New Comcast online video service for its Internet customers

Comcast Corp., which is based in Philadelphia, said Monday that it will launch the service in Boston at the end of the summer, followed by Chicago and Seattle. The company is also pondering whether to add optional sports, movies, kids and lifestyle packages to Stream for an additional $5 to $10 per month. Sling TV also doesn’t have agreements with major broadcast networks, meaning it only offers cable channels.

Electronic Arts and Comcast have announced a partnership to offer subscribers of the cable company access to game streaming via their set-top box. It would have created a TV and Internet behemoth that would serve more than half of the country’s high-speed Internet customers, as calculated by the government. Matt Strauss, an executive vice president at Comcast, said in a press release that the company planned “to make it available everywhere in our footprint by early 2016”.

It will work on computers, tablets and phones but won’t work directly on TVs. “But it could keep Comcast customers from straying to these newfangled competitors”.

Much of Stream’s content is already free.

Sling’s biggest advantage over Comcast’s Stream will be the fact that it carries the beloved sports network ESPN.

The service is quite simple – games will be streamed to your TV from the cloud via your Comcast X1 connection, and these games will be mostly EA’s games. In April, Dish could not handle the influx of users who logged on to watch the semi-finals of the NCAA March Madness college basketball tournament. An important sporting event will inevitably result in a jump in viewership and streaming providers might not find it feasible to create the capacity required for catering to such drastic surges. “Until they’re actually on the market and we can judge them on the merits of the actual service, it’s a complete guessing game”. Hence, they might stick to the comparatively stable pay-TV option for their sporting needs. “If you’re in your house and you want to watch a network TV program live, you can get it by flipping on your TV and having your antenna deliver the signal … for free”.