Netflix And Comcast Announce New Partnership After Years Of Fighting
If you've been following the tense relationship between Netflix and Comcast over the past few years, then this may come as something of a shock to you: the two companies have just announced a new partnership that will bring Netflix to Comcast's X1 set-top box. We never thought we'd see the day, but it would appear that Comcast has decided to stop fighting Netflix and instead work alongside it, finally seeing the benefits that could potentially come from working together.
That's saying a lot too, because Comcast hasn't always taken kindly to Netflix's dominance in the streaming space. Putting the past aside, however, the two companies say that Netflix should be available on X1 boxes later this year, though they didn't give a more specific time frame than that. Essentially, this partnership is most likely meant to make it easier for folks to access Netflix on their TVs, with Netflix obviously hoping to pick up some new subscribers in the process and presumably cutting Comcast in on a share of the profits from those new users.
For those who already have a streaming device like a Chromecast, Roku, gaming console, or even a smart TV, Netflix on Comcast's set-top boxes probably won't offer much in the way of a quality-of-life improvement. For people who don't really have an easy way to stream Netflix to their TV, though, this will probably prove to be quite a handy feature. Who knows – extending the olive branch to Netflix might to something to help repair Comcast's image with its detractors, though we're guessing the company will have to do a lot more to please the people who have gone to every corner of the Internet with their horror stories.
For now, we're left to speculate on what a Comcast and Netflix team up will look like, as both companies say they aren't sharing more details on the partnership until later on this year. While we wait, though, we can at least be happy that the relationship between these two seems to be cooling off a little bit.
SOURCE: Re/Code