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Remember when you first signed up for Netflix streaming? It was nice. A few bucks a month for tons of good movies, some pretty decent original shows, zero ads, and you could finally ditch the nightmare that was cable. Fast forward to 2025, and streaming is the nightmare. It splits up everything you want to watch across a dozen different platforms, all of which now have ads just so they can make you pay to remove them. They remove content constantly, they’re full to bursting with things you don’t care about or need (Hades the video game, a dozen horrible Christmas movies every year, and NFL games on the same ticket, what?) and the price is always, always, always going up. From the consumer perspective, streaming video services are objectively worse than they were a decade ago. Frankly, these services are absolutely milking and bilking their users. There’s no real alternative at this point, at least if you want to watch new shows or the occasional streaming-exclusive movie that isn’t terrible. But there are ways to maximize your enjoyment and minimize your money spent. Step one: quit. Quit early, quit often This isn’t a new idea — I first heard about it from my colleague Eric Ravenscraft years ago, and we’ve advocated for it on TechHive more than once. But it bears repeating. The streaming services don’t have any loyalty to you, and you’ll gain nothing by being loyal to them. Quit your subscriptions constantly, month by month if you want, and move on to the next one. Heck, we’ve said that cancelling your subscription immediately is the one trick all cord cutters should know. The watch-and-bail setup is pretty simple. You sign up for any singular streaming service for just one month, taking advantage of any deals or promotions they’re offering to entice new suckers customers. You go through whatever you want to watch on that service which is exclusive to that service alone. Then you bail, and move on to the next one. Rinse, repeat, try to never be subscribed to more than one at a time. ibreakstock / Shutterstock.com There are some obvious advantages here. Shows and movies financed or produced by one service tend to stay on that service and not move around. Netflix made House of Cards, so you can’t watch House of Cards on Disney+. Hulu made The Handmaid’s Tale, so you can’t watch it on Max. So watch only the exclusive stuff one one service while you have it. These aren’t universally true — Paramount+, “the home of Star Trek,” unceremoniously dumped Prodigy, and Netflix picked it up for its second season. Disney clawed back Daredevil and other Marvel series when it started making its own for Disney+. But in any given month you can generally rely on the exclusive content that’s already on a service to stick around for at least a month. Have a plan The way to maximize this process is to go in with a plan. I keep a list of all the upcoming shows (including returning seasons) that I want to see on any particular service, so when one of them gets three or four piled up, I switch to it and binge as much as my schedule will allow. For example, right now I’ve got Castlevania: Nocturne season 2 and A Man on the Inside qued up on my Netflix list. I’ll wait for at least one more show or movie to catch my eye (like, say, the Knives Out threequel) before I plan my next Netflix month. Streaminganbieter rafapress/Shutterstock.com Also, it doesn’t hurt to memorize the general landing places for movies, if you’re waiting on them to transition from theaters to streaming. Some are obvious: Disney movies (including Marvel, Star Wars, et cetera) will come to Disney+, Paramount movies will come to Paramount+, two to four months after they leave theaters. Warner Bros. movies will eventually land on Max, the service that it owns. Some (but not all) Universal Pictures movies will come to Peacock, as that’s an NBC-Universal brand. Sony Pictures is the only major Hollywood studio without an accompanying streaming service at the moment. And of course, any movie released to theaters explicitly by Netflix, Apple, or Amazon will make their way to those respective services before long. Keep an eye out for deals Obviously this approach will save you some money by keeping your subscriptions down to one or two a month. I like to use that savings to upgrade to ads, which again, are only there to make you pay more so they’ll go away. Enshittification strikes again. But even beyond maximizing your allotment of time and money, you can game this system to be better for you. Streaming services are constantly hungry for new users. They’ll try to entice them with a free week or month of trial service before they charge, or several months at a discount rate. Keep an eye out for those discounts — for example, at the time of writing Hulu will offer you a month of service for free, and Apple TV+ is doing a week. Watch the usual deal sites for these opportunities, especially if one of your singular service lists is getting long. Hulu Sometimes these are restricted to truly “new” users, i.e., if you’ve signed up and unsubscribed before you’re not eligible. You can sometimes get around this by making a new account: use a burner email (or a slightly tweaked one) and a method of payment you haven’t associated with that service before. If you can swing it, these freebies are a great way to watch just one show or movie that’s exclusive to a service you otherwise don’t care about. Infrequently there are some pretty good deals on year-long plans. I’m currently part way through a Paramount+ year-long package — I got it for $30, plus another $30 upgrade to remove ads. That’s half off the price, only $5 a month total, and I watch enough Star Trek releases throughout the year that it makes sense. (At least for the moment — damn you, Paramount, for canceling Lower Decks.) Bundles of media are less appealing to me, if only because they tend to offer diminishing returns. Hulu and ESPN are both owned by Disney, so there’s a package combined with Disney+, naturally. But each overlapping circle of that Venn diagram narrows the appeal to users. It might be different for you, of course, especially if you’re sharing services among a big family. Manufactured headaches The streaming services are aware of these bouncing customers, and trying to minimize that behavior as much as possible. That’s why the “drop all the episodes at once” binge model that Netflix pioneered is no longer the de facto standard. You’ll need a minimum of three months subscribed to get through a new ten-episode season on a weekly schedule. The solution is to wait until all the episodes are posted…but that requires some temperance, and leaves you out of “the conversation” and at risk of spoilers. Again, patience is your friend if you’re trying to maximize your money. A newer wrench in this system is live sports. Previously the exclusive domain of “live TV” bundles, a la Hulu+ Live TV or YouTube Live, streaming services are increasingly claiming major sports events for their own walled gardens. Netflix got an exclusive on NFL games on Christmas day last year, with no way to catch them over-the-air, and many Thursday night games are now exclusive to Amazon Prime Video. …just don’t ask about Monday, or Thursday, or Saturday, or Christmas.  NFL That’s going to be extremely frustrating if you’re subscribed to the ludicrously expensive Sunday Ticket on YouTube, plus ESPN for Monday Night games…you get the picture. Enshittification in action. There’s no real way to counter this from a penny-pinching perspective, though you can always go to a sports bar or a friend’s home (or invite them to log in at your place) to catch a singular game you don’t want to pay for. God, this just sucks If this all seems like a lot of complication and effort just to save some money, it is! That might be the point — the easiest thing to do is just spend more money and make fewer choices. A lot of people are so sick of it they’re just going back to old-fashioned physical media, and who could blame them? The silver lining here is that you have more choices for entertainment than ever before, frustrating as they might be. There are smaller, niche services like Dropout.TV, Crunchyroll, or Brown Sugar which are also more affordable. There are practically endless hours of things to watch on YouTube, and a lot of options to keep from paying Google’s ever-increasing premium to block ads. And if you don’t mind ads, and you’re not picky, there are completely free options like Crackle and Tubi. Droput is great and it’s cheap.Dropout There’s a stunning variety of video games in every shape and shade, and even ways to get them cheaply like Xbox Game Pass. You could also just, you know, do something not on a screen. I suppose that’s theoretically an option. They still make books, right? All joking aside, both your time and your money are limited, no matter how much you have of either. Remember that if a service isn’t earning your money, you should stop giving it to them. I recommend an “entertainment audit” once a year, during which you evaluate what you’re paying for in relation to what you’re using, and seeing if you really want to keep it up. Things are better than they were when your only choices were regular TV and cable. But not by much. And with other factors putting the squeeze on consumers even in affluent countries, I think streaming services that keep offering less and less while they charge more and more are going to meet some of the same harsh realities that the rest of us are dealing with sooner rather than later. Further reading: The best streaming devices of 2025 Read...

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Remember when you first signed up for Netflix streaming? It was nice. A few bucks a month for tons of good movies, some pretty decent original shows, zero ads, and you could finally ditch the nightmare that was cable. Fast forward to 2025, and streaming is the nightmare. It splits up everything you want to watch across a dozen different platforms, all of which now have ads just so they can make you pay to remove them. They remove content constantly, they’re full to bursting with things you don’t care about or need (Hades the video game, a dozen horrible Christmas movies every year, and NFL games on the same ticket, what?) and the price is always, always, always going up. From the consumer perspective, streaming video services are objectively worse than they were a decade ago. Frankly, these services are absolutely milking and bilking their users. There’s no real alternative at this point, at least if you want to watch new shows or the occasional streaming-exclusive movie that isn’t terrible. But there are ways to maximize your enjoyment and minimize your money spent. Step one: quit. Quit early, quit often This isn’t a new idea — I first heard about it from my colleague Eric Ravenscraft years ago, and we’ve advocated for it on TechHive more than once. But it bears repeating. The streaming services don’t have any loyalty to you, and you’ll gain nothing by being loyal to them. Quit your subscriptions constantly, month by month if you want, and move on to the next one. Heck, we’ve said that cancelling your subscription immediately is the one trick all cord cutters should know. The watch-and-bail setup is pretty simple. You sign up for any singular streaming service for just one month, taking advantage of any deals or promotions they’re offering to entice new suckers customers. You go through whatever you want to watch on that service which is exclusive to that service alone. Then you bail, and move on to the next one. Rinse, repeat, try to never be subscribed to more than one at a time. ibreakstock / Shutterstock.com There are some obvious advantages here. Shows and movies financed or produced by one service tend to stay on that service and not move around. Netflix made House of Cards, so you can’t watch House of Cards on Disney+. Hulu made The Handmaid’s Tale, so you can’t watch it on Max. So watch only the exclusive stuff one one service while you have it. These aren’t universally true — Paramount+, “the home of Star Trek,” unceremoniously dumped Prodigy, and Netflix picked it up for its second season. Disney clawed back Daredevil and other Marvel series when it started making its own for Disney+. But in any given month you can generally rely on the exclusive content that’s already on a service to stick around for at least a month. Have a plan The way to maximize this process is to go in with a plan. I keep a list of all the upcoming shows (including returning seasons) that I want to see on any particular service, so when one of them gets three or four piled up, I switch to it and binge as much as my schedule will allow. For example, right now I’ve got Castlevania: Nocturne season 2 and A Man on the Inside qued up on my Netflix list. I’ll wait for at least one more show or movie to catch my eye (like, say, the Knives Out threequel) before I plan my next Netflix month. Streaminganbieter rafapress/Shutterstock.com Also, it doesn’t hurt to memorize the general landing places for movies, if you’re waiting on them to transition from theaters to streaming. Some are obvious: Disney movies (including Marvel, Star Wars, et cetera) will come to Disney+, Paramount movies will come to Paramount+, two to four months after they leave theaters. Warner Bros. movies will eventually land on Max, the service that it owns. Some (but not all) Universal Pictures movies will come to Peacock, as that’s an NBC-Universal brand. Sony Pictures is the only major Hollywood studio without an accompanying streaming service at the moment. And of course, any movie released to theaters explicitly by Netflix, Apple, or Amazon will make their way to those respective services before long. Keep an eye out for deals Obviously this approach will save you some money by keeping your subscriptions down to one or two a month. I like to use that savings to upgrade to ads, which again, are only there to make you pay more so they’ll go away. Enshittification strikes again. But even beyond maximizing your allotment of time and money, you can game this system to be better for you. Streaming services are constantly hungry for new users. They’ll try to entice them with a free week or month of trial service before they charge, or several months at a discount rate. Keep an eye out for those discounts — for example, at the time of writing Hulu will offer you a month of service for free, and Apple TV+ is doing a week. Watch the usual deal sites for these opportunities, especially if one of your singular service lists is getting long. Hulu Sometimes these are restricted to truly “new” users, i.e., if you’ve signed up and unsubscribed before you’re not eligible. You can sometimes get around this by making a new account: use a burner email (or a slightly tweaked one) and a method of payment you haven’t associated with that service before. If you can swing it, these freebies are a great way to watch just one show or movie that’s exclusive to a service you otherwise don’t care about. Infrequently there are some pretty good deals on year-long plans. I’m currently part way through a Paramount+ year-long package — I got it for $30, plus another $30 upgrade to remove ads. That’s half off the price, only $5 a month total, and I watch enough Star Trek releases throughout the year that it makes sense. (At least for the moment — damn you, Paramount, for canceling Lower Decks.) Bundles of media are less appealing to me, if only because they tend to offer diminishing returns. Hulu and ESPN are both owned by Disney, so there’s a package combined with Disney+, naturally. But each overlapping circle of that Venn diagram narrows the appeal to users. It might be different for you, of course, especially if you’re sharing services among a big family. Manufactured headaches The streaming services are aware of these bouncing customers, and trying to minimize that behavior as much as possible. That’s why the “drop all the episodes at once” binge model that Netflix pioneered is no longer the de facto standard. You’ll need a minimum of three months subscribed to get through a new ten-episode season on a weekly schedule. The solution is to wait until all the episodes are posted…but that requires some temperance, and leaves you out of “the conversation” and at risk of spoilers. Again, patience is your friend if you’re trying to maximize your money. A newer wrench in this system is live sports. Previously the exclusive domain of “live TV” bundles, a la Hulu+ Live TV or YouTube Live, streaming services are increasingly claiming major sports events for their own walled gardens. Netflix got an exclusive on NFL games on Christmas day last year, with no way to catch them over-the-air, and many Thursday night games are now exclusive to Amazon Prime Video. …just don’t ask about Monday, or Thursday, or Saturday, or Christmas.  NFL That’s going to be extremely frustrating if you’re subscribed to the ludicrously expensive Sunday Ticket on YouTube, plus ESPN for Monday Night games…you get the picture. Enshittification in action. There’s no real way to counter this from a penny-pinching perspective, though you can always go to a sports bar or a friend’s home (or invite them to log in at your place) to catch a singular game you don’t want to pay for. God, this just sucks If this all seems like a lot of complication and effort just to save some money, it is! That might be the point — the easiest thing to do is just spend more money and make fewer choices. A lot of people are so sick of it they’re just going back to old-fashioned physical media, and who could blame them? The silver lining here is that you have more choices for entertainment than ever before, frustrating as they might be. There are smaller, niche services like Dropout.TV, Crunchyroll, or Brown Sugar which are also more affordable. There are practically endless hours of things to watch on YouTube, and a lot of options to keep from paying Google’s ever-increasing premium to block ads. And if you don’t mind ads, and you’re not picky, there are completely free options like Crackle and Tubi. Droput is great and it’s cheap.Dropout There’s a stunning variety of video games in every shape and shade, and even ways to get them cheaply like Xbox Game Pass. You could also just, you know, do something not on a screen. I suppose that’s theoretically an option. They still make books, right? All joking aside, both your time and your money are limited, no matter how much you have of either. Remember that if a service isn’t earning your money, you should stop giving it to them. I recommend an “entertainment audit” once a year, during which you evaluate what you’re paying for in relation to what you’re using, and seeing if you really want to keep it up. Things are better than they were when your only choices were regular TV and cable. But not by much. And with other factors putting the squeeze on consumers even in affluent countries, I think streaming services that keep offering less and less while they charge more and more are going to meet some of the same harsh realities that the rest of us are dealing with sooner rather than later. Further reading: The best streaming devices of 2025 Read...

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Nope, there’s nothing wrong with your TV—that was an ad you just saw on Amazon Prime Video.  Like many of the big streaming services, Amazon Prime Video has rolled out an ad-supported tier, but it did so a little differently. Rather than raising prices and then giving you the chance to switch to a new, cheaper, “with ads” tier, Amazon added commercials to its standard tier, and you must pay more to turn the ads off.  So, want to get rid of the commercials? Here’s what you do, along with how much it’ll cost you. How to turn off the ads on Amazon Prime Video To nix the commercial breaks on Amazon Prime Video (well, most of them anyway–more on that in a bit), you’ll need to upgrade your existing Amazon Prime account. Here’s how: Go to the Amazon Prime Video website, click your profile icon in the top-right corner of the page, then click Account & Settings. Click the Go Ad-Free button. Confirm your payment and billing info, then click Start subscription. How much ad-free Amazon Prime Video costs If you want to go back to an ad-free Prime Video experience, it’ll cost you an extra $2.99 a month, in addition to the cost of Prime. As you probably know already, Prime Video is included in Amazon Prime, which costs $14.99 a month or $139 a year. Besides Prime Video, Amazon Prime offers such benefits as free shipping for products purchased on Amazon, free Amazon Fresh grocery deliveries, Amazon Music, unlimited Amazon Photo storage, Prime Gaming, Prime Reading, and more.  Ad-free Amazon Prime still has some ads Even before Amazon began rolling out ad breaks to the standard Prime Video tier, some Prime Video content already came with ads, namely Thursday Night Football and other live sporting events. It’s worth noting that if you pony up for the ad-free version of Prime Video, you’ll still see commercial breaks during TNF and live sports.  What you keep–and lose–if you don’t upgrade to ad-free Prime Video Besides the ads, standard Prime Video subscribers lose a couple of key benefits included in the ad-free Prime Video tier. Namely, you’ll miss out on Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos, meaning you’ll have to make do without frame-by-frame HDR mapping as well as immersive 3D audio. That said, all Prime Video subscribers get 4K and standard HDR10 streaming, along with the ability to download videos for offline viewing. Didn’t Prime Video used to be ad-free for everyone? Yep, that’s true. Previous to January 29, 2024, Prime Video content was almost completely ad-free (there were exceptions, which we’ll detail in a moment). As of now, however, the standard Amazon Prime Video plan comes with ads. Looked at another way, current Amazon Prime subscribers are now paying the same amount for Prime Video with ads as they previously did for ad-free Prime Video. For the record, Amazon first announced in September 2023 that ads would be coming to Prime Video.  Purchased and rented Prime Video titles stay ad-free Even if you don’t upgrade your Prime Video plan, any movies or TV shows that you purchase or rent on Prime Video will be ad-free. Why ads came to Prime Video Amazon added commercials to Prime Video for the same reason most of the other big streamers did: It wants more revenue. Wall Street has been demanding profitability from the big streaming services, and offering cheaper, ad-supported tiers is an easy way to boost income.  Indeed, Amazon is late to the “with ads” party. Max debuted HBO Max “With Ads” (back when it was still called “HBO Max”) more than three years ago. Netflix finally went the ad-supported way in late 2022, while Disney+ teed up its own ad-supported tier shortly afterward.  That leaves Apple TV+ as the only big streamer without an ad-supported tier, but many expect Apple to roll out a cheaper Apple TV+ “with ads” plan sooner or later. Read...

For the past five years running, I’ve written an annual check-in on ATSC 3.0 (or “NextGen TV”), the broadcast standard that’s supposed to greatly improve over-the-air TV. Every year, it’s been a story of baby steps. As 2025 gets underway, that story hasn’t really changed. While ATSC 3.0 is starting to deliver more of what it initially promised—most notably big events in HDR—you might still need to go out of your way to get a compatible TV or external tuner box. ATSC 3.0’s interactive elements remain limited as well, with one promising effort having stalled over the last year. More on that later. All of which means that the existing ATSC 1.0 standard, which is supported by nearly all televisions today, will stay viable for years to come. The bigger question is whether over-the-air TV will remain viable along with it. A quick ATSC 3.0 refresher When the broadcast TV industry first announced ATSC 3.0 in 2019, it touted a handful of key benefits: Up to 4K-resolution video High dynamic range (HDR) video Dolby Atmos and DTS:X immersive audio formats Dolby dialog enhancement Additional stations and on-demand video, discovered over the air but delivered over the internet The standard also comes with some pitfalls for viewers: Its internet-connected nature allows broadcasters to collect viewing data and serve targeted ads over the air, and its use of DRM puts new limits on the ability to record local channels. To access ATSC 3.0, your local broadcast stations need to offer it, and you need either a TV or an external tuner box that supports the new standard. But even if you meet those criteria, your local stations might only offer a subset of ATSC 3.0 features. Getting all the pieces into place has been a slog, with only modest progress made each year. Hardware support stalls If you buy a new TV in 2025, there’s a good chance it won’t support ATSC 3.0. Many TV makers only offer it in higher-end sets, and some have even scaled back or halted ATSC 3.0 support after offering it in previous years. Samsung, for instance, stopped shipping ATSC 3.0 tuners in its OLED TVs last year and will exclude them again from its 2025 OLED sets. (The company still offers ATSC 3.0 on its Neo QLED line.) LG won’t be bringing ATSC 3.0 back to its TVs this year either, after dropping support in 2024 sets over a patent dispute. ATSC 3.0 has brought on some new supporters: RCA will offer ATSC 3.0 in its 55- and 65-inch Mini LED TVs for 2025, and Panasonic has included ATSC 3.0 support in the Fire TV OLED and LED sets that debuted late last year. Not much else has changed. While Hisense includes ATSC 3.0 tuners in most (but not all) of its Mini-LED TVs and laser projectors, TCL and Sony reserve the feature for some of their higher-end sets. Shipment projections from the CTA reflect this reality: The tech trade group previously expected 5.5 million ATSC 3.0 TVs to ship in 2024, but the actual figure was around 4 million, and now it expects just 5 million shipments for 2025. If your TV doesn’t support ATSC 3.0, you can access it through an external tuner, but the cost remains high. ADTH sells a NextGen TV tuner for $90, although it requires an internet connection to decrypt ATSC 3.0 channels that use DRM. Zinwell’s tuner with offline DRM support, which is sold by Channel Master, costs more at $149. Anne Schelle, managing director of the Pearl TV broadcast consortium, told me at CES that we may see a sub-$50 tuner, but not until sometime next year. Over-the-air DVR support is limited as well. The most compelling option this year could come from an upstart device brand called MyVelo TV, which plans to launch a $100 Android TV box with ATSC 3.0 playback and DVR features this spring. For now, though, Bitrouter’s ZapperBox M1 is the only complete solution that can play and record encrypted channels. Bitrouter has started shipping satellite boxes for whole-home DVR, but the company’s founder and president, Gopal Miglani, says streaming encrypted channels or recordings from one tuner box to another is still a few months away. The MyVelo TV Premiere box and plug-in ATSC 3.0 tuner.MyVelo TV You can see a list of ATSC 3.0-compatible TVs and tuner boxes on the WatchNextGenTV website. OTA HDR expands 4K remains largely non-existent on ATSC 3.0 channels. Delivering broadcasts at that resolution requires a lot of extra bandwidth, which isn’t feasible while stations are still simulcasting in ATSC 1.0. In the meantime, broadcasters are focusing on HDR, which provides a more vibrant picture by allowing light and dark images to convey more color detail. More than 80 million homes now have access to at least one over-the-air channel with HDR support, and some stations are starting to support either Dolby Vision or HDR10+, both of which provide more accurate color adjustments on a per-scene basis. The upcoming Super Bowl LIX on Fox should be a major showcase for over-the-air HDR, although it won’t be a native HDR broadcast. Instead it’ll be up-converted from standard dynamic range, just like Fox’s live stream on Tubi. (The latter, though, will also be upscaled to 4K, versus 1080p for Fox’s over-the-air broadcast.) The WatchNextGenTV site lets you look up nearby ATSC 3.0 channels with HDR support.Jared Newman / Foundry To see which ATSC 3.0 stations support HDR in your area, check the WatchNextGenTV website. Unfortunately there’s no way to tell which stations offer HDR10+ or Dolby Vision unless your TV provides this information. Waiting for interactivity At the CES trade show last year, a U.K.-based company called Roxi showed off an impressive demo of ATSC 3.0’s interactive features. Using the standard over-the-air channel guide, users could tune into one of Roxi’s live streaming music channels, then flip through row of additional genre-based channel options. Rob Lewis, Roxi’s CEO, said at the time that it was partnering with the major broadcaster Sinclair to launch ATSC 3.0 music channels around the country by that March. One year later, and those plans have not materialized. Sky News reported last year that Roxi was racing to raise money, and was later nearing a deal to sell its assets to a new company called FastStream. (Roxi had previously used the “FastStream” name for its underlying technology.) The company has not responded to requests for comment. For now, ATSC is pointing to other interactivity advancements instead. Spokesperson Dave Arland said that roughly 100 ATSC 3.0 channels now offer some level of interactivity—which can be as simple as local weather forecasts—and pointed to pause-and-rewind features that NBC has been offering on its owned-and-operated stations. ATSC will also begin offering a “starter” application framework that will help more broadcasters offer basic features such as traffic and weather alerts. (It will also help facilitate the aforementioned data collection on people’s viewing habits.) Meanwhile, a firm called GameLoop hopes to deliver casual games through ATSC 3.0 later this year. Still, it’s unclear whether these features will do much to move the needle for ATSC 3.0. Bitrouter’s Gopal Miglani says interactive features aren’t a major priority for the ZapperBox, which doesn’t support them currently, because the demand isn’t there. “Not a single customer asks for them,” he said. “It’s not going to help me sell more boxes.” Should you care about ATSC 3.0? ATSC 1.0 isn’t going away anytime soon. FCC rules require broadcasters to simulcast their main stations using the old standard until at least July 2027, and at the current rate of ATSC 3.0 adoption, an extension seems possible. In the meantime, ATSC 3.0 faces some more existential questions. For instance, if you can stream the Super Bowl for free in 4K HDR on Tubi, why bother with an over-the-air ATSC 3.0 version that doesn’t support 4K (and, depending on tuner hardware, might still require an internet connection)? If the major networks are already delivering breakthrough interactivity in their streaming apps, what more could ATSC 3.0’s interactive channels offer? More importantly, what’s the future for over-the-air TV as networks dial back programming investments and streaming services gobble up more sports rights? Without clear answers to those questions, ATSC 3.0 probably won’t rejuvenate over-the-air TV, but those local broadcasts still have value in their current form. Thus my advice is the same as it’s always been: Go with whatever TV or over-the-air DVR best suits your needs today, whether it supports the new broadcast standard or not. Sign up for Jared’s Cord Cutter Weekly newsletter to get columns like this one every Friday. Read...

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Streamers love to fiddle with their navigation menus, moving this menu bar here and shifting this button there, all in the name of “streamlining” the experience. The changes are typically just different, not better, but Max’s latest menu revamp at least adds something new.  The most obvious change on the new Max navigation is that the top menu bar, which housed such items as Home, Series, Movies, HBO, B-R Sports, and News, has been nixed.  Those top “content lenses” have now shifted over to the left-side menu, meaning you’ll no longer have to jump from one side of the screen to the other when navigating the various menu items.  Sounds logical—although as The Streamable points out, the Max change is essentially the reverse of what Netflix did last year, when it moved its main navigation bar from the left side of the page to the top. (Sigh.)  The new Max design (drag the slider left to reveal) moves the top navigation to the side, while also adding What’s New and Categories. Aside from juggling the location of its existing menu items, the new Max navigation adds a couple of new options to the mix: Categories and What’s New.  Categories is just what it sounds like, with a Max press release saying the option offers “a new pathway for users to browse titles by genre, brand, and thematic collections.” That’s a pretty standard navigational feature—Netflix and most of the other big streamers let you browse by category too, in one configuration or another—but we’ll take it.  More interesting is the What’s New option, a “new navigation page showcasing content that has recently arrived on the platform, as well as those coming or leaving soon.”  What’s New should be a handy way to keep tabs on recently added movies and shows on Max—and more importantly, to catch titles that are poised to leave the service before they’re gone.  Veteran Max users on Reddit are saying that the just-added What’s New option hearkens back to the “leaving soon” section on the former HBO Max app, back before Max underwent its name change.   Max says it’s been testing its new navigation layout in Latin America, and that the revamped design will go worldwide in a “phased rollout approach.” Read...