Spectrum News Plus on Xumo Play Brings a New Alternative News Source to Millions

Whether you've noticed it or not, traditional cable TV viewership has been declining as cable companies have relentlessly raised prices without providing much new content (endless reruns of the same old shows). By some estimates, in 2023, traditional pay TV providers in the U.S. had lost 5.4 million subscribers, which was a significant increase from the 4.9 million who had proverbially "cut the cord" in 2022. At the same time, cable companies are trying to offset the losses by charging their remaining customers even more, which seems to be accelerating the trend.

Meanwhile, streaming options (paid, ad-supported or otherwise) including Google's YouTube TV,  Disney's Hulu Plus Live TV, and services which skip the costly sports content such as Philo and Frndly TV, plus the rabbit-ear friendly OTA DVR system such as Tablo have all made it possible for more and more Americans to cut the proverbial cord with (at best) minimal disruption. Increasingly, mainstream consumers are dumping traditional cable TV services and streaming instead in order to slash their monthly bills. Although streaming costs have continued to rise, they remain less costly than traditional cable television services. 

And, as previously hinted, there is now a growing plethora of so-called "FAST" (Free, Ad-Supported Streaming TV) services which offer an abundance of content people once turned to cable TV to watch which is available for no cost. Xumo Play now rivals Paramount's successful PlutoTV, having dedicated channels with Universal's content including such popular older shows including "Murder, She Wrote", "Little House on the Prairie",  the cartoon "The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle" and the "Bravo Vault" to name just a few. Now it includes Spectrum News+ as a unique offering which is not currently available on rival FAST streaming platforms at this time.

In some markets such as New York City, there are not only large cable TV providers such as Charter Communications' Spectrum cable service, but the legacy landline telephone service known as Verizon [branded Verizon FiOS in case the mobile business is separated from the legacy landline business] upgraded to fiber optic years ago, hence Verizon is a leading competitor to Spectrum. Still, the local cable company has offered its own 24/7/365 news service called NY1 (on cable channel #1, naturally, although in other markets such as Tampa, it is on channel 9) since 1992 in spite of periodic ownership changes for the cable company (Time-Warner sold its cable television business to Charter in 2016). But rival Verizon FiOS customers don't have access to NY1 local news, at least they didn't until 2024 when Spectrum's cable business reconsidered its local news strategy. 

On July 15, 2024, Charter Communications officially announced (see https://corporate.charter.com/newsroom/spectrum-news-plus-launches-fast-channel-on-xumo-play for the announcement) that it was introducing the launch of a dedicated subchannel known Spectrum News+ on Xumo Play, which is the Free, Ad-supported, Streaming Television (FAST) service which operates as a joint venture of both Charter Communications and Comcast. Xumo also sells a streaming box known as the Xumo Stream Box which competes with Roku and Amazon's Fire Stick. Unlike those products, the remote control on Xumo Stream Box has numbers so users can enter the channel numbers directly instead of being forced to scan thru every station.

At the moment, Comcast is still the owner of much of the NBC Universal content library, so Charter's contribution to the joint venture has been its acclaimed local cable news service. That said, Comcast officially announced a plan to spin-off its major cable networks, including USA Network, Syfy, MSNBC, and CNBC, into a separate, publicly traded company. Comcast is hardly alone. In 2022, rivals including AT&T did the same, followed by a similar move by Warner Bros. Discovery in an effort to rid themselves of their cable networks which had become slow-growth, marginally profitable businesses.

Still, if you were a New Yorker who had switched from Spectrum cable to Verizon because you got a better deal on basic television services, the new Verizon television service lacked NY1 so people simply did without it. That was until a free streaming alternative known as Spectrum News+ on Xumo Play had emerged. While Spectrum News+ combines news content from its local cable systems around the country (spanning selected markets in California, Florida, Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Missouri, NYC as well as markets in upstate New York, in addition to markets in North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Wisconsin), hence it's not identical to Spectrum's NY1 local news service. Instead, it is a more national cable news network with local coverage in the markets where Spectrum cable is offered.

As Charter noted in its original press release, the service is based in New York where NY1's newsroom operates, supplemented with original news content from other markets, including national weather as well as some award-winning local news content, such as "On Stage" https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/shows/on-stage which covers the NYC Broadway live-theater business (which now airs weekly on Spectrum News+ on Sunday evenings at 6:30 PM ET) and even live coverage of New York City's well-known Greenwich Village Halloween Parade.

Of course, corporate media outlets have done irreparable damage to their credibility, with a combination of an editorial decision to try and normalize an authoritarian political candidate who has promised to dismantle the fundamentals of democracy (including the free press) and poorly edited news content, but in response, news viewers have fled from those corporate-owned news outlets, which are now experiencing dramatic viewership declines because viewers now have more choices than ever for news. That's made local credible alternatives such as Spectrum News coverage appear far less biased and more objective than the major news networks. One issue is that so-called "corporate media" has for decades merged with and acquired one another to become giant corporate media outlets whose primary concern is about the bottom line, and less about objectivity in reporting or journalism as a profession, and viewers are now noticing.

Although Charter Communications could theoretically be considered a smaller member of "corporate media", until quite recently, it lacked a national platform for audiences, which limited its news coverage and access to that. With the advent of FAST streaming, suddenly Spectrum News has become a national player in news delivery. Perhaps it is appropriate to see where this goes in the future given how corporate media has notably been failing the American public in recent years.