Cord Cutters

Spotify today launched "Talk to Spotify," a conversational AI feature that lets Premium subscribers find, control, and learn about music, podcasts, and audiobooks through back-and-forth chat. The Spotify Talk to Spotify AI chatbot sets itself apart from generic music assistants by drawing on each user's actual listening history, not just catalog knowledge, when generating responses, according to Spotify's announcement.

Spotify is rolling out new listening filters for Release Radar, the weekly discovery playlist that reaches nearly 9 million listeners every Friday. The controls let users steer their recommendations by genre or toward unfamiliar artists, giving them a new way to influence a playlist that has largely been algorithm-controlled.

The Onn Full HD streaming stick, a $15 Google TV dongle that turns any HDMI-equipped television into a capable smart TV, has become harder to find and more expensive to buy. Its standard retail price has climbed to $30, double its 2023 launch price, with in-store stock running thin at many locations, according to Cord Cutters News and Android Police. For cord-cutters who relied on the Onn Full HD streaming stick as the cheapest entry point into Google TV, the question is immediate: buy now at...

BBC director-general Matt Brittin confirmed this week that the corporation has held early talks with Channel 4 about a possible streaming partnership, with the most concrete idea being Channel 4 content distributed through BBC iPlayer while Channel 4 retains its ad-funded business model. The timing was pointed: Brittin's appearance before the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee came just two days after Sky announced a £1.6 billion acquisition of ITV, according to Hollywood...

The Nvidia Shield TV base model has been unavailable across NVIDIA's major U.S. retail partners for months. NVIDIA broke its silence on the matter, and the answer left the central question unresolved. The company said the base model is "largely out of stock due to demand" and that it has "no updates to share regarding future availability at this time." If you're wondering why Nvidia Shield TV is out of stock, that's the official explanation. It doesn't tell you when, or whether, the device is...

In 2022, Apple signed a 10-year, $2.5 billion deal with Major League Soccer and immediately built a wall around it. Fans who wanted to watch games had to pay $100 per year for MLS Season Pass, a subscription layered on top of their existing Apple TV subscription, Awful Announcing reported. The Apple TV sports strategy was, in theory, ambitious. In practice, it was a friction machine. In the first three years of the deal, MLS struggled to meaningfully grow its Season Pass subscriber base, even...

Plug your Fire TV Stick into an HDMI 2.0 port. Save the HDMI 2.1 port for a gaming console or PC. If you have a soundbar, that goes in the ARC or eARC port, not the streaming stick. That single paragraph covers the setup most people get wrong when figuring out the best HDMI port for Fire TV Stick use, and everything below explains why it works this way and how to confirm you've got the right port on your specific TV.

Apple SVP Eddy Cue used his appearance at Cannes Lions this week to sketch out where Apple TV+ is heading: more films with franchise potential, new originals every week through 2026, and live sports anchored by Formula 1. Cue's push for more Apple TV content, as he framed it at the Palais, comes down to two words: "better, more." What those words mean in practice is narrower than they sound.

Apple reportedly has a new Apple TV 4K ready to ship. The holdup is software. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is timing the launch of the new Apple TV 4K for fall 2026, around the readiness of its next-generation Siri, with both the new Apple TV and a refreshed HomePod mini currently in "very advanced testing."

NTS Radio and Swedish audio company Atonemo launched the NTS Radio Player today, a compact Wi-Fi streamer purpose-built for NTS's curated channels and continuously running mixtapes, designed to connect directly to speakers and amplifiers you already own. The practical question it raises: does dedicated hardware make NTS meaningfully better than casting from your phone to whatever speaker is nearby, The Verge reported today.

YouTube TV NBC Audio Issue Leaves Subscribers With Low, Muffled Sound

Fox Corp. agreed Monday to acquire Roku for approximately $22 billion, gaining a foothold in the operating system running inside more than 100 million streaming households globally. As Deadline framed it yesterday: "Fox Corporation is buying an operating system." Analysts and executives have described it as a distribution and ad-tech play rather than a content-library acquisition, and the numbers bear that out.

A growing number of Chromecast with Google TV owners are finding their remotes won't stay paired, and the pattern of complaints points to something more than individual hardware failures. 9to5Google reported that a fresh wave of complaints has accumulated across Reddit and Google's support forums, enough for reports to flag a recurring complaint pattern. The Chromecast with Google TV remote not working pattern has surfaced before, but the current volume and consistency are harder to dismiss.

YouTube TV customizable multiview is here: what you can watch, how to check, and what it still can't do

Spotify Guided Workout Experiences Launch: Features, Limits, and Access

2026 Apple TV 4K Rumors: A17 Pro, Siri Delay, and Release Window

Apple Music introduced a mandatory AI disclosure system in early March, requiring labels and distributors to tag content whenever artificial intelligence played a "material portion" of its creation. The Apple Music AI-generated music policy covers four categories: sound recordings, artwork, lyrics and compositions, and music videos. Here is the tension at the center of it: Apple says the tags are required, but its own technical specification describes them as optional, defaults to assuming none...

Disney announced a new round of Disney+ and Hulu integration features on May 19, 2026, bringing the two apps closer together with Hulu profile linking, Hulu access inside Disney+ for eligible Hulu subscribers, new Hulu profile avatars, and an upcoming Live Guide. Bundle subscribers who primarily watch Hulu on demand can now bring more of their Hulu activity into Disney+, though Hulu Live TV, add-ons, and non-adult profile linking are not fully folded in yet. Disney says there are "no current...

Sony's PlayStation Plus price increase is due to take effect tomorrow, May 20, pushing monthly subscriptions from $9.99 to $10.99 and three-month plans from $24.99 to $27.99 across the U.S., UK, and Europe, GamingBolt and BBC reported this week. The annual plan stays flat at $80. Sony cited "ongoing market conditions."

Netflix began rolling out a redesigned mobile app on April 30, 2026 in nine countries, including the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia, built around a new vertical video swipe feed called Clips. Netflix says the redesign is meant to capture more daytime viewing and help members discover titles faster, Variety reported. The company plans to roll out the update to the rest of the world "in the months to come."