Legacy cable company invents $180-a-year streaming bundle

If you’re a customer of Comcast’s Xfinity internet or TV business, you now have a new bundle of streaming apps available at a discount. For $15 a month, Xfinity StreamSaver (because you can’t sell something that already exists without giving it a funny name, apparently) brings together Netflix, Peacock, and Apple TV+. It’ll all be available through Comcast’s hardware, of course, but also on other platforms.

On their own, the three services would cost a minimum of $23 a month. That’s $7 for Netflix with ads at 1080p resolution, $6 for Peacock Premium with ads, and $10 for Apple TV+. And as it turns out, that’s the same level of service you’ll get with StreamSaver, saving you about $96 a year. And if you want to get rid of ads or get 4K resolution on Netflix, you can pay the difference for that higher service tier.

Comcast also says that you can bundle the bundle with NOW TV (which is Xfinity’s own live streaming solution a la YouTube TV or Hulu With Live TV) for another $30 a month.

“StreamSaver is a homerun for consumers who want top-tier entertainment and live sports, and for our world-class partners Peacock, Netflix and Apple who benefit from the reach and depth of our entertainment platforms and Xfinity’s marketing engine,” Dave Watson, CEO of connectivity and platforms for Comcast, said in a press release. “StreamSaver also reinforces the value of our broadband products, offering customers new ways to save money on streaming entertainment via the nation’s best and most reliable network in and out of the home.”

We joke a little about how a legacy company like Comcast — which remains one of the biggest cable companies in the U.S. — sort of is reinventing a la carte streaming as a new cable bundle, and that’s not exactly incorrect. But it also can make a fair amount of sense if you are (or are going to become) a customer.

In fact, it makes exactly $8 a month worth of sense, at the very least.