By Phillip Swann
The TV Answer Man –@tvanswerman
TV Answer Man, what’s the free channel this week with Comcast Xfinity? Hope it’s something worth watching. — Darlene, North Beach, Maryland.
Darlene, Comcast earlier this year announced that it was launching a new feature called, ‘Free This Week,’ that will provide Xfinity and Flex subscribers with a slate of free programming every week during the year.
The free shows and movies on Comcast continue this week with on-demand programming from Apple TV+, the streaming service that offers such as award-winning shows and movies as Ted Lasso, Severance, WeWork, Slow Horses, For All Mankind, Silo, Coda, Sidney and The Morning Show, among many others.
But…yes, there is a BIG but on this one.
Apple TV+ does offer all those award-winning shows, but Comcast is NOT providing them to you for free this week. The free Apple TV+ shows that are for free this week on Comcast are Prehistoric Planet, Foundation, Loot and Swagger. And that’s it. Four shows.
Comcast has been advertising for weeks that Apple TV+ would be free this week, but it turns out that it’s just a very small peel of that Apple.
If you want to watch the shows I mentioned earlier for free, you would be better off getting a free one-week trial from Apple TV+. (The streaming service normally costs $6.99 a month.) Or, even better, Apple and Major League Baseball have teamed to offer a two-month free trial. See this article for more details.
Click Amazon: See the 1-Day-Only Discounts!
But if you want to access those four Apple titles on Xfinity, subscribers must go to Comcast’s On Demand menu on their Flex or X1 set-tops. (They are also available on the Xfinity Stream app and the Xumo XClass TV.) You can access that by saying ‘Free This Week’ into your voice remote or clicking on the Menu button on your remote to see a list of Menu options.
Darlene, hope that helps. Happy viewing and stay safe!
— Phillip Swann
@tvanswerman
I was surprised how stingy the Apple TV trial was. That is no way to try out a streaming service. It gives me a bad opinion of Apple TV+. It makes it seem they must not have much worthwhile.
I googled and saw a list of shows that looks interesting. But without being able to try them out I’ll just stick with the two streaming services I already have (Hulu and Prime).
Yeah this is nothing that will ever make me check out Apple+. Not even offering first episodes of things like ‘Ted Lasso’ and ‘Severance’ that might hook people. Do they even have movies? Wouldn’t know from this.
This just reveals how little Apple+ has if they’re worried people can binge everything good on their service in a week. Clearly not worth the $.