Established streaming industry leaders like Netflix and Amazon are facing more competition than ever. Now legacy entertainment giants are in the game with their own subscription services, like Peacock, HBO Max, Paramount Plus, and the Disney Plus / Hulu / ESPN Plus bundle, while Apple TV Plus attacks around the edges. Meanwhile, the rise of ad-supported free platforms like Roku Channel and Pluto TV has attracted enough attention that Plex, YouTube, and Amazon’s Freevee are trying to get a chunk of the action too.
Maybe the thi— no, fou— wait, fifth time’s the charm for WB.
The new, narrower model has microphones on the actual device, presence sensing, a faster processor, additional storage, and an updated remote with two more shortcut buttons, 9to5Google reports. It’s unclear when the new model might launch.
The original TV Streamer launched in September 2024, and we gave it a 9 on our review scale. However, it recently got a $50 price hike, taking its price up to $149.
The cuts would affect 5 percent of the company, or roughly 850 jobs, and may be announced “as early as next week,” Puck reports.
The Altruists focuses on the relationship between former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (Anthony Boyle) and former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison (Julia Garner). It debuts on November 19th.
During Marvel Television’s presentation at this year’s New York Comic Con, the studio announced that it is developing a live-action series titled Zodiac that will debut in 2028. The new show’s still a ways out, but we can expect to see the second season of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man on January 13th, 2027.
Sony, which acquired Crunchyroll in 2021, is launching a hub for the anime streaming service on the PS5 in spring 2027, as reported earlier by Variety. It’s still not exactly clear what this hub will look like, but Sony says it will allow players to explore anime series and games, as well as access the Crunchyroll app.
Following today’s completion of the $110 billion Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery megamerger to form Skydance, the company announced three new board members: Powell Jobs, former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, and newly-appointed Skydance co-CEO Ynon Kreiz. Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair is also joining as a “board advisor.”
Soon, YouTubers will be able to A/B test multiple cuts of the same video to see which hook, script, or edit performs best with their audiences. The company told me the different versions will only be shown to a very small segment of people — but as Marques Brownlee explains, it could get weird. Will people argue in comments while watching two different videos? What happens to timestamps? And who’s the feature really for?
According to Deadline, one of the shows that Vin Diesel announced during NBC’s upfronts in May is going into production. There aren’t any details yet on the status of the other three F&F TV projects Diesel had mentioned, while the 11th movie in the series, Fast Forever, is still scheduled to hit theaters on March 17th, 2028.
The company says it will “reduce the reach” of Shorts content that’s re-uploaded without significant changes in an effort to prioritize “original content.” Instagram has made similar promises — but that hasn’t stopped swarms of anonymous accounts from taking over social media feeds through a practice known as clipping. I wrote about the ecosystem in May.
Roku CEO Anthony Wood wanted to follow Netflix’s playbook for an extended leadership transition. His board had other ideas.
The latest trailer for Disney Plus’ upcoming VisionQuest series gives use our best look yet at Ruaridh Mollica’s Tommy Shepherd — the reincarnated son of Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff and Paul Bettany’s Vision. It seems like he (and that curious accent) are going to be a big part of the show when it premiered on October 14th.
Mike Flanagan’s first Amazon series is a (mostly) excellent update of the classic Stephen King tale.
Go watch the ultra-low-budget black-and-white slapstick insta-classic Hundreds of Beavers, which Dropout’s Sam Reich calls “a masterclass in visual comedy.” Dropout mostly streams original content, but is increasingly licensing indie comedy; it launched the Don Hertzfeldt Collection last month.
The box office success of Avengers: Endgame’s re-release has apparently emboldened Sony, which is considering turning Spider-Man: Brand New Day around for a second run at cinema screens (and box office records) with new footage, The Wrap reports. It’s not clear if that means teases for future movies, or just deleted scenes.
The biopic arrives on Prime Video on November 18th, starring Cage as the famed NFL coach. The full trailer and some new photos also give a first look at the rest of the cast, including John Mulaney as EA founder Trip Hawkins and Christian Bale as Raiders owner Al Davis, as well as Kathryn Hahn, Sienna Miller, and Shane Gillis.
People have been asking for 4K, and Rode is giving it to them. The Rodecaster Video, Video S, and Video Core now have a 4K capture mode. They’re also getting expanded syncing capabilities with the Rodecaster Pro II and Duo for fully integrated audio/video production setups.
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The Watch With live reactions feature is being expanded to all long-form videos later this year. Additional features are coming in 2027, including livestreamer matchmaking, interactive fan funding on co-hosted streams, and automatic speech translation and dubbing.
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Your free streaming reruns app may look different now, with Pluto TV’s recently rolled-out update that shares tech with Paramount Plus and has a David Duchovny-starring “Escape to Pluto TV” ad campaign.
The new Home screen now blends live and on-demand content, but some users say it’s slower, makes channel surfing harder, and pushed the channel guide under Live TV. Paramount is already promising more tweaks, like bringing back Kids Mode and adding an in-player live channel changer.
Disney is also raising prices on its ad-free Hulu plan, ad-free Hulu and Disney Plus bundle, and the standalone ad-supported subscriptions for each, Bloomberg reports. It says Disney could start notifying subscribers about the price increase as soon as today, exactly one year after an earlier Disney Plus price hike and just a month after ESPN raised prices.
Along with a bunch of AI news today, YouTube music exec Lyor Cohen announced a renewed agreement with concert promoter Goldenvoice to keep streaming both weekends of the Coachella music festival for the next four years.
This continues an arrangement that will hit 15 years next April, despite Bloomberg’s report of competing bids from the likes of Netflix and Amazon. It also says that in the future we’ll see more pre-event programming, as well as mini-documentaries and other videos about artists between sets.
This builds on the feature introduced in May which allows users to build a custom video feed based on AI prompt descriptions of your interests, moods, or favorite topics. The expansion means you can create and save more than one custom feed to your home screen, with YouTube saying it’ll be available for users in the US on web, mobile, and TVs “soon.”
YouTube is expanding its likeness detection tool to include not just facial matches, but vocal matches too. At the company’s Made on YouTube event on Wednesday, executives teased the upcoming expansion that will allow creators to monitor potential synthetic soundalikes posted to the platform.
The original likeness detection feature started testing with creators and eventually was opened to anyone with a YouTube account — the company has essentially created its own deepfake monitoring and takedown regime.
If you have one of Birdfy’s smart birdwatching devices, you can tune into its video feed on the biggest screen in the house now on the Roku version of the Birdfy companion app.
