streaming media

Worth reading this one carefully before the pitchforks come out, because it is a single reported customer and not a mass deletion. A Reddit user says the Extended Edition Lord of the Rings trilogy they bought through the Google Play Store in 2022 vanished from their library. The screenshots they...

Roku dropped four new channels into The Roku Channel and three of them are the usual archive filler: Mad TV, Whose Line Is It Anyway, Retro Black Laughs. The fourth is the story. Fairground AI sits at channel 300 and runs generative AI video around the clock, and the ad breaks are AI generated...

Formula E has signed a multi-year deal making Disney+ its global streaming home from the 2026-27 season, across 144 territories, with ESPN and ESPN+ handling the US. Every race weekend is included, practice and qualifying as well as the races, plus on-demand replays and the usual...

Freeplay quietly turned into something else this week. It launched as a channel grid, the free live stuff baked into Google TV sets and the Walmart Onn boxes, and Google has now dropped a library of more than 10,000 free movies and shows into it, along with another 300 or so live channels. The...

Cord Cutters ran a piece recommending three Roku remote accessories and reading it mostly made me notice how much of this category exists to patch things the TV standard already covers. The three picks are an EZclicker oversized remote for Roku TVs, the Sideclick clip-on that bolts extra buttons...

Someone on Reddit went to watch the Extended Edition trilogy they bought from Google Play back in 2022 and found it gone. Not delisted, not shuffled into a different tier, just gone from a library they had paid for. When they asked Google for a refund or a gift card, the chat agent told them the...

Apple put out the September Friday Night Baseball schedule and buried the interesting part in it. The Red Sox at Yankees game on August 28 is the first Friday Night Baseball carried live in Apple Immersive on Vision Pro. Angels at Pirates on September 4 and Giants at Dodgers on September 18 get...

Samsung has started running Eclipsa Audio content on TV Plus, which is the first time the format has had anywhere to live outside YouTube. It is IAMF underneath, encoded and delivered through TV Plus channels, and if your set or bar does not support it you quietly get a stereo version instead...

Read the Onkyo Y-40 review this morning and came away with two thoughts, one about the amplifier and one about the review. The amplifier: compact stereo integrated with Spotify Connect, TIDAL Connect, AirPlay 2, Bluetooth, a built-in phono stage, and the part that matters for this forum, HDMI...

Disney talked about the free Disney+ tier again on the 5 August earnings call, and the framing is the interesting part. It is still only under consideration, no date, no implementation detail, and the stated purpose is explicitly an entry point - something to pull in price-sensitive viewers and...

Someone ran the same movie through an Apple TV and then off the 4K disc, sound level matched the two with REW and a UMIK-1, and measured the result on the RTA. Average SPL curves first, peak measurements second. The gap came out at roughly 0.9dB. What caught my eye more than the number was what...

Since the redesign started rolling out in late May this keeps coming up, so here is the short answer: Roku does not give you a way back. Once the new home screen lands on your set or player, the old app grid is gone. What you do get is a handful of settings that let you switch off most of what...

Australia's ABC has pushed four free ad-supported channels into LG Channels on webOS this week, no account and no subscription needed. Which ones you get depends entirely on where you live. The UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway and Singapore get the full set: ABC...

Roku OS 15.3 has started landing on some Roku TVs even though Roku still lists the release as a developer beta under NDA, with no public release note and no timeline for the wider rollout. It surfaced through a reader tip rather than any announcement, which is a strange way to ship software to...

Cord Cutters flagged the anniversary this week and it is worth sitting with for a second. On 8 August 2017, on a quarterly earnings call, Disney said it was building its own streaming service and ending the licensing deal that had been putting its films on Netflix. Disney+ itself did not arrive...

A Counterpoint Research report going around this week says premium smartphones hit a record 29 percent of the global smartphone market in the first half of 2026, and that Apple and Samsung together took 84 percent of that premium slice. On its own that is a phone industry stat. What makes it a...

HBO Max has added Shorts, a vertical scrolling feed of clips, trailers and bonus bits pulled from its own library, sitting behind its own icon on the bottom nav. It is tuned to your watch history, and if something grabs you mid-scroll you can jump into the full episode or drop it in My List...

Digging into what Prime Video and Samsung are actually shipping this month, and the feature list is stranger than the headlines make it sound. HDR10+ Advanced has six listed pieces: enhanced overall brightness, intelligent motion smoothing, local tone mapping, genre based optimization, advanced...

The old Caspian gear had a long run and a lot of goodwill behind it, so a fourth generation was always going to get read closely. The pairing is a streaming preamplifier at $4,500 and a power amplifier at $3,750, with an integrated sitting underneath at $5,000 with the streaming module or $3,750...

So Disney found a way around the injunction, and the answer looks like VP9. Heise reported the codec, and Disney itself has only said it adopted an alternative technology and started restoring 4K UHD. The logic writes itself: HEVC is the thing InterDigital is fighting them over, so out it goes...