streaming media

Breezeline has stopped selling traditional cable TV outright. New customers who want video now get a DIRECTV streaming package instead, either through a DIRECTV Gemini box or just by signing into the DIRECTV app on whatever they already own. This isn't a sudden decision either. They began...

Worth reading even if you never owned one, because the pattern applies to every box under your TV. Spotify stopped making Car Thing in July 2022, five months after it went on general sale in the US at 89.99 dollars, and took a 31 million euro charge doing it. Then on December 9, 2024 it remotely...

The news doing the rounds is that Disney has formally retired the 20th Century Fox name, which had been living on borrowed time since the studio was renamed 20th Century Studios a few years after the acquisition. It stays on older titles, obviously. Nothing reaches back into a disc already...

Reminder that keeps getting buried under the price hike news: if you hold a US library card you probably already have two streaming services you are not using. Kanopy carries over 30,000 movies and shows including a chunk of the Criterion Collection, older Oscar winners and a run of A24 titles...

Paramount+ started testing something they are calling a free tier, and the fine print deflates it fast. It is Android phones and tablets only right now, you can open the app and browse the catalog, and you get up to two episodes from selected shows. That is a trailer with extra steps. A tier...

Linn pushed Davaar 118 out and it adds native Amazon Music and Presto Music to DSM players on the newer ARM-Linux platform, starting from the Selekt DSM generation. Both show up inside the Linn app, so there is no AirPlay leg, no Bluetooth hop, no second streamer parked in the chain. Amazon...

Awful Announcing is reporting that ESPN hasn't abandoned the idea of putting the first hour of major WWE Premium Live Events on its linear channels, even though that hour went missing at SummerSlam. The stated reason is a scheduling conflict rather than a change in strategy. SummerSlam ran...

Roku OS 15.3 has started a limited rollout to some TVs and players. It is still mostly a developer beta thing but it has reached a few consumer devices, and if you get it, do not go hunting for the new feature. There is not one. The changelog is almost entirely for channel developers. Better...

Seattle is running its preseason streams through Dolby OptiView with Dolby Vision this year, on the Seahawks app and on Seahawks.com, and locally over the air through KING 5 on ATSC 3.0 if you have a tuner that can take it. Press conferences and the other live digital coverage get the same...

The Toy Story 5 disc details landed and one line is worth flagging: it is shipping on a 100GB 4K Blu-ray. Disney almost always uses the 66GB tier unless a film runs long, and this one is 102 minutes. Short film, biggest disc. That is more bitrate headroom than a 102-minute animated feature...

There is a thread going about Life Goes On, the 1989 to 1993 network drama, started by someone who found episodes uploaded to YouTube and realised the show has almost no home video presence. Season one came out on DVD in 2006 and then the releases simply stopped. That pattern shows up often...

The Guardian has Apple in early talks with the R and A about US rights to The Open Championship. NBC has had it since 2017, when it outbid ESPN on a twelve year package, with coverage shared out to Golf Channel under Versant. That deal runs to 2028 and the formal tender opens early next year...

There is a thread doing the rounds again asking Disney to reopen the anthology vault, the Disneyland and Wonderful World of Disney and Wonderful World of Color material, and floating a retro line to sit where the Treasures tins and the Movie Club exclusives used to be. I would buy it tomorrow. I...

The Guardian reported preliminary talks between Apple and the R and A over US rights to The Open, with the current NBC arrangement running to 2028 and a formal tender opening early next year. My reaction is not excitement. We have seen this movie. Apple signed a ten year, two and a half billion...

Focal and Naim owners picked up another service in the app this month, and this one is narrow on purpose. Presto Music is classical and jazz first, with a catalog of more than 200,000 albums, over 34,000 of those in high resolution, and more than 70,000 digital album booklets attached. Streaming...

Anyone actually read their July DIRECTV bill line by line? The regional sports network fee used to sit at $3.99 for most eligible packages. It's now a range, topping out at $23.99 in some markets, with the average landing near $15. It took effect at the end of June, so July and August statements...

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...