It came down to the wire, but Disney+ has finally added its last missing piece. Disney’s new streaming service will be available on all Amazon devices, including Amazon Fire TV boxes, Amazon Fire tablets, and Fire TV Edition smart TVs, when it launches on November 12, 2019, according to a press release.
Earlier, Disney had confirmed that the Disney+ app would come to Roku, Chromecast, and Apple TV boxes, iOS and Android smartphones and tablets, and Xbox One and PlayStation 4 game consoles. However, the Amazon family of streaming devices, which make up around 29% of all streaming hardware in American homes, wasn’t listed, with reports claiming that Disney and Amazon were fighting over ad revenue.
Any potential differences seem to be resolved. Not only is Disney+ headed to Amazon devices on launch day, but it’ll support Amazon’s voice assistant, Alexa, and its programming will appear in the general Amazon Fire search results.
Disney+ is a new streaming service from Disney, which owns 21st Century Fox’s former properties, Marvel Entertainment, Lucasfilm (the home of Star Wars), National Geographic, Pixar, and more. At launch, Disney+ will have more than 600 television shows and movies from across all of those brands, including both classic older films and original series like the live-action Star Wars show The Mandalorian. A Disney+ subscription costs $7 a month. A one-week trial will be available on launch day.
Disney+ isn’t the only big streaming service launching in the next year. Apple TV+ (which isn’t currently available on Amazon Fire devices) debuted on November 1 to middling reviews, while WarnerMedia and NBCUniversal will release HBO Max and Peacock respectively in spring 2020. Meanwhile, existing services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon’s own Amazon Prime Video continue to thrive, offering consumers deep and varied libraries that mix legacy content with original series and feature films.
In other words, if you’re devoted to watching every big show on the market, your life is about to get much, much more expensive. Thankfully, deals on Disney+ can be found if you keep an eye out for them — and now you won’t have to buy any new hardware to watch it.
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.