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.
With the next chapter of the MCU continuing on after the well-received Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Disney brought Kevin Feige, Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, and Hayley Atwell out at D23 on Friday to show off this new trailer for the next Avengers movie, which is scheduled for release on December 18th.
The “Ask YouTube” conversational search experience that YouTube started testing in April is now rolling out to the mobile app. It’s available for signed-in users in the US who are 13 or older, and can be found by tapping the “Ask” option in the YouTube search bar.
ESPN and other outlets report that Josh Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and founder of Thrive Capital, and former Disney boss Bob Iger made the deal for $12.5 billion, a record-breaking price.
The pair had interest in a possible Las Vegas expansion team, but according to ESPN, “pivoted to make an aggressive offer to buy the Lakers from Mark Walter,” who became the team’s majority owner one year ago and is under federal investigation for alleged tax fraud.
ESPN lost Formula 1 rights last year, when Apple spent big to get the rights for Apple TV. Now, Disney is replacing F1 with… Formula E, the all-electric (and increasingly Formula 1-ish) racing series, starting this December on Disney Plus and ESPN Plus. Shockingly, this deal might come with less talk about battery management than whatever’s happening with F1.
[The Walt Disney Company]
Discovery Plus will play continuous streams of shows across its new “channels,” including 90-Day Fiancé, Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, Deadliest Catch, House Hunters, and more. You’ll also be able to access livestreams and programming from NASA Plus.
These always-on channels are rolling out in the US on the Discovery Plus app and on the web.
Public Eye is a hidden object detective game that presents you with AI-generated visuals across a 10-episode story. It comes from Wolf Games, the same AI games studio behind the Law & Order: Clue Hunter title Peacock added to its app earlier this year.
Following Netflix’s growing “podcast” investment and a similar deal with TikTok, six more video podcasts are coming to Disney subscribers in the US, starting with the official Jonas Brothers podcast, Hey Jonas!, on August 14th across both Disney Plus and Hulu, leading up to the release of Camp Rock 3.
Pod Meets World on Disney Plus will follow on August 24th, with Desperately Devoted, StraightioLab, Thanks Dad with Ego Nwodim, and Fake Doctors, Real Friends with Zach and Donald coming to Hulu later this year to join the podcasts already on the platform like The Mess Around with Hannah and Lamorne.
Netflix hired a guy to sit inside a Hollywood billboard and promote its new movie, The Last House, which follows “a family mysteriously sealed inside their home.”
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Though there were rumblings David Fincher was developing an English language Squid Game spinoff for Netflix, The Playlist reports that those plans have been scrapped.
The New York Times reports that Owen Cenazandotti and Safine Hamadi were convicted of aggravated violence, incitement to hatred, and violence online related to Raphaël Graven’s death during a Kick livestream last year. Cenazandotti and Hamadi both face suspended prison terms, fines, and a six-month ban from posting on Kick.
[New York Times]
The new practice mode offers creators a chance test things out privately before really going live.
As part of WBD’s Q2 2026 earnings report (pdf) released today, the company revealed that around 40 percent of HBO Max subscribers across the globe are on the ad-supported tier, an 11 percent increase from the same time last year. The company’s quarterly streaming revenue also surpassed $3 billion for the first time.
[The Hollywood Reporter]
During an earnings call on Wednesday, Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro reiterated the company’s plan to make Disney Plus the “digital centerpiece” of the company by incorporating “games, merchandise, and other experiences” into the app. “We expect to introduce elements of this expanded ecosystem beginning in spring of 2027,” D’Amaro said.
The March 2nd start date will cost Paramount millions of dollars, as it must pay $7 million each day the deal doesn’t close after September 30th.
Separately, Paramount revealed in its Q2 2026 earnings report (pdf) that its streaming service gained 2 million subscribers over the past few months and will soon add a short-form video feed, similar to HBO Max and Netflix.
If you said that in your head in a weird little voice, good news: Dropout is now streaming Don Hertzfeldt’s legendary animated films, from Rejected to World of Tomorrow. Paper Trail, which just won the short film category at the Annecy Festival, will be available September 1st.
Network Boost is a new feature that aims to provide reliable connectivity for IRL streamers. It requires a Streamlabs Ultra subscription (which starts from $27 per month) and works by pooling cellular and local Wi-Fi connections together on both the iPhone you’re broadcasting on, and a secondary iPhone or Android device running the Streamlabs Controller app.
It’s the first company to reach the audio streaming milestone, showing 9 precent year-over-year growth in premium subscribers. Monthly active users climbed to 777 million, up 12 percent since the same quarter last year.
According to Variety, the series will be a spin-off of Amazon’s 2024 Secret Level anthology series, which includes a Warhammer episode. It’s in development alongside the live-action Warhammer project Cavill’s also working on, and reportedly features the Deathwatch, “an elite group of Space Marines that specialize in hunting down alien threats.”
As Dexerto reports, Green says he wasn’t reading an AI prompt in a clip from a recent Ask Hank Anything video, but confessed that he’s been using AI “to locate papers and other resources for learning about topics.” In a Reddit post, he said he needs to “readjust” now.
I need to come to terms with the fact that the level of dopamine I’ve been getting from interacting with LLMs...with doing more and more and more and more...is not healthy for me or good for the world. It is careless, and has disconnected me from where people are on this.
According to 404 Media, impacted creators have received a notice from YouTube saying that the platform found “severe or repeated violations of our sex and nudity policy.” 404 notes that “Erotic ASMR exists, but that’s not what these artists were doing on YouTube.”
“We terminated these channels for linking to content that violates our nudity and sexual content policy,” YouTube spokesperson Boot Bullwinkle tells The Verge. “Our external link policies apply equally to all creators across YouTube, and this action was taken in accordance with our long-standing policies, not as a change in policy or targeting of ASMR content.”
Update: Added YouTube statement.
A show almost canceled as a tax write-off before it ever aired is now canceled, according to Variety, despite Variety’s report that it was renewed in March.
Our S1 review mentioned that “by the end of the season, you get the sense that Simon and Slattery could go on to become one of Marvel’s more novel riffs on a superhero team,” and a source in today’s report says the show’s characters could pop up elsewhere in the currently-under-renovation-MCU.
The iconic media player of the Napster generation has partnered with Deezer to power Winamp’s own “premium music subscription service,” which is set to launch in the first half of 2027. The new Winamp Player will combine Deezer’s music catalogue with users’ local music libraries, internet radio stations, podcasts, and more. And yes — the interface will be “highly customizable.”
In the process of getting through his thoughts, he does a pretty good riff about the people who say they “make” stuff with AI. As for Musk’s version of The Odyssey, Johnson says, “I’m excited for the Cyclops to have two eyes.”
The satellite radio company is rolling out a $5 / month (or $49 / year) Sports Pass that offers access to “every live game and event SiriusXM carries,” including all home and away NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL broadcasts. It will also include 24 local sports talk stations when the plan launches on September 1st.
