Comcast, Charter Put the Customer First with the Xumo Stream Box
By Noah Ziegler
With a video landscape that looks more fragmented as each day passes, two cable giants joined forces in the pursuit of providing simplicity to their customers. Comcast and Charter’s joint venture Xumo and its Xumo Stream Box product was an elaborate equation to solve, but its two primary components—live TV and streaming—led the way for a device that’s now found a home in many households across the two companies’ footprints.
“We’ve gone from zero Xumo Stream Boxes, to now millions deployed in the marketplace,” Xumo President Marcien Jenckes says. “It’s been rewarding, but it’s also been the beginning of what’s now a long process ahead of us to continue to grow and develop the product into the best-in-industry, best-in-class solution for streaming and content consumption.”
The road to the Xumo Stream Box’s launch was a long one and took many months of collaboration to fine-tune each aspect of the product. The two companies had plenty to iron out to try and combine live TV along with hundreds of built-in apps like Netflix, Prime Video and Apple TV+ on top of the many FAST channels that call the Xumo Stream Box home. Luckily for Comcast and Charter, the two companies shared the same priorities when developing the product: enhancing customer engagement and satisfaction.
But there was one difference between the two. Charter’s go-to-market strategy for Xumo was positioning it as the company’s video product. That meant the Spectrum TV app and making it easy to use was also high up on the Charter priority list.
“We wanted something that could bridge the familiar for customers like my parents, who were used to 20 years of a traditional set-top box, so really thinking about the customer experience and what was important from the minute the customer received the device,” Robyn Tolva, Charter’s SVP, Video, says. “Was it easy to understand? Was the activation process straightforward? Did the box boot to what would be live video and sound which is unique for an IP device? … For us, if we were thinking in those early days about stepping through that customer journey and what were the important things to us, those are the things that we brought to the table.”
Not every partnership is smooth sailing, but Comcast and Charter have been on the same page every step of the way. Jenckes said the two companies have operated at “a very high level of alignment,” with both wanting to be at the forefront of the current customer behavior evolution and the shift to streaming.
Entertainment isn’t the only focus area of the Xumo Stream Box with potential monetization opportunities including the placement of advertising in front of specific demographics. One operator who sees the value of Xumo— other than Comcast and Charter—is Mediacom, who partnered to distribute Xumo Stream Boxes to Xtream internet customers at no added monthly cost.
“The value proposition for Mediacom is to distribute Xumo Stream Boxes to internet customers as a way to drive internet consideration, tier dispersion, consumption and retention,” Jenckes says. “It’s really this concept of ‘streaming is the killer app for broadband connections’ as cable operators are increasingly trying to drive and reinforce the value of their broadband connections. There is a lot of synergy between that business goal and deploying a Xumo Stream Box.”
Jenckes notes there’s a robust pipeline of operators that could soon begin offering Xumo Stream Box to customers, but now the focus remains on scaling the product and optimizing the features.
“A lot of people think that launch is the end of something, you kind of work up to it. And there was certainly a lot of work that went up to it,” Jenckes says. “For us, it’s really the beginning.”