Xumo Stream Box review: Good, but not best in class

With the Xumo Stream Box, Comcast and Spectrum are leaving clunky cable boxes behind, with mixed results.

This $60 streaming box offers access to the companies’ respective cable TV services along with popular streaming apps such as Netflix, Disney+, and Max. Comcast’s Xfinity internet customers can get a Xumo box for free—even without TV service—while Charter is leasing the Xumo box to new Spectrum TV customers for six months at no charge, after which it will cost $5 per month.

The Xumo platform offers a fairly comprehensive selection of streaming apps, including all the major on-demand services and lots of lesser-known ones.

While the Xumo box does a nice job bringing cable and streaming into a single interface, its performance is occasionally sluggish, and some menu elements are cumbersome to navigate. It’s not a bad streaming box if you can get it for free, but other streaming platforms provide a better experience overall—even if you’re still paying for cable.

The Xumobox is not your typical cable box

The Xumo Box is smaller than a traditional cable box, but larger than low-cost streaming dongles such as the Roku Streaming Stick 4K and Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K. It hooks up to your TV via an HDMI cable and connects to the internet via Wi-Fi or ethernet, with no coaxial cable required. That means you can set it up anywhere in the home.

You can also install the box on your own, without getting a cable technician involved. This involves connecting the device to Wi-Fi, linking your cable provider account, and optionally setting up the remote to control your TV, soundbar, and other A/V gear. It’s a hassle-free process on par with other streaming platforms.

This review is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best media-streaming devices.

The Xumo Stream Box can play 4K HDR video and it supports both Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos. It doesn’t have Bluetooth connectivity, however, so you can’t use wireless headphones or earbuds for private listening.

The Xumo Stream Box combines cable and streaming TV

With the Xumo Stream Box, Comcast and Charter formed a joint venture to build an interface in line with modern streaming players. There’s a row on the home screen for apps such as Netflix and Hulu, along with recommendations of what to watch from across different video providers.

Overall, it’s a nice way to see what’s available to stream, refreshingly free of the banner ads you find on Fire TV and Roku players. You can add shows to a universal watch list, pick up where you left off through a “Continue Watching” row, and search for content by voice with the remote’s mic button.

The Xumo Stream Box also tries to preserve some cable creature comforts. Live TV plays immediately when you turn the box on, and clicking the video thumbnail you takes into the full cable experience with features like a grid guide and a DVR library. The remote even includes number keys for punching in your favorite channels.

Still, the Xumo box could’ve done more to bridge these two worlds. The remote lacks shortcuts to such common cable functions as the guide, channel flipper, and recording function, and Spectrum’s DVR list is buried a few layers deep in the menu system.

Meanwhile, Xumo’s unified streaming guide has the same kinds of blind spots we’ve seen on other streaming platforms. The “Continue Watching” row, for instance, supports content from Netflix, but not Hulu or Max. The home screen’s content recommendations include shows from Hulu and Max, but not Netflix, which in turn means you can’t add Netflix shows to Xumo’s watchlist.

All of which means you’ll eventually have to launch individual apps from the row of icons on Xumo’s home screen. These apps are arranged in order of recency, with no way to pin your favorites to the front.

The Xumo Stream Box is not so speedy

The Xumo Stream Box is a bit slow by today’s standards. Click an app icon on the home screen, and you might find that nothing happens. You can even keep scrolling around while the app is loading, only for the intended app to start loading about five seconds later. (Then it can take another 10 seconds or so to actually start using the app.)

Some apps seem especially ill-suited for Xumo. Paramount+, for instance, was borderline unusable because of its sluggishness, with each button press taking about a second to register an on-screen response. Pluto TV was equally bad. In other apps, animations often feel jerky, and response times lethargic. Even the Spectrum app could be snappier switching between navigation tabs and loading the live guide.

Xumo Stream Box app support

The Xumo platform offers a fairly comprehensive selection of streaming apps, including all the major on-demand services and lots of lesser-known ones.

Poke around, though, and you’ll see some notable omissions. There’s a PBS Kids app, but no regular PBS app. There’s Britbox and MHz Choice, but no Acorn TV. Anime fans are out of luck with no Crunchyroll, and film buffs might miss Mubi.

Live TV streaming services are a notable weak point as well. YouTube TV, Sling TV, and Hulu + Live TV are available through the Xumo Stream Box, but not FuboTV, DirecTV Stream, Frndly TV, or Philo. Presumably the two largest cable companies in the United States are not super motivated to have an extensive catalog of cable alternatives.

Does the Xumo Stream Box have DVR?

Unlike traditional cable boxes, the Xumo Stream Box does not have a built-in DVR. Instead, it uses the cloud DVRs that Spectrum and Comcast offer with their respective TV services.

Spectrum, for instance, offers a $5-per-month cloud DVR service that lets you record up to 50 programs and keep them for up to 90 days, and its $10-per-month “Enhanced” DVR ups the program limit to 100 and stores recordings for one year. These recordings are stored online rather than on the device itself, which means you can access them from the Xfinity or Spectrum TV apps on other devices as well.

On the downside, the Xumo box does not show a visual preview when you’re fast-forwarding through recordings (at least not with Spectrum), so skipping through commercials takes some guesswork. There’s no shortcut to the DVR list on the home screen either, so you must navigate through the Spectrum app to reach it.

Is the Xumo Stream Box better than an Apple TV 4K?

Although Comcast and Charter would really like you to use the Xumo Stream Box for cable TV, both companies also offer free apps for other streaming platforms:

• Comcast has apps for Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, and Roku, as well as Samsung TVs, and LG TVs.
• Spectrum has apps for Apple TV, Roku, Samsung TVs, and Xbox gaming consoles.

I can’t speak to Comcast’s apps, but the best Spectrum TV app experience is on Apple TV, beating the Xumo Stream Box by a wide margin. Spectrum TV customers can bundle an Apple TV 4K for $90, either paid up-front or over 18 monthly installments.

The Apple TV 4K costs $30 more than the Xumo Stream Box, but it’s a much faster device with better app support and excellent integration with Spectrum’s app. You can tune to live channels by voice just like you can on the Xumo box, and Apple’s “TV” app lets you quickly find and launch shows from your cable channels.

An unlike the Xumo box, Spectrum’s Apple TV app does provide a visual preview when you fast forward through recordings. That alone makes it an easy choice for new cable customers—even if it does mean giving up the Xumo remote’s channel number buttons.

Should you get a Xumo Stream Box?

If you’re a Comcast Xfinity internet customer, the Xumo Stream Box is a much easier sell given that it’s free. Sure, the device is occasionally sluggish, but it does a nice job making sense of streaming options at a literally unbeatable price.

As something you must pay for, on the other hand, the Xumo Stream Box has much less to offer. It’s not the best interface for accessing cable TV service—that honor goes to the Apple TV 4K or the cable box you’re already used to—and it’s less pleasant to use than cheaper streaming dongles such as the $40 Roku Express 4K+ even the $20 Walmart Onn 4K Stream Box. Its app selection is also more limited than those competitors.

Give Comcast and Charter credit for trying to break into streaming box business, a market that’s started to feel stagnant and would benefit from fresh competition—even it is from the cable guys. But they’ve still got a lot ground to cover.

Correction: Spectrum is only offering six free months of the Xumo box for new TV customers, not all TV customers as previously stated.