News and Updates about Cord Cutters

Warner Bros. Discovery yesterday began testing HBO Max Shorts with a limited group of U.S. iPhone users: a vertically scrollable feed of scenes, trailers, and bonus clips drawn entirely from the existing HBO Max library. The feature is not original programming. It is existing content reformatted for vertical mobile playback, designed to pull subscribers from a 30-second clip into a full episode or series. Broader availability across devices and markets is planned, with no timeline attached.

Warner Bros. Discovery this week launched two new mobile features for HBO Max subscribers in the U.S.: a swipeable vertical Shorts feed and a conversational AI search tool called Ask HBO Max. Both are built around the same problem too many choices, not enough watching and neither is available to all subscribers yet.

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.

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 publicly displayed price has climbed to $30 for some shoppers, 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...

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

Roku has raised prices on every streaming device it sells, with increases ranging from 33% to 50% across the full lineup. No hardware was updated, no new features were announced, and the changes took effect immediately, according to The Verge today. The Roku Ultra jumped from $99.99 to $149.99. The entry-level Streaming Stick climbed from $29.99 to $39.99.

Google's TV platform holds a six-point lead over Apple's tvOS in the latest Hub Entertainment Research survey, 14% to 8%, among U.S. respondents describing the operating system on their most-used TV or streaming player, according to Android Authority. That lead matters less than the gap separating both companies from Roku and Fire TV. Before going further, it's worth being precise about what's actually being measured here: this is a survey of primary viewing setups, not shipment figures,...

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.

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...

Some Netflix users are seeing prompts asking them to add a unique email address before using a profile, according to Android Authority. Netflix has not publicly detailed whether the prompt is mandatory for all users, how widely it is rolling out, or how Kids profiles will be handled.

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.

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."

The new Fire TV interface is now available worldwide on all current-generation Amazon Fire TV Stick devices and Amazon Ember smart TVs, and Amazon says all current-generation Fire TV Sticks, the Fire TV Cube, and Ember smart TVs purchased globally now ship with the redesigned UI. That's the broadest distribution since the update quietly began on a handful of premium devices four months ago.

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.

Apple is making the full Formula 1 Austrian Grand Prix weekend free to U.S. viewers in the Apple TV app from June 26–28, 2026. Practice, qualifying and the Grand Prix will stream at no cost with an Apple ID, with no paid Apple TV subscription required. Sports Business Journal reported Thursday that this is the first time Apple has made a complete F1 race weekend free in the United States.

Peacock is launching its vertical video feed in the Peacock app, rolling out original Bravo microdramas and a swipeable short-form section built into the mobile app. According to Peacock, the two Bravo series are the first official originals in the microdrama format announced by a major U.S. entertainment streaming platform.

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.

The Spotify disco ball icon fix is now live on iPhone. The familiar flat green circle is back in the App Store today, 25 days after Spotify publicly told users the standard icon would return "next week." The update is available now, according to 9to5Mac.

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.

Amazon began notifying Prime subscribers in India and Australia this week that Amazon Music Prime ads will start appearing in their included music streaming tier, with offline downloads being removed at the same time. The notification email directs users who want what the tier used to offer to pay for Amazon Music Unlimited on top of their existing Prime membership fee.

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

Spotify and Universal Music Group recently announced a licensing deal that clears both master recording and publishing rights for AI-generated music, allowing the company to launch a tool letting Premium subscribers create covers and remixes of songs from participating UMG artists. The tool will cost extra on top of a standard Premium subscription. No price and no launch date have been set so far.

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

Spotify used its 2026 Investor Day this week to announce four podcast features and, more deliberately, to argue that they belong together. Spotify podcast memberships, AI-generated personal audio, in-episode Q&A, and rebuilt brand sponsorship tools are not separate bets.

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