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.
The new feature is coming first to Canada, allowing users to connect and share music with like-minded fans across genres like rock, country, and K-pop. In Fan Groups, users can join or create chat threads, as well as save recommendations from others.
Amazon Music plans on bringing Fan Groups to the US and other countries next year.
“I don’t want to say no forever,” Apple head of services Eddy Cue told Screen International, “but there are no plans.”
There are plenty of signs that Apple has at least explored ads for its streamer in the past, but right now it seems content with price hikes to pay the bills.
[Screen International]
Now that the Disney blackout has dragged on for an “extended period of time,” Google will begin handing out the promised credits today. Customers should get an email explaining how to apply the one-time credit to their next bill. But, $20 probably won’t satisfy disgruntled customers who just want to watch SportsCenter.
Music recommendation algorithms were supposed to help us cut through the noise, but they just served us up slop.
It’s a good day to stay home: the first two episodes of Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus are now on Apple TV, while Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is on Netflix after a brief theatrical run. And if you’re looking for more after you watch, here are my interviews with Gilligan and Frankenstein creature designer Mike Hill.
Never mind Liquid Glass, the new Apple TV intro was made using the real stuff, filmed by shining colorful lighting behind a glass model of the logo. With big companies like Coca-Cola and Google putting out entirely AI-generated marketing, it’s nice to see some things being made the old-fashioned way.
If you can’t wait until November 26th to experience the final season of Stranger Things (which has taken more than three years to release), you can now watch the first five minutes of its first episode, “The Crawl.” It’s been an age since we’ve seen Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) looking so baby-faced.
The new show from Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan isn’t afraid to take things slow.
The company said in its Q3 2025 earnings report that it’s “making progress” on the new service, which it initially teased in September. Upon launch, WBD will take sports content off HBO Max and put it into TNT Sports, which will be available as yet another streaming bundle option.
The traditional late-night TV space has been in something of a dire spot lately, but in all of the chaos, Google and YouTube see an opportunity to get more people watching streaming talk shows like Hot Ones, Good Mythical Morning, and Brittany Broski’s Royal Court.
Netflix is working with A24 to develop a reality TV series based on the chaotic collaborative cooking game, according to a report from Deadline. The production is still in “early stages of development,” but I can already imagine the secondhand stress from watching contestants rush around a kitchen.
Netflix and Sony haven’t locked in on a concrete premiere date for the KPop Demon Hunters sequel just yet, but the studios are reportedly thinking about releasing the movie some time in 2029.
[Deadline]
The standoff between Disney and YouTube started just before midnight on Thursday evening, and unlike the 36-hour tiff in 2021, there’s no sign of an end yet. Disney said it asked Google to turn the networks on for 24 hours for election (and probably football) coverage, but YouTube declined.
There are plenty of other options for customers - election news information is very widely available across other broadcast stations and news networks on YouTube TV, as well as on the main YouTube service, for free. In fact, on the last two U.S. election days, the vast majority of tuned in YouTube TV subscribers chose not to watch ABC.
The latest season of Sesame Street debuts on Netflix on November 10th, and the streamer has just dropped a new trailer teasing what’s in store for the fuzzy monsters and their human friends.
Mike Hill talks about working with Guillermo del Toro, and why Jacob Elordi was the right actor for the role.
If you weren’t able to see Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein in theaters during its all-too-brief theatrical run, it’ll be on Netflix next week. The latest trailer, meanwhile, provides the best look yet at Jacob Elordi’s take on the creature.
Disney is one of the last major streamers to support the open-source, royalty-free (and Samsung-backed) competitor to Dolby Vision. Its inclusion now gives people with Samsung TVs access to the dynamic HDR content that other TV owners have been getting from Dolby Vision.
Audiochuck, the studio behind a range of true crime podcasts, has struck a deal with Fox that will put a free, ad-supported streaming channel for Crime Junkie on Fox One and Tubi, along with on-demand video episodes.
The deal is valued at $150 million, according to the WSJ, and will allow Fox to distribute Crime Junkie and other podcasts across third-party platforms as well.
[The Wall Street Journal]
The Netflix fantasy epic continues its downward spiral with a bloated and mostly boring new chapter.
The fifth and final season of Stranger Things kicks off next month, and in the meantime Netflix has a very dramatic new trailer to get you in an Upside Down mood.
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, just released its Q3 2025 earnings report (pdf), reporting revenue is up by 16 percent from the same period last year, at $102 billion for three months, compared to $88.2 billion in 2024 and $76.6 billion in 2023.
Sundar Pichai:
Our full stack approach to AI is delivering strong momentum and we’re shipping at speed, including the global rollout of AI Overviews and AI Mode in Search in record time... The Gemini App now has over 650 million monthly active users... And we have over 300 million paid subscriptions led by Google One and YouTube Premium.
Fubo and Hulu + Live will remain separate, meaning you can still watch Hulu + Live TV from the Hulu app, while Fubo’s content will stay on its own streaming service. Under the new structure, Hulu’s parent company, Disney, owns 70 percent of the combined businesses.
