Cord Cutters: Page 2

Spotify just became the first streaming service wired into Meta's Muse AI agent, following Ticketmaster as the platform's earliest music-related connector, according to Music Ally. The Spotify Meta Muse integration lets users ask the agent to play tracks, save songs, and build playlists through conversation, per Android Authority's reporting on the rollout.

If you're searching how to watch Lions vs. Bills for free, the live window has already closed. The Week 2 matchup between the Detroit Lions and Buffalo Bills kicked off at 8:15 p.m. ET on Sept. 17 at Buffalo's new Highmark Stadium.

Some YouTube users say they no longer have to tap play at all. Opening the app is apparently enough to start a Short playing, according to a report from Android Authority published today. One user described a Short auto-launching through connected earphones and waking a sleeping partner, with no interaction involved beyond opening the app.

The 78th Emmy Awards aired live on September 14, 2026, but anyone who missed the ceremony can still watch the 2026 Emmy Awards without cable.

Is Spotify shuffle actually random? That question is worth asking again because Spotify no longer runs one shuffle algorithm. Ten months ago, Spotify made Fewer Repeats the default shuffle experience for Premium subscribers, moving away from pure randomness because more randomness itself was producing more frequent repeats, Spotify's announcement explains.

Netflix nudging ahead as UK viewers' starting point is a narrow finding with a broad implication: the broadcast default is gone.

On the ten biggest album releases measured by Spotify streams, US traffic fatalities averaged 139.1. On the surrounding comparison days, the average dropped to 120.9. That 18.2-death gap sits at the center of a music streaming traffic fatalities study built on an event-study comparison of release days against nearby control dates in an NBER working paper.

Netflix's July shareholder letter contained a number that cuts against a decade of streaming-industry assumptions: revenue grew 13% year over year to $12.6 billion, while member viewing hours for the first half of 2026 grew just 2%. The two figures don't cover identical periods, but the gap is wide enough to raise a real question at the heart of any credible Netflix monetization strategy: if people aren't watching dramatically more, what's actually driving the revenue?

Is Disney Plus putting ads on ad-free plans? Not in the way most subscribers are picturing.

If a video ends and another one just starts playing on its own, or a thumbnail starts playing while you're only scrolling past it, those are two different problems with two different fixes. Both get blamed on "YouTube autoplay," but they're controlled by separate settings. This guide covers how to turn off autoplay on YouTube for each one, on phone, desktop, and TV, plus how to turn it back on if you change your mind. A YouTube Community thread on the topic treats the two behaviors as separate...

Roku entered the OLED television market for the first time on September 1, 2026, with two new sets priced well below what LG and Samsung charge for comparable screens. The Roku Pro Series OLED TV starts at $999 for a 55-inch model and is available now, while the higher-end Roku Pro Series LX OLED TV starts at $1,299 and ships in October.

Searching for how to watch 2026 US Open Round 2 live for free won't turn up a current live option because Round 2 is already over.

Search "my Roku remote won't pair," and most of what comes back isn't a pairing failure at all. If the remote can already move through Roku's menus and pull up voice search, pairing has succeeded, and the real issue is that the TV hasn't been set up for power and volume control yet, which is a separate step handled independently of pairing.

Apple has held preliminary discussions with the R&A about Apple TV Open Championship streaming rights, according to a Guardian report cited by 9to5Mac. Netflix and Amazon are also expected to be interested in the rights, per the same report.

Amazon has added Luna game streaming directly to the Prime Video app, giving Prime members access to a rotating catalog of streamable games through a new Games tab on Fire TV devices. No console required, no separate download. On geography, the two outlets that confirmed today's rollout don't agree: Engadget says the launch covers the US and UK, while VGC specifies the UK only. Both confirm Fire TV as the starting point, with additional devices and countries to follow in the coming months....

Netflix spent a decade competing on 4K resolution and frame-rate clarity. This week, to mark Stranger Things' 10th anniversary, the platform released the Stranger Things VHS Special Edition: all eight episodes of season 1 engineered to look like a tape pulled off a shelf at a video rental store in 1983. The release dropped July 15, the exact date season 1 originally debuted on Netflix, Polygon confirmed this week.

LG introduced a picture setting that lets movie studios influence how individual streaming titles appear on compatible televisions. Creator Original Picture Mode can apply title-specific parameters for shadow detail, color balance, noise reduction, and motion handling instead of relying on one general cinema preset.

TV Time's original founder is rebuilding the app from scratch under the name Bingers, days after the show-tracking service was removed from app stores on July 15, ending 15 years of operation. TechCrunch and Engadget both reported on July 15 that Bingers is targeting an App Store and Google Play launch by July 31.

Netflix's decision to license short-form clips from Condé Nast, Hearst, and BuzzFeed Studios is one of the clearest strategic tells the company has offered in years. Not because the content matters three-to-twenty-minute clips from Bon Appétit and Cosmopolitan are table stakes, not programming strategy but because of who Netflix chose not to sign. The deals are with publishers, not creators. In the Netflix vs YouTube short-form video battle shaping up this year, that distinction is the whole...

Microsoft has begun rolling out the Xbox app on select Hisense and V HomeOS-powered smart TVs, letting owners stream Xbox games without buying a console. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma says Xbox streaming has now reached more than 150 million TVs and devices worldwide this summer, part of a broader push to get the service onto hardware people already own.

Reviewed by: Y. Garcia

A widespread Plex outage on July 14, 2026, disrupted the company's streaming services and reportedly prevented some users from reaching media stored on their own Plex servers. The underlying computers and files were not necessarily offline; Plex apps were struggling to find or connect to them.

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...

TV Time goes dark in six days. On July 15, the app is pulled from both stores, tvtime.com goes offline, and all personal account data is permanently deleted, with no archive to request and no restore option once the servers switch off, Moviebase reported last week. Users who want to keep their watch history have one path: export it through TV Time's GDPR self-service tool before the cutoff, import it into Trakt, then connect a destination app such as JustWatch from there.

Apple TV+ is occupying Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con for the first time, with a two-hour Apple TV+ Hall H panel on Saturday, July 25 covering five titles, a separate late-night sneak preview of Dark Matter Season 2, and a free multi-sensory Silo installation open to the public, Deadline reported today. The panel runs 2:00–4:00 PM and will be moderated by Josh Horowitz, host of the Happy, Sad, Confused podcast.

Disney is internally discussing making some Disney+ content available without a subscription, according to two people familiar with the matter. Adam Smith, Disney's product and tech chief, raised the idea at a company streaming town hall this week, offering no timeline and no defined scope.

Roku's market position has a way of making the platform look more capable than it is. Across U.S. broadband households, Roku OS accounts for 28% of connected TV platform usage, ahead of Samsung Tizen at 23%, with Amazon Fire TV, LG webOS, and Vizio SmartCast trailing at a distance, according to Parks Associates research.

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.

Netflix ended 2025 with 325 million global subscribers, $45 billion in revenue, and a 29.5% operating margin, per its annual filing with the SEC. Those are numbers most traditional media companies would trade their entire legacy for. Yet the idea of Netflix becoming cable is no longer just a metaphor. It is visible in the product roadmap, in the acquisition pipeline, and in the engagement metrics that have been keeping executives up at night.

Spotify recently 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.

Microsoft today launched a limited test of Xbox free ad-supported cloud gaming, letting Xbox Insiders stream games from their existing libraries at no cost in exchange for watching a short ad block before play begins. Sessions cap at one hour. No subscription required. The owned-games requirement does the heavy lifting here: if you don't already have eligible titles in your library, the offer gives you nothing.

This guide tells you exactly how to watch the 2026 MLS All-Star Game live online and whether you qualify for the free trial. The game streams exclusively through MLS Season Pass on the Apple TV app. No cable broadcast, no over-the-air channel, no alternative platform. "Free" applies only in two specific situations. Figure out which one describes you, then follow the steps below to have a working stream before tomorrow's 8 p.m. ET kickoff.

A quick reality check before you start: This guide works best for households in urban and suburban areas within range of broadcast transmitters. Rural readers, apartment dwellers with no exterior placement options, and anyone whose primary goal is free live sports coverage will hit real limits, spelled out at each relevant step. Go in with accurate expectations.

A federal judge dismissed rapper RBX's Spotify streaming-fraud lawsuit last month, finding that the complaint did not plausibly support its negligence and unfair-competition claims. The case can be refiled within 21 days, so it isn't over. But the dismissal laid bare a structural problem that no ruling can fix: the same enforcement systems Spotify built to fight bot streams are removing legitimate artists from the platform, and those artists have almost no recourse when it happens.

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...

Peacock enters this next chapter with 46 million subscribers, a genuine sports portfolio, and a growing entertainment slate. None of that is the problem. The problem is structural: for years, Comcast's cable and broadband network connecting more than 65 million U.S. customers gave Peacock bundled distribution, built-in promotional use, and a balance sheet deep enough to absorb streaming losses without triggering a crisis. The Comcast NBCUniversal spin-off doesn't change what Peacock is. It...

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.

The most revealing number from the 2026 World Cup isn't a match rating. It's a ratio. Through 40 games, Telemundo's average audience stands at 5.5 million viewers per match and 2.3 million of them are watching via a stream, tracked by Adobe Analytics across Peacock and Telemundo's apps, according to NBC Sports press release published this week. That's not a rounding error or a supplemental trickle. That's approaching half the audience, measured and reproducible.

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.

Major consumer streaming services currently top out at 4K video, and 4K/60Hz is within HDMI 2.0's bandwidth ceiling. The bottleneck in your setup is the service, not the cable.