News and Updates about Cord Cutters

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.

DuckDuckGo's browser now blocks most of pre-roll and mid-roll YouTube ads automatically, with no extension required and no setup needed on most platforms. The feature went live this week as default-on for Windows, Mac, and iOS users running the latest version.

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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.

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.

A YouTube TV Help Community Product Expert said a recent change removed Live Guide background playback from YouTube TV on certain devices, cutting a feature that let subscribers keep a live channel running while browsing upcoming programming. The change is intentional, no app setting restores it, and the community explanation doesn't fully account for all the hardware where users are reporting the loss, including Roku devices, based on user reports cited by multiple outlets last week.

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.

Spotify this week launched Track Reactions, a feature that lets collaborators respond to individual songs in shared playlists using emoji visible to every playlist member. Announced on the Spotify Community blog, the feature closes a loop that has been open since collaborative playlists existed: until now, adding a song generated no quick in-playlist reaction.

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.

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.

Google TV rolled out a homescreen update yesterday that surfaces 2026 World Cup live matches, upcoming fixtures, highlights, and post-game content through a single Sports topic page, reducing the friction of finding where to watch without changing who controls access. The Google TV World Cup hub runs from June 11 through July 19, according to 9to5Google.

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.

Audible launched Audible Rewards in the U.S. today, a free loyalty program combining gamified listening goals with perks that carry real monetary value, including referral payouts, anniversary credits, and listening-based discounts, according to Good e-Reader. The catch: Audible has not published full program terms, and confirmed dollar values exist for only a handful of those perks.

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

A concentrated wave of first-gen Chromecast failures has surfaced this week, with users reporting that major streaming apps have stopped recognizing the 2013 dongle as a cast target. The breakage is app-specific: some services still work, others have quietly dropped the device from their cast menus entirely. Google, which ended software support for the original Chromecast in 2023, has not commented on the current failures.

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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...

Apple's Eddy Cue will receive the Cannes Lions Entertainment Person of the Year 2026 award at the festival running June 22–26, Deadline and Variety reported today. The institution doing the honoring is not a Hollywood guild or a streaming trade body. Cannes Lions is the advertising and marketing world's biggest annual gathering, and Lions CEO Simon Cook pointed explicitly to Apple's influence on consumer behavior through its devices and platforms when explaining the decision, not just its...

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...

Plex is tripling the price of its Lifetime Plex Pass. Starting July 1, 2026 at 12:01 AM UTC, new buyers pay $749.99, up from $249.99 a 200% increase on a product the company openly admits it considered eliminating entirely, per Plex's own announcement today. Existing holders keep all current benefits unchanged. New buyers have six weeks at the current price.

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."

A cheap Fire TV Stick and an Apple TV 4K will both stream in 4K. Both support Dolby Vision. Both respond to voice commands. So when you're looking for the best 4K streaming device and Consumer Reports' five-dimension scoring framework tends to favor premium set-top boxes over cheap sticks, the reason isn't what's happening on the screen. It's everything else.

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."

Spotify's Prompted Playlist expanded to podcasts last month, and the podcast version puts something front and center that remains less clear on the music side: why each pick landed in your mix. Every episode or chapter in a podcast playlist comes with a short note explaining its connection to your prompt, your listening history, or the moment. The podcast rollout foregrounds those explanatory notes more clearly than the music-side experience Spotify has publicly described, though Spotify's...