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Frank Purcell, senior director of marking at Comcast, gave a demonstration of its new streaming service on the company's X1 platform, which they plan to release in New Jersey today.

(Tim Farrell/The Star-Ledger)

UNION — Comcast has decided to respond to "cable cutters," customers who abandon their cable subscription in favor of online streaming services, by cutting their cables, too.

A new feature that launches today on the company’s X1 platform for more than 1 million Comcast subscribers in New Jersey allows customers to watch recorded and live shows with their phone, tablet and computer.

For example, a Comcast subscriber who used their DVR to record the finale of AMC’s “The Walking Dead” on Sunday night could watch it on their phone during a long lunch break and be ready to talk zombies over an afternoon coffee break.

Or, as Frank Purcell, Comcast’s senior director of marketing, put it, a family with children could accommodate as many viewing preferences as there are screens in the home. He demoed the new streaming service for The Star-Ledger on Friday at a Comcast innovation lab in Union.

“Our vision has always been that any device that could render video securely should be a TV,” said Matt Strauss, senior vice president of video services at Comcast Cable, who talked to The Star-Ledger about the service yesterday. “The definition of TV is continuing to get blurred. I have little kids and they don’t even know what a TV is. They think the computer is a TV, or the tablet is a TV.”

He said the company’s commitment to giving its viewers what they want and when they want it extends back an entire decade, to when Comcast launched its On Demand service. Now viewers also get to choose where they watch content and on what kind of screen, Strauss said.

Meanwhile, the paid TV industry has been reeling from the impact of subscribers defecting in favor of piecing together their own viewing options with streaming services and devices like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple TV and Roku.

Last year alone an estimated 687,000 cable subscribers canceled their accounts, according to Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson, the eponymous Wall Street veterans at MoffettNathanson research firm in Manhattan.

Frank Purcell, senior director of marketing at Comcast, holds an iPod that has a remote app for the X1 as he gave a demonstration of its new streaming service last week.

All of 2013, they said in a report last year, amounted to the worst 12-month stretch in the paid television industry they had ever seen.

Satellite and television companies added about 574,000 subscribers in 2013, Moffett-Nathanson estimated, but not enough to give the paid TV industry a net gain.

One of those satellite companies, Dish Network, recently updated its DVR service, the Hopper, to add features that resemble the streaming now available on Comcast’s X1 platform.

Audiences were introduced to Dish’s Hopper in 2012 with ads featuring a loud, fictional family with thick Boston accents. When the 2014 NCAA Tournament kicked off last month, Dish gave the service a new face: Hopper the Kangaroo, voiced by actress Rebel Wilson.

In the campaign’s first ad, the marsupial sits in her cubicle and uses a tablet to stream a basketball game and ditch it just in time to suck up to her boss.

Cable companies themselves aren’t the only ones staking a claim on consumers’ mobile devices.

Networks like HBO have launched their own mobile apps that allow cable subscribers who already pay for the channel to watch content on mobile devices. That might seem at odds with Comcast's new service. Had Time Warner not spun off its cable operation into an independent company, HBO would have become part of Comcast when the company agreed to purchase Time Warner Cable, in a $45 billion deal.

If the company’s previous acquisitions are any indication, it could be some time before the deal wins approval from regulators.

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Comcast agreed to buy NBCUniversal, operator of the NBC, Bravo and USA networks, for $30 billion in 2009. The deal wasn't approved until 2011.

In an interview earlier this year, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts pointed out that two years could be an eon in television industry years.



His comment didn't go unnoticed by Mitch Burns, CEO of Nielsen, the Manhattan-based televisions ratings firm.

In fact, he took to his company's blog to agree with him.

“Based on 70 years of watching what consumers experience, and how they buy, how they act and what they do based on their consumption of content, we see a seismic shift coming in the next five years,” he wrote. “Nowhere is this more acute than when it comes to television and video consumption.”

Editor's Note: An earlier version of this article stated that HBO is owned by Time Warner Cable. The network is owned by Time Warner Inc., which spun off its cable operation into an independent company.

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