Apple TV has quietly stumbled onto a pretty good streaming strategy: make great original shows and movies, then occasionally throw some genuinely great older movies into the mix. As part of its latest content drop, Apple TV has added a collection of classic and popular movies that subscribers can watch without paying an additional rental fee. The selection varies by region, but titles spotted so far include Arrival, The Martian, E.T., Gone Girl, Zodiac, Titanic, The Sixth Sense, The Bourne Identity, and Catch Me If You Can.
What makes this move interesting is the quality of some of these movies. Arrival, for instance, isn’t just another sci-fi movie. Denis Villeneuve’s thoughtful take on first contact uses language and time to tell a surprisingly emotional story, while The Martian turns being stranded on Mars into an unusually optimistic survival adventure.
Then there’s Gone Girl and Zodiac, two David Fincher films that have become modern thriller staples. E.T. needs almost no introduction. The Sixth Sense remains one of those movies where knowing the twist somehow doesn’t make watching it again any less fun.
The catch is that the collection isn’t necessarily permanent or identical everywhere. Users have reported different selections depending on their country, and some of these movies have appeared on Apple TV before as temporary additions.
That’s actually a pretty interesting development for Apple. The service has built its reputation around original programming, with shows such as Severance, Ted Lasso, and The Studio emerging as critical hits. Its movie ambitions have also grown considerably, with F1: The Movie becoming a major box-office success before landing on Apple TV. Apple says the film became the highest-grossing sports movie of all time and earned major awards recognition.
Apple’s 2026 slate continues that push, with new original series and films arriving throughout the year alongside live sports including Formula 1. Adding beloved third-party movies therefore feels less like Apple randomly filling catalogue gaps and more like another piece of the same strategy: give people more genuinely good things to watch.
Honestly speaking, this could actually be one of the smartest things Apple TV can do. Netflix built its identity around having an enormous library, while Apple has largely gone the other way, focusing on a smaller collection of high-profile originals. A rotating selection of excellent older movies fits that approach surprisingly well.
Apple doesn’t need thousands of films gathering digital dust. It just needs enough good ones to make opening the app feel like there’s always something worth watching. And that’s perhaps the best thing about this latest addition. Apple TV doesn’t suddenly have everything. It just has more stuff you’d actually want to watch.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?
YouTube is changing how its Home page works, giving viewers more control over what shows up there and making some of the app’s most-used sections easier to reach. Custom Feeds are now replacing the existing topic chips for eligible users, while YouTube is also testing a redesigned top bar on mobile that moves Subscriptions closer to the Home feed.
YouTube first started experimenting with Custom Feeds earlier this year, letting you type out what you wanted to watch and turning that request into its own stream of recommendations. Now, the feature is starting to look less like a side experiment and more like something YouTube actually wants people to use as part of their everyday Home page.