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.
Todd Harthan and Todd Helbing have joined the series as co-showrunners and executive producers, along with Marc Webb and Rachel Moore as executive producers, as Variety reports. Author Christopher Paolini will also be executive producing the adaptation of his YA fantasy series at Disney Plus, which is also home to the hit adaptation of Percy Jackson.
As expensive bundled packages, premium live sports pricing, and restrictive walled gardens proliferate, customers have turned to TV piracy instead. Now why do I feel like I’ve seen this one before?
NotSoSavvy:
Hey, the exact same problem that drove people to Torrenting comes up again! It’s weird that as soon as watching things legally becomes more of a hassle than watching them illegally, people start watching illegally again. It’s almost like people hate walled gardens and it’s generally in a company’s best interests to have wider, easier distribution they get a smaller cut from than try and make their own Netflix or something.
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While Top Gear has spent years trying to replace Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond with mainstream celebrities, Amazon is instead appeasing British broadcasting execs’ obsession with online content creators. The Grand Tour season 7 presenters are viral trainspotter Francis Bourgeois, alongside James Engelsman and Thomas Holland, who run the Throttle House YouTube channel.
Hulu already offers companion podcasts for some of its shows, but now Deadline reports that it has struck a deal to stream We’re Here to Help — a comedy advice podcast hosted by Jake Johnson and Gareth Reynolds — one day before it appears on other platforms.
Fed up with increasing subscription prices, viewers embrace rogue streaming boxes.
You’ll be able to livestream the famous K-Pop group’s first concert in three years on March 21st, the day after the new BTS album comes out. You might want some coffee, though; the show starts at 7AM ET that day.
Disney’s deal with OpenAI includes a plan to allow Sora users to create 30-second clips featuring over 250 Disney characters while some will appear in curated vertical video feeds inside Disney Plus, CEO Bob Iger told investors on Monday. Iger said the feature could arrive “sometime in fiscal 2026,” adding the company hopes to allow Disney Plus subscribers to create them directly on its platform:
What this deal does is by giving us the ability to curate what has been basically created by Sora onto Disney, is it jumpstarts our ability to have short form video on Disney Plus.
That’s how much Disney says ESPN and its sports business lost in income during the 15-day YouTube TV blackout late last year, totalling $110 million. That’s almost double the daily hit analysts had estimated at the time, and it’s just for sports, not counting any hit to ABC or Disney’s entertainment channels.
Current CEO Bob Iger has apparently said he plans to step down before the end of the year, and the company’s board of directors are set to vote next week on who should be his successor, The Wall Street Journal reports. The frontrunners are reportedly Josh D’Amaro and Dana Walden.
[The Wall Street Journal]
Though Netflix originals The Pete Davidson Show and The White House with Michael Irvin look and feel like a podcast, they lack a lot of features podcast listeners are used to, like RSS feed downloads and chapter markers. Here’s my take.
What the bidding war over Warner Bros. Discovery says about the future of Hollywood, with Puck’s Julia Alexander.
As part of Comcast’s latest earnings report, the company said that its streaming service now has 44 million subscribers, while losses increased to $552 million in the last three months of 2025 — up from $372 million at the same time last year.
(Disclosure: Comcast is an investor in Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company.)
[The Hollywood Reporter]
Ahead of the finale for Fallout season 2 next week, Amazon has started dropping episodes of the first season on YouTube so you can get a taste of the post-apocalyptic series for free. That finale, meanwhile, will be available a little early, streaming at 9PM ET on February 3rd.
It follows Snap in reaching an agreement to resolve the first of several cases slated to go to trial this year about social media’s alleged harm to users, an attorney for the 19-year-old plaintiff confirmed. That leaves Meta and YouTube as defendants in the case going to jury selection today.
Disney Plus is teasing Jessica Jones’ return to the MCU in this new teaser trailer for Daredevil: Born Again’s upcoming second season, and it looks like the detective is going to be knocking heads.
Soon, you’ll be able to play as The Office’s Dwight Schrute and Michael Scott in Fortnite when new skins of the characters debut in the game’s item shop. It’s one of Fortnite’s stranger collaborations, but it makes more sense when you consider how many people are still watching the show.
While the new trailer for Disney Plus’ Star Wars: Maul - Shadow Lord series doesn’t at all make the Sith Lord look like a heroic figure, it does suggest that meeting his new apprentice is going to reveal new things about his character when the show premieres on April 6th.
Ahead of debuting a trailer for its new Star Wars: Maul - Shadow Lord animated series tomorrow, Disney Plus has shared a short (and inky) teaser that makes it seem like the Sith Lord’s lightsaber is going to be seeing plenty of action.
