Comcast and Amazon’s partnership will bring Prime Video to X1 cable boxes later this year

In a somewhat surprising move, Comcast, one of the nation’s largest cable TV providers, has announced that it will be partnering with Amazon later this year to bring Prime Video to its X1 cable boxes. Comcast has offered its own streaming service, Xfinity On-Demand, for many years and while there is quite a bit of content available for free, access is limited based on your subscription tier. Also, many of the most popular shows and movies are locked behind a rental paywall. Amazon’s Prime Video will give Comcast subscribers another catalog to access with additional Prime Original content like Goliath, Sneaky Pete, and more, all without the need to switch their TV input. Users will have to be subscribed to Amazon Prime to take advantage of the new feature.

Whether you own the Nvidia Shield, a Roku TV, or an iPad, you can get Amazon Prime Video on every single one of them. It’s an app that spans across nearly every platform possible since it seemed that the last domino had dropped and it came to the Apple TV last year. With Comcast’s announcement today, it proves that Amazon truly wants to be platform agnostic and get every one of its Prime members to have access to its streaming service.

Considering that more and more people subscribe to Amazon Prime mainly for its 2-day shipping perks, Prime Video is one of those offerings that seems to be forgotten quite often. Even so, Amazon continues to invest in the platform and broaden its selection by either licensing existing content or creating its own.

“Amazon Prime Video’s growing list of originals, movies, shows, documentaries, and kids’ programming will be an excellent complement to the overall X1 viewing experience,” said Dana Strong, President of Consumer Services, Comcast. “We want to give customers easy access to all their favorite content in one place.”

It remains unclear if users will be able to purchase Amazon’s paid content without leaving the X1 platform. If not, this would mirror how the Apple TV’s app operates as well. At the very least, users can expect the ability to stream content that was purchased via a different device.

With Comcast’s addition of Amazon Prime Video’s ever-growing collection, it seems that this partnership could be an attempt by the company to keep its customers from buying other devices that typically encourage users to cut the cord. By keeping its customers from switching TV inputs, it may help delay the irrelevancy of Comcast’s cable boxes for many.

No word on a specific launch date for now outside of the functionality arriving sometime in the next six months.

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