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.
The show returns for season 5 on Friday, and Apple just announced that it would be coming back for one last season after that. Now we have the first teaser trailer for Star City, a spinoff that shows the other side of the alternate reality sci-fi story. It starts streaming in May.
There could be a sticky situation if jurors don’t reach a verdict today on day nine of deliberations, independent journalist Meghann Cuniff reports. One juror is set to leave on a prepaid vacation tomorrow, and the judge hasn’t yet said what would happen if they go before a verdict.
Though we knew Jon Bernthal was co-writing a Punisher-focused streaming special for Disney Plus, the streamer has just announced that it will premiere on May 12th, right as the second season of Daredevil: Born Again comes to a close.
Though Disney almost put an end toMarvel’s Wonder Man series before it got a chance to stream, the studio is bringing it back for another season according to Variety.
Been meaning to catch the film, maybe I will once it’s available to stream. My colleague Kevin Nguyen reviewed it last year.
Until now, Mister Rogers Neighborhood has only been available on YouTube in a limited capacity via the PBS Kids account and sketchy uploads. But now it will have an official home on YouTube thanks to a partnership between Fred Rogers Productions and Little Dot Studios, which has, let’s say, diverse interests.
Now that Stranger Things is over — the main series, anyways — you can finally own the whole thing on disc. Arrow Video is releasing a box set of the complete series on Blu-Ray and 4K UHD, which will be available in July. I hope the collection spans exactly 11 discs.
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein won a handful of Oscars last night, including one for best make-up and hairstyling. Last year I had the chance to talk to Mike Hill, who designed the creature from the film, about his relationship with del Toro and all the work that went into recreating the character.
After being removed last month the HDR format and 3D movies are once again available to Disney Plus Premium subscribers in Europe, although some German users are still reporting them missing. Disney confirmed to FlatpanelsHD the removal was a result of a “German patent dispute with American company InterDigital.”
[FlatpanelsHD]
Last year Netflix confirmed that its long-gestating Assassin’s Creed series was still happening, and now we have further proof of life thanks to a casting announcement. Noomi Rapace, Sean Harris, Ramzy Bedia, and Corrado Invernizzi have joined the cast, though there’s still no word on when it’ll start streaming.
Creators can now upload video thumbnails up to 50MB instead of just 2MB, according to YouTube CEO Neal Mohan. Bring on the hi-res YouTube Face.
This spring, Peacock is bringing a new Jeopardy! game to its mobile app. It will feature daily trivia rounds straight from the Jeopardy! team, along with shareable scores and streak challenges.
Parent advocates were determined to make their presence known to Meta’s CEO.
Ben Affleck’s AI startup, recently purchased by Netflix for around $600 million, has a different approach to gen AI.
It’s called Channel Surfer, and it presents YouTube as an old-school grid of TV channels, which you can flip though to see what’s on. All the simplicity of watching cable in a hotel room; all the videos you actually want to watch. It’s fun on its own, but it feels like magic as soon as you import your own subscriptions to create personalized channels.
One of my favorite things to do on social media is to just imagine the people setting up the camera right before the video starts — because as soon as you remember they set up a camera, the whole viewing experience changes. This fun Ringer story about the rise of YouTube Face (trust me, you know the face) pulls back a lot of that artifice and dives into some of the strange workings of the internet’s biggest video platform.
[The Ringer]
The stressful-yet-delightful party game is now available as one of Netflix’s streaming TV games that you control with your phone. This version lets you play as 10 “Netflix celebrity chefs,” including the famous Stranger Things monster.
Netflix is also working on an Overcooked reality show.
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Hulu has dropped a trailer for its upcoming Handmaid’s Tale spinoff, The Testaments, and when the series premieres on April 8th, it looks like it will be a harrowing reminder of much violence the girls of Gilead were forced to endure.
The entire point of HBO’s upcoming Lanterns series is to introduce new incarnations John Stewart and Hal Jordan — two superpowered space cops — to DC Studios’ cinematic universe. But Lanterns first teaser trailer makes it seem like the show might feel much more like True Detective when it premieres in August.
While Trump’s federal regulators are seemingly in the bag for Larry Ellison’s big dumb gift to his large adult son, The New York Times notes that state attorneys general can sue to block mergers in the US, and EU regulators will have a say since properties like HBO Max and CNN are offered globally.
