writer for The Daily Beast. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.