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.
A collection of 15 shows will be available on HBO Max, Vulture reports, including the Ricky Gervais-led version of The Office. They’ll be available until the end of September.
[vulture.com]
2027 will mark the 50th anniversary of Star Wars: A New Hope’s debut, and to celebrate the occasion, Lucasfilm is putting the movie back in theaters beginning May 4th of that year — just a couple of weeks before Star Wars: Starfighter’s premiere.
After rolling out its own take on Spotify Wrapped last year, Amazon Music now lets you view “insights,” which show the artists, songs, and podcasts you listened to the most during each month. Other music streaming platforms have started offering more frequent glimpses into user listening habits, too, with YouTube launching seasonal recaps and Apple Music delivering them on a monthly basis.
That was EV accessory manufacturer Hansshow’s offer to YouTuber Branden Flasch, after he posted a pretty damning takedown of their “Dangerous, useless and overpriced” charging adapter.
Believe it or not, the apparent attempted bribe was only the opening gambit in a conversation that goes on to include accusations of corruption, plenty of profanity, and arguing the adapter must be safe because Flasch didn’t die. You’re gonna want to read this for yourself.
Production on the second season of Netflix’s 3 Body Problem adaptation is now underway, and the show has added Alfie Allen, Claudia Doumit, and Ellie De Lange to its cast.
The new show from BoJack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg hasn’t actually premiered yet — it starts streaming on August 22nd — but Netflix has already confirmed it’ll be getting a second season. In the meantime, you can check out this new trailer that sets up the time-jumping family story.
There have already been two great seasons of Apple’s prehistoric nature documentary series, and the next will shift the focus to the Ice Age, exploring the period across five episodes. Tom Hiddleston will be swapping in for Sir David Attenborough as the narrator when the show premieres on November 26th.
The streaming platform began testing a new homepage in June, and now it’s starting to roll out a new “surf mode” feature that lets you scroll through a TikTok-like feed of show and movie clips from The Roku Channel. It will also introduce two new rows for the top 10 shows and movies on Roku, as well as add an “In Theaters Now” row where you can explore movie trailers.
Disney Plus’ Eyes of Wakanda animated miniseries was slated to debut on August 6th, but the streamer has just bumped the show’s premiere up to August 1st and decided drop all four episodes at once.
Train Dreams, which was one of my favorite films at the festival this year, is streaming on November 21st, and will also be coming to select theaters this fall. It’s an understated and heartbreaking movie about coping with loss and change, telling a story that spans a single lifetime and is buoyed by some incredible performances from Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones. You can get a feel for it in the new trailer below.
It’s only taking 2.5 percent, but that’ll set Sony back JPY68 billion (around $464 million).
They’re calling it a “strategic business alliance,” focused on “expanding the fan community for IP such as anime and manga.” Sounds like it’ll be as much about Sony’s anime streaming service Crunchyroll as it will be about the two companies’ gaming pedigree.
Dungeons & Dragons and Netflix have teamed up on a new Stranger Things-themed board game bundle called Stranger Things: Welcome to the Hellfire Club. It will be released on October 7th and you can preorder it now.
I’m very confused by this tweet, but maybe it means Apple is close to sharing more about the upcoming show from Vince Gilligan. Apple has also posted a YouTube video that’s counting down to 3PM ET on Friday.
Update: Apple posted a countdown video.
With a $1.5 billion five-year deal to lock the irreverent show down and take it away from HBO Max, the streaming service clearly thinks so.
Paramonut Plus is steadily gaining subscribers, but lags behind rivals when it comes to the most popular content, and securing South Park might just help. And hey, if it distracts from stories about its troubled Skydance merger and payouts to Trump, that can’t hurt either, right?
The full report, which you can find here, shows that Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) terminated almost 11,000 channels between April and June of 2025 as part of an investigation into “coordinated influence operation campaigns.”
The mass removals included over 7,700 channels with ties to China, and 2,000 linked to Russia, as reported by CNBC.
Apple announced that production is officially underway for the previously-revealed season 4 of Ted Lasso. There’s even a photo to prove it. More interesting, though, is the news that a bunch of the cast are joining Jason Sudeikis in returning to the show, including Hannah Waddingham, Juno Temple, Brett Goldstein, Brendan Hunt. and Jeremy Swift.
We’ve talked before about the funhouse-mirror-alternative-reality that Trump (and Musk) have built. JP Brammer, who watches much more YouTube than I do, notes something weird is going on in content land — it seems Donald Trump has lost control of the plot. NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny, writing from a more anxious angle, seems to agree. Content has now outpaced reality. I guess we’re going to find out by how much.
[johnpaulbrammer.substack.com]
Wes Anderson’s latest, The Phoenician Scheme, is still in select theaters, but it’ll also be streaming very soon. Peacock just announced that it’ll air the movie starting on July 25th. The news comes just a day after the streamer announced a sizable price hike.
“Early results are encouraging, outperforming pre-launch testing and demonstrating strong member interest in the new features,” Netflix says in its second-quarter letter to shareholders. About 50 percent of members have used it.
The new UI started rolling out globally in May, and it features a Home tab with a huge banner front and center that highlights something to watch.
During an interview with Variety, HBO Max head Casey Bloys said the next season “is definitely planned for 2027,” though there might not be another one after that:
Craig [Mazin] is still working it out whether it will be two more seasons or one more long season. It hasn’t been decided yet, and I’m following Craig’s lead on that.
The next season will be the first without the involvement of The Last of Us co-creator Neil Druckman, who is shifting focus to upcoming Naughty Dog games.
Disney Plus is continuing to take steps into the world of live streaming, this time to promote The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Subscribers will be able to watch the red blue carpet event on July 21st, live from the film’s premiere at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. For the rest of us, the movie hits theaters on July 25th.
