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Comcast’s streaming bundle is $15/month for Netflix, Peacock, Apple TV+, and ads

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Triple play (with ads) —

It’s $25 or $10 cheaper than separate subs, but note the plans you’re getting.

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Xfinity log on a tablet, with fossil rocks, glasses, and a notepad on the desk beside it.

Enlarge / Comcast/Xfinity’s new bundle of streaming services harkens back to a much earlier era.

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Disaggregation is so 2010s, so Comcast, facing intense pressure from streaming services, is bringing back the old bundle-it-up playbook. Its previously announced bundle of Netflix, Peacock, and Apple TV+, only to Comcast/Xfinity cable or broadband subscribers, will cost $15 per month. It’s a big discount on paper, but the fine print needs reading.

The “StreamSaver” bundle is considered a “companion to broadband,” Comcast’s CEO David Watson said at a conference today, according to Reuters. It cuts more than 30 percent off the separate price of certain tiers of each service and can be bundled with Comcast’s own “NOW TV,” which has 40 other cable channels streaming. The service is due out May 29 in the US.

Take note that Comcast’s bundle gives you Netflix’s “Standard with ads” plan (which also locks you in at “Full HD” resolution and two devices), Peacock’s “Premium” (which also has ads), and Apple TV+, which has made some recent moves toward an advertising infusion. The things that people liked about streaming—being able to pick and choose TV and movie catalogs, pay to avoid advertisements, and not be beholden to their cable company for entertainment—are effectively countered by StreamSaver. The lines get blurrier, and the prices go up.

If you were already set on paying for the cheapest versions of each service and don’t mind not being able to cancel any one of them once you’re tired of it, $15 is indeed a savings. Doing the math earlier this month, Ars’ Scharon Harding totaled up all three networks at $39.47 per month with no advertising, or $24.97 per month with ads.

Tacking streaming services onto your Comcast subscription would help the company out, as would signing up, especially for StreamSaver. Comcast lost nearly 500,000 cable TV subscribers in Q1 2024, down to 13.6 million subscribers, compared to 16.1 million at the end of 2022. Peacock, the streaming service it owns, has not made money since its 2020 launch and lost $2.7 billion in 2023.

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Cable TV providers ruined cable—now they’re coming for streaming

Apple TV Plus, cable, Comcast, netflix, peacock, streaming, Tech / /

Cable 2.0 —

Comcast wants to tie its cable/Internet to your streaming subscriptions.

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Cable TV providers ruined cable—now they’re coming for streaming

In an ironic twist, cable TV and Internet provider Comcast has announced that it, too, will sell a bundle of video-streaming services for a discounted price. The announcement comes as Comcast has been rapidly losing cable TV subscribers to streaming services and seeks to bring the same type of bundling that originally drew people away from cable to streaming.

Starting on an unspecified date this month, the bundle, called Streamsaver, will offer Peacock, which Comcast owns, Apple TV+, and Netflix to people who subscribe to Comcast’s cable TV and/or broadband. Comcast already offers Netflix or Apple TV+ as add-ons to its cable TV, but Streamsaver expands Comcast’s streaming-related bundling efforts.

Comcast didn’t say how much the streaming bundle would cost, but CEO Brian Roberts said that it will “come at a vastly reduced price to anything in the market today” when announcing the bundle on Tuesday at MoffettNathanson’s 2024 Media, Internet and Communications Conference in New York, per Variety. If we factor in Peacock’s upcoming price hike, subscribing to Apple TV+, Netflix, and Peacock separately would cost $39.47 per month without ads, or $24.97/month with ads.

According to Roberts, Comcast is hoping that the upcoming package will help Comcast “add value to consumers” and “take some of the dollars out of” other streaming businesses.

For subscribers, the more immediate effect is the continuing and rapid blurring of the lines between cable and streaming services. And Comcast knows that.

As Roberts notes: “We’ve been bundling video successfully and creatively for 60 years, and so this is the latest iteration of that.”

Comcast is hemorrhaging subscribers

Last month, Comcast said it lost 487,000 cable TV subscribers in Q1 2024. It ended the quarter with 13,600,000 subscribers, compared to 14,106,000 at the end of 2023 and 16,142,000 at the end of 2022.

Comcast’s broadband subscriber base also decreased from 32,253,000 at the end of 2023 to 32,188,000.

Peacock, Comcast’s flagship streaming service, hasn’t made any money since launching in 2020 and lost $2.7 billion in 2023. However, in April, Comcast said that Peacock’s Q1 losses lessened from $704 million in Q1 2023 to $639 million in Q1 2024.

It’s worth noting that in January, Comcast raised prices for its cable and Internet services by 3 percent, blaming the price hikes on broadband investments and an increase in programming costs.

Déjà vu

One of the common reasons people abandoned cable TV were bundled packages that forced people to pay for services, like phone or Internet, or channels that they didn’t want. Now, Comcast is looking to save its shrinking subscriber base by bundling its cable TV or Internet service with some of its biggest competitors. Like streaming services, Comcast is hoping that bundling its products will deter people from canceling their subscriptions since they’re tied to each other.

Subscriber churn is also a problem in the streaming industry. Antenna, a subscription analyst company, estimates that around 25 percent of video-streaming subscribers in the US have canceled at least three such subscriptions in the last two years. These high-churn subscribers represent around 40 percent of new subscriptions and cancellations last year, Antenna told The New York Times in April.

But Comcast’s announcement hints at déjà vu as Comcast blatantly seeks to re-create the cable bundle or triple-play package using the very streaming services that are eating away at Comcast’s cable business. Ironically, Comcast is seeking to bandage a declining business by feeding some of the biggest contributors to that decline, using the same tactics that drove many customers away in the first place.

We’re expected to hear a lot more about bundled services. Last month, we learned that a Disney+, Hulu, and Max bundle would be released this summer, for example. And there’s already a lengthy list of streaming bundle packages available from third parties like Verizon and T-Mobile.

But for people who left cable to avoid overloaded bundled packages and to get away from companies like Comcast, which group cable TV or Internet with streaming services that often raise prices, limit show and movie availability and features, and increasingly focus on ads, it just isn’t worth the monthly savings.

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Masters of the Air: Imagine a bunch of people throwing up, including me

Apple TV, Apple TV Plus, austin butler, Band of Brothers, culture, masters of the air, Review, the pacific, Tom Hanks, World War 2 / /

Masters of People Vomiting Everywhere —

It’s a bad show. I wanted to love it, but it’s just not good.

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Photograph showing two stars of the show standing in front of a B-17

Enlarge / Our two main heroes so far, Buck and Bucky. Or possibly Bucky and Buck. I forget which is which.

I’m writing this article under duress because it’s not going to create anything new or try to make the world a better place—instead, I’m going to do the thing where a critic tears down the work of others rather than offering up their own creation to balance the scales. So here we go: I didn’t like the first two episodes of Masters of the Air, and I don’t think I’ll be back for episode three.

The feeling that the show might not turn out to be what I was hoping for has been growing in my dark heart since catching the first trailer a month or so ago—it looked both distressingly digital and also maunderingly maudlin, with Austin Butler’s color-graded babyface peering out through a hazy, desaturated cloud of cigarette smoke and 1940s World War II pilot tropes. Unfortunately, the show at release made me feel exactly how I feared it might—rather than recapturing the magic of Band of Brothers or the horror of The Pacific, Masters so far has the depth and maturity of a Call of Duty cutscene.

Does this man look old enough to be allowed to fly that plane?

Enlarge / Does this man look old enough to be allowed to fly that plane?

Apple

World War Blech

After two episodes, I feel I’ve seen everything Masters has to offer: a dead-serious window into the world of B-17 Flying Fortress pilots, wholly lacking any irony or sense of self-awareness. There’s no winking and nodding to the audience, no joking around, no historic interviews with salt-and-pepper veterans to humanize the cast. The only thing allowed here is wall-to-wall jingoistic patriotism—the kind where there’s no room for anything except God, the United States of America, and bombing the crap out of the enemy. And pining wistfully for that special girl waiting at home.

Butler clearly gives a solid performance, but the man’s face is too perfect, like an Army Air Corps recruiting poster, with his tall hair and his cap parked jauntily at an angle atop it. He’s pretty to the point of being a distraction in every single scene he’s in. He noted in interviews that he signed up to work with a dialect coach to drop the Elvis accent he picked up while filming with Baz Luhrmann, and being notionally a cowboy from Casper, Wyoming, he wears his character’s “well, aw, shucks” down-home attitude as comfortably as the silk aviator’s scarf around his neck. But at least to this native Texan’s ear, there’s still a lot of Memphis coming out of the man’s mouth.

Every member of the cast has their 1940s-ness dialed up to 11—and perhaps that’s appropriate, given that World War II ended 80 years ago and “World War II” is fully a period aesthetic at this point, with its own rules and visuals any audience will expect to see. But the show wastes no opportunity to ram home that ’40s feeling—every room is dimly lit, and every Allied office feels like a ramshackle clapboard mess. Each scene’s framing feels like it was carefully assembled from comic book clippings, with barely disguised CGI trickery to keep everything hanging together. Watching in 4K HDR was beautiful, but it also made me cringe repeatedly whenever a VFX shot with bad tracking or bad color matching would flash past. There’s just nowhere to hide the digital-ness of it all, and boy, does it ever shine through. The overall effect is less like Saving Private Ryan and more like Sucker Punch—with a bit of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow thrown in.

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