Comcast Courts Cord Cutters With $20 'Now TV' Skinny Streaming Bundle

Comcast will soon offer a discount streaming TV service aimed at people who have lost interest in its non-discount, traditional TV service but still pay it for broadband.

Now TV will cost $20 a month for an entertainment-heavy, sports-light set of channels when it launches “in the coming weeks." Its core Now TV Live package will cover 41 news and entertainment channels that include such name-brand options as A+E, AMC, BBC News, Discovery, Food Network, HGTV, History Channel, IFC, Lifetime, Sundance TV, TLC, and The Weather Channel.

Comcast says this bundle will cover watching on three devices at a time and include 20 hours’ worth of DVR storage.

Now TV will also bundle the ad-supported Premium version of Peacock, which normally costs $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year for live and library content from NBC and Bravo as well as Universal Pictures movies. The sports content included here, such as Sunday Night Football games, makes this slightly better for sports fans than other "skinny bundles" that eschew live sports because of its escalating costs.

To round out this menu, Now TV will throw in a free, ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) collection that consists of NBC News Now and Sky News plus 19 genre-based channels from Xumo. Comcast launched that free service as a joint venture with Charter (the second largest cable operator after Comcast) in 2022 after buying the company of the same name in 2020.

Both Now TV Live and the Xumo bundle will be available in Comcast’s Xfinity Stream app on Amazon Fire TV, Comcast’s Xfinity Flex, and Android and iOS, plus TVs that can receive casts from Apple’s AirPlay and Google’s Chromecast. Peacock’s device support covers a much wider set of streaming platforms, including Roku players and TVs, Android TV, and most connected TVs from LG, Samsung, and Vizio.

Comcast’s press release touts the simplicity of the offer here: “an everyday monthly price of $20, no equipment required, and the ability to sign up and cancel anytime.” The Comcast broadband required to get Now TV, however, features rates that increase after the first year or two; and its cheapest tier requires a one-year contract to get a lower price. Its pay-TV product has equipment fees that start at $9 and advertised rates that don’t include separate fees for broadcast TV and regional sports networks.

Comcast has been as battered by cord cutting as the rest of the cable industry. In its first-quarter 2023 results, it reported a loss of 614,000 video subscribers that left it with 15.5 million video customers, less than half of its 32.3 million domestic broadband subscribers, of which 29.8 million were residential customers.

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