There's not much in the way of slick and splashy new documentaries premiering on HBO Max as we head down the home stretch of July, and you know what? That's fine. Few streaming services have a better track record when it comes to documentaries, and a bit of a lull in new releases is sometimes just the excuse you need to dive into the archives.
July is almost out the door, folks, but Netflix isn't taking its foot off the gas just yet, adding a handful of new TV shows to binge, if you've already ripped through I Will Find You, The Hawk, and maybe even Little House on the Prairie. There's still plenty worth watching for U.S. subscribers, including a series so new it just landed yesterday.
Roku is raising the prices for its streaming sticks and boxes by up to 60 percent.
Roku has updated its website with the new prices. Currently, it is still selling its streaming players at their old MSRPs but lists those prices as sale prices. The new prices are:
Roku is even upping the price for a bundle that includes a Streaming Stick Plus and a one-month subscription to Fox One. As recently as July 20, Roku listed the bundle at $60 with a sale price of $25, according to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Now, the bundle carries an $80 MSRP and $45 sale price.
© Roku
Refreshing your Netflix feed and finding new titles to watch is always exciting. But when you're on the lookout for a movie that's a little different from your usual recommendations, it can be surprisingly difficult to know where to start.
For more than five decades, HBO/HBO Max has mastered the serious business of fire-breathing dragons, drug warfare, and gangsters sleeping with the fishes. But when you scroll past all that brooding, though, you'll find the service is also quietly stacked with all kinds of comedies, and right now, U.S. subscribers have four of them right at their fingertips for a weekend full of laughs.
It's hard to believe, but we've hit the tail end of July, when Netflix's new releases run dry until the calendar flips into August, when a new season of Alone: Australia lands alongside Big Chicken: A Fast Food Conspiracy, in which comedian Mo Gilligan eats nothing but fried chicken for a month.
Amazon announced today that it has updated some versions of its Prime Video app to include direct access to its cloud-based Luna gaming platform.
The business goal is to solve Luna’s awareness problem and bring new users to the platform. Many Prime members don’t know the gaming service is included with their membership.
Consumers in the US and UK who have both a Prime subscription and a Fire TV can now launch Luna directly from the Prime Video app, where it can be found in its own dedicated tab in the UI. Prime subscribers who launch Luna in the app will get direct access to a library of both casual and mainstream “AAA” video games for no additional cost and without having to exit the app.
“Effectively, we relaunched last October, taking a bunch of the value of Luna that had been behind a paywall… We pushed it into the Prime membership, as a way of providing great value and trying to grow our business,” Jeff Gattis, GM of gaming at Amazon, told GeekWire.
Players on Luna can stream an assortment of games to their TV or browser via Amazon’s cloud servers, using a smartphone as a controller if they don’t have a compatible gamepad. Luna’s current library ranges from established mainstream hits like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Dispatch, and Fallout 4 to an assortment of casual-friendly exclusive titles like Amazon’s own Courtroom Chaos.
Since that relaunch, Gattis said, the company has “basically 5x’d” its player base.
“The question for us is, how do you build upon that?” he said. “How do we let 200 million-plus Prime members worldwide know that they have this great benefit where you can play $70 games inside your Prime membership at no additional cost? One of our biggest challenges today remains that people don’t know the [Luna] benefit exists.”
While Luna was previously available to Prime subscribers via web browser and a couple of other types of smart TVs, it was a standalone service that required users to seek it out on its own. By shifting it into its own tab on the Prime Video app, Amazon’s hope is to drive up awareness that, well, Luna is there at all.
“It’ll start on Fire TV, but obviously our end state is to roll out to more countries and more devices, both first-party and third-party,” Gattis said. “Eventually we’ll be everywhere that Prime Video is.”
The integration of Luna with Prime could also potentially bring back the largely-abandoned practice of video game movie tie-ins. Fans of this summer’s Masters of the Universe reboot can watch the film on Prime Video, then switch to Luna to play Masters of the Universe: Legends Unite, a strategic deckbuilding game that’s currently exclusive to Luna. This kind of transmedia synergy used to be a part of every big summer action movie, but it’s largely fallen by the wayside since the 2010s.
Luna originally debuted in 2020 as a subscription-based cloud service. Subscribers could pay a monthly fee for access to over 100 video games, which they could play through their browser by streaming them from Amazon’s servers.
Back then, Luna was Amazon’s entry into what was shaping up to be a publisher-driven “battle for the cloud,” with companies like Google and Nvidia all launching their own game streaming services. Over time, however, the cloud’s impact on gaming hasn’t matched its early hype.
More recently, the component crunch has driven up the price of consoles and graphics cards, and that plays into Amazon’s bet on Luna.
Gattis said the cloud has been “technology ahead of its time,” in part because the industry aimed it at the wrong people, pitching it as a direct replacement for consoles and gaming PCs.
“That’s a heavy lift to ask somebody like myself,” he said. “I’ve invested both emotionally and financially in my Series X console and my 5090 graphics card. I’m happy.”
Amazon is catering to everyone else: players unlikely to buy a gaming PC or a current-generation console, let alone the next generation of gaming hardware at even higher prices. For the first time, Gattis said, there are “a lot more people who are going to think about the cloud as a viable alternative to $1,500 hardware.”
With 70 live-action feature films under his belt, Oscar winner Matt Damon is one of today’s best actors. His unique talents, sharp intellect, and extreme versatility have turned him into a bit of a cinematic unicorn. With The Odyssey currently in theaters, now is the perfect time to explore some of the A-lister’s best movies of all time, from leading-man blockbusters and hard-hitting historical pictures to giddy ensemble bro-fests, one-man showcases, and creepy thrillers.
There's a reason Paramount+'s fast-paced new movie Wardriver sits at the top of the streamer's Top 10 rankings—it's a thriller, and people love them. In fact, according to FlixPatrol, most of the biggest streaming services currently have thrillers among their top five because they offer mystery, crank up the tension, and dare you to look away lest you miss something.
When it comes to in-flight entertainment, there are two kinds of flyers—the ones who gamble on the random crud on the seat-back screen or the airplane Wi-Fi and those who download their entertainment the night before. Be the second kind. TV shows offer the ultimate flexibility when flying. You can watch a single episode between the drink cart and your nap, or binge a whole season on a long-haul flight—it's your call.
Paramount+ subscribers in the U.S. can look forward to boldly going where no one has gone before, with Captain Pike and the crew of the Starship Enterprise in the fourth season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds this Thursday. But before then, if you're hunting for a flick or two for movie night this week, I've got some primo selections below.
As we round the corner into the final straight of July, Netflix still has a lot of life left in it when it comes to options that make for good weekday movie nights. Netflix U.S. viewers seem to still be flocking to the disaster doc, Shipwrecked: Nightmare at Sea, that we covered in our weekly roundup of documentaries, as it still sits in the streamer's Top 3, but if a doc isn't what you're looking for, read on.
Apple Music now costs $11.99 per month in the US, while Family and selected Apple One plans are also rising. Here is what subscribers will pay.
The post Apple Raises Apple Music and Apple One Prices appeared first on TechRepublic.
Netflix has its fair share of exclusive titles in the form of Netflix Originals, but of all the titles in the niche library, only a few can truly be recognized for being groundbreaking. Some pioneered new film-making techniques, others raised the bar for animation, and a few have reshaped television today.
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