Watch out Roku, Comcast and Charter’s new streaming box is out – and it actually looks good
It took a year to arrive, but Xumo, the streaming box from Charter and Comcast, is here – and it’s looking pretty good. The Xumo Stream Box is a one-box system for Spectrum customers, and Xfinity customers will get it too in the near future.
The device is powered by Comcast’s Entertainment Operating System and, according to Charter’s wonderfully named Rich DiGeronimo, president of product and technology, it “simplifies streaming, combining a live TV experience with all the top apps.” The box offers cross-app search and recommended content from a range of subscriptions, both paid and ad-supported.
Like many of the best streaming devices, the built-in apps include Apple TV Plus, Disney Plus, Hulu, Max, Netflix, Peacock, Pluto, Prime Video, Tubi, Xumo Play and more, but the first thing you see is live TV.
Xumo: leading with live
The star here as far as Charter and Comcast are concerned is the live TV you subscribe to, and that’s what you see first: Spectrum TV, Xfinity Stream, or Xumo Play. That TV can also be combined into playlists with shows and movies from your apps, and you can have different favorites lists for different members of the household.
If the interface looks familiar, that’s because it is: the same entertainment operating system is already in Sky Glass and Sky Stream, from the British TV service Sky. So we know it works and it works well: this isn’t some shoddy proprietary operating system created in a back room by people who don’t know what they’re doing. As we noted in our Sky Glass review, “it’s quite cozy” – we like the interface and recommendation system, and that’s another reason to be excited about Xumo. It also looks a lot like Android TV, and that’s not a bad thing: you immediately feel at home there.
While this is a Charter/Comcast partnership, each company does things a little differently. If you are a Charter customer, you can get a Xumo for free for the first year. Additional boxes cost $60 upfront or $5 per month. But Comcast will push the box to new Internet subscribers rather than TV subscribers, with a launch in the next few months. There will also be other devices, including Xumo TVs.
From what we’ve seen so far this all looks very impressive, but of course it’s all about how it performs: the hardware has to be powerful enough to run the software smoothly, because if you ever have a TV streamer with too have been using little power, you’ll be vividly aware of how frustrating a slow or sluggish device can be. I hope the hardware has the necessary horsepower.