They say history repeats itself, and streaming is no exception.
Amid increasing streaming fragmentation, the rapid arrival of new multi-company streaming bundles on the market, like Venu (ESPN, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery) and StreamSaver (Peacock, Netflix, and Apple TV+), is prompting some (including us) to say we’re getting something like cable 2.0.
Comcast, which is offering the StreamSaver bundle to Xfinity subscribers, is bullish on bundles. That’s in part because it can keep some change in consumers’ pockets: At $15 a month, StreamSaver could save consumers already subscribed to all three services more than $100 a year, Todd Arata, SVP of brand marketing at Comcast, told Marketing Brew.
We talked to him to learn more about the company’s plans for StreamSaver and how it plans to market the bundle.
What a steal!
Comcast is leading the charge on marketing StreamSaver, Arata said, as opposed to the individual streaming services included in the package. The company, which has an internal marketing team working on it, is already promoting StreamSaver on the Comcast Xfinity site, since StreamSaver is only available for Xfinity customers. There’s also a variation of the StreamSaver bundle that includes the Comcast live TV offering Now TV that runs for $30 a month.
Instead of considering StreamSaver as a brand in and of itself, Arata says he sees it more “as a name. It’s a name to a package.”
“For me, it’s all about reduction and putting less layers in between,” Arata told Marketing Brew. “I see it as a really new enhanced package that will either accentuate the Now [TV] brand or the Xfinity brand.”
To help boost awareness, StreamSaver will receive media placement during the upcoming Paris Olympics, which will stream on Peacock. Omnicom’s Goodby, Silverstein, & Partners will help with the marketing campaign, he said.
In addition to the Olympics campaign, StreamSaver will be promoted with a mix of paid and organic influencer partnerships that are designed to bring in younger audiences who may be more interested in streaming, he told us. Comcast’s other marketing efforts for StreamSaver will span radio, TV, and direct mail, he said, and demonstrations of the product will take place at the company’s more than 500 retail locations.
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“We love our retail place to be a destination where people can come and learn more,” he said.
Part of the pitch to customers is centered on the common consumer complaint that it can be difficult to find where different programming is streaming and juggle access to multiple accounts.
“It’s so tough to find what to watch and how to watch it with multiple remotes, multiple different platforms, and multiple passwords and subscriptions,” Arata said. With that said, StreamSaver users will still need to download and sign in to the three different streaming apps in order to access their programming.
Sink or swim
The well-documented rise in streaming has put pressure on Comcast’s linear TV business, and last year, the company lost more than 2 million pay TV subscribers, according to a Leichtman Research Group analysis, finishing 2023 with roughly 14 million pay TV subscribers. Comcast said it lost around 487,000 TV subscribers in the first quarter of the year.
As that business declines, the company is looking for other ways to grow revenue, and Dave Watson, Comcast Cable’s president and CEO, has said that the StreamSaver offering is designed to help boost its broadband internet business.
Laura Martin, managing director and senior internet and media analyst at the investment bank Needham & Company, said that StreamSaver could be a boon for the company, as well as for Apple and Netflix. (And for the record, she agrees that the streaming ecosystem is starting to look like cable.)
“The most important thing when you have a bundled offering like this is it lowers churn, which increases lifetime value, which is what Wall Street cares about,” she told us. “A bundled offering like this more resembles the linear TV ecosystem. When people sign up, when consumers sign up, they last a lot longer, they don’t disconnect as fast, because the odds are they find something on one of the three services that they want to watch and [don’t] disconnect. That’s good for all three of them equally.”