One of the country's biggest cable TV outlets, Comcast, has made a deal with one of its biggest competitors, DISH Network, to offer DISH's various Sling TV bundles on its Xfinity X1 set top boxes. While the deal may seem counterintuitive at first, Comcast has solid reasoning for making the unexpected move, which as of yet has no official launch date.
Comcast And DISH Network Partner
The partnership between Comcast and DISH Network certainly appears to be a strange one at first. The two companies are viewed by most as being in direct competition, with DISH Network's skinny bundles offered over-the-top (OTT) by Sling seen as an alternative to Comcast's traditional set top box cable offerings. Why would Comcast encourage customers to turn to DISH programming and even potentially accelerate cord-cutting as consumers become more aware of its competitor?
Why The Partnership Between Rivals?
The answer is that Comcast is primarily using the deal to facilitate the offering of Sling and Dish Networks extensive multicultural programming to its customers who currently have no such options. While almost all of the DISH Network and Sling programming in English echoes that already available on Comcast, the same can't be said for programs in other languages. Comcast is looking to beef up its multicultural programming to entice the millions of consumers who speak other languages to either remain with the service or become new customers.
Sling via the DISH Network has an extensive slate of standalone and add-on Spanish-language program offerings designed for U.S. English-dominant, bilingual and Spanish-dominant viewers. Right now, Sling TV offers over 320 channels in 21 languages: Arabic, Bangla, Bengali, Brazilian, Cantonese, German, Gujarati, Hindi, Italian, Kannada, Malayalam, Mandarin, Marathi, Punjabi, Taiwanese, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu and Vietnamese.
Comcast's Official Statement
"The addition of Sling TV's multicultural programming will be an excellent complement to the existing international offerings on X1 and will be attractive to our customers," said Javier Garcia, senior VP and GM of multicultural services for Comcast Cable. "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."
Comcast has not yet announced when the service will be available to its customers, but pricing is expected to be the same as it is with Sling's offerings via DISH Network. Comcast just rolled out access to Netflix programming on its X1 platform earlier this month, allowing customers to sign up directly via the platform for a one month free trial.
