Deeper Dive—What’s next for Comcast’s suddenly busy smart TV business

In the span of one month, Comcast has gone from outlier in the streaming platform market to suddenly having a robust smart TV strategy on two continents.

Though reports have forecast the move for months—and Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said the devices themselves were years in the making—October was the month when the company jumped out first with Sky Glass in Europe and then XClass in the U.S. One is being rolled out by a satellite provider as a replacement for the dish and the box, and the other is rolling out in partnership with a massive retailer, but both are products of Comcast’s unified technology platform.

During today’s earnings call, the company spent a considerable amount of time laying out what’s next now that Comcast is very much engaged in the smart TV wars on multiple fronts.

According to Roberts, Comcast’s global technology platform already handles about 5 billion entertainment streaming per week on 75 million devices. He called the launch of Sky Glass and XClass a “logical extension” of that and “an embodiment of what we do well, which is aggregation.”

“And then it’s a platform for innovation on a go-forward basis for where we think television will evolve, whether it’s gaming, whether it’s fitness, healthcare or education. Having that be part of your relationship with our company is novel territory for us to do R&D off of,” Roberts said.

Sky Glass is starting in the U.K. but the company has plans to expand quickly to other countries.

Sky CEO Dana Strong highlighted the shift in commercial model that’s coming along with Sky Glass; the devices are being sold a lot like mobile handsets, through monthly payment plans that allow room for upgrades.

“We’ve converted a large upfront payment to an affordable monthly payment with ownership, of course. It establishes a long-term relationship with a customer as a result and it improves [Sky’s] acquisition economics because it allows for self-installation and there’s no longer a need for a dish and a set-top box,” she said.

Sky said that Glass gives it some interesting headroom by opening up addressable markets with consumers who may have been prohibited from having satellite dishes or didn’t want them. It also may appeal to customers who are more interested in streaming content. Strong said there will also be syndication opportunities and chances to draw more revenue from features like Watch Together or fitness and health.

“Long, long-term we think this is a platform for innovation and really just the beginning,” Strong said, adding that Sky Glass has the “exact same guts” as all other Comcast technology, amounting to significant synergies with the company’s overarching smart TV strategy.

In the U.S., Roberts said Comcast sees multiple opportunities within the XClass partnerships with Hisense and Walmart. Comcast Cable CEO Dave Watson said XClass allows his company to deliver the X1 user interface outside of Comcast’s service footprint—and offer a smart TV that can even run Charter’s streaming app—while sticking to a business model that keeps the TV manufacturers and retailers in mind.

Watson also said that XClass gives Comcast and NBCUniversal to make Peacock the focal point of a streaming platform in the hopes of driving more usage and monetization.

Comcast will have to compete for smart TV share with giants like Amazon, Google and Roku, which won’t be easy. But the company has finally taken X1 out to a bigger world and with it opened lots of new opportunities for growing new business models and reshaping old ones.