Halloween is the perfect excuse to revisit some horror favorites, and Netflix has a few additions that fit the season. From supernatural scares and gory survival thrillers to creature features and classic slashers, the platform hosts a variety of titles you can pick from.
Reboots and revivals have a bit of a reputation for being unnecessary cash grabs, but every now and then, a familiar series gets a second life that proves there's still plenty of value in revisiting an old favorite. Netflix has had its fair share of successful revivals, bringing back beloved franchises for the longtime fans and a new generation. From nostalgic sequels to fresh takes on classic shows, some of these reboots have managed to capture what made the originals so special.
It may be a cliché, but my kids really do start asking if we're there yet about ten minutes into every road trip. One of the best ways to keep them quiet is to let them watch one of their favorite shows or movies on a tablet. Netflix has some great options that keep my kids entertained for hours.
T-Mobile is introducing new wireless plans that change how customers get perks and phone deals, giving them a set number of “Picks” to spend on a new phone or an expanded menu of extras that they can swap out every 90 days.
The company says it will be the only carrier that lets customers choose which benefits come with their plan. Instead of fixed bundles of extras plus a discount on a new phone for each line, customers get a single allowance to spend on options ranging from Netflix and ESPN to Xbox Game Pass, Google’s Gemini AI and Delta SkyMiles.
One catch is that phones and perks come out of the same pool of Picks, so a family that wants a new phone on every line may have little left to put toward extras.
The plans, called T-Mix, will be available in November. Existing customers can switch or keep their current plans, said Allan Samson, T-Mobile’s chief marketing officer.
The move comes as T-Mobile’s customer growth slows and new rivals emerge, including SpaceX, a current T-Mobile partner that is reportedly planning a wireless service of its own. T-Mobile’s stock is down about 26% this year, including a drop of nearly 8% on Friday after a report on SpaceX’s wireless plans.
The Bellevue, Wash.-based company has relied for years on “Un-carrier” moves — splashy changes that defy industry conventions — to capture consumer attention.
Samson described T-Mix as the latest of those moves, aimed at what the company’s research identified as a top customer complaint: paying for extras they don’t use. Picks are “essentially a form of currency,” he said. “You can use them for anything you want.”
A subscription hub: With the new plans, T-Mobile is adding a much larger menu of subscriptions in an attempt to turn its plans into a hub for streaming, music, gaming and AI services.
Along with longtime perks such as Netflix, Hulu and Apple TV, the new options include ESPN’s Unlimited streaming service, Xbox Game Pass, YouTube Premium, Apple Music and Google’s Gemini AI subscriptions.
The company says people spend far more on subscriptions than they realize. In T-Mobile’s research, customers estimated spending about $90 a month, Samson said. A separate study by C+R Research puts average spending at $219.
A big part of the idea is to consolidate that spending and let customers move among services more freely, picking up a streaming service for a new show, for example, or adding satellite coverage for a summer trip, then dropping it afterward.
Customers can make those changes every 90 days in the T-Life app. T-Mobile texts them when a 10-day change window opens, and their choices roll over if they do nothing. T-Mobile handles the switch between services in its plans, although the fine print notes that customers may need to initially cancel existing subscriptions on their own to avoid paying twice.
T-Mobile buys subscriptions below retail prices through deals it negotiates with streaming services and other partners. That lets T-Mobile include the services in its plans for less than it would cost customers to subscribe on their own.
Phones vs. perks: For consumers, one trade-off for the newfound flexibility is that phones and perks now draw from the same finite supply.
Customers who hold on to their phones or choose less-expensive models can put that value toward streaming and other extras, but a family that wants a new phone on every line may not have enough Picks to cover them.
Whether consumers end up getting more or less for their money depends largely on how many lines they have and how often they buy new phones. Smaller accounts that keep their phones are likely to come out ahead. Larger families that upgrade every line may pay more and get less, because T-Mobile is also dropping its long-standing free third line.
Samson estimated that accounts with one or two lines will pay $5 to $10 a month less than on T-Mobile’s current plans, while a five-line account might pay $10 to $15 more. Across all of its customers, he said, pricing is roughly the same.
T-Mobile says a family of three on its Loaded plan, which costs $200 a month ($2,400 a year) with AutoPay before taxes and fees, gets more than $4,320 a year in plan features and benefits, based on its own valuation.
The math behind the Picks: Customers choose from three plans, with base prices for customers on AutoPay, before taxes and fees:
Adding lines adds Picks, and Picks apply to the whole account, so one Netflix subscription covers the family. Unused Picks don’t accumulate from one quarter to the next.
Most extras cost one or two Picks. Ad-free Netflix costs three, and ESPN Unlimited costs four. Phones cost Picks, too: two for an iPhone and three for an iPhone Pro, Samson said, tied up for the three-year payment plan. A four-line account on the More plan gets seven Picks, not enough for a new iPhone on every line.
No price guarantee: The terms say T-Mobile may change the benefits and the number of Picks each one requires at any time, with changes taking effect the following quarter. Customers who change a partner benefit outside a change window may have to pay a fee. Once a year, customers will also be asked to reselect their benefits.
The launch comes less than a week after New York Attorney General Letitia James announced a settlement with T-Mobile over its 2017 “Price Guarantee” plans, which promised customers the carrier would “never change the price you pay.”
T-Mobile raised prices on those plans by about $5 a line in 2024. It agreed to offer refunds and other options that the attorney general’s office expects to provide more than $38 million in value, and to freeze prices for affected customers until at least 2029.
Asked about price protections, Samson said T-Mix plans don’t come with a guarantee. T-Mobile can control its network costs, he said, but not what partners such as Apple and Xbox charge, although it has multiyear deals in place.
“We didn’t want to be disingenuous,” he said, adding that partner prices are set for the next couple of years but “I can’t tell you what’s going to happen in 2030.”
The Un-carrier playbook: T-Mobile launched its Un-carrier campaign in 2013 by dropping two-year contracts. Samson said the company makes an Un-carrier move only when it sees a big customer pain point and believes it has something unique to offer.
T-Mobile has been testing T-Mix since Oct. 1 in 37 stores in Kansas City. Only about 70% of Picks were chosen in the store at the time of purchase, Samson said, in part because families wanted to go home and decide together, and some customers were saving Picks for phones coming out later.
Details of the plans leaked in recent weeks, first reported by The Mobile Report and later by PhoneArena.
Verizon lets customers add discounted streaming bundles to its plans for an extra monthly charge. Samson said the difference with T-Mix is that the benefits are included in the plan price.
Upholding the company’s tradition of jabbing at rivals, he described one competitor’s approach as “naked connectivity.” The other, he said, will “throw you a nice phone and then leave you alone. And every now and then, there’s a rate increase.”
The plans are also one of the first major consumer moves under CEO Srini Gopalan, who succeeded Mike Sievert in the role last November.
T-Mobile’s account growth has slowed this year. In the second quarter, it added a net 277,000 postpaid accounts (households and businesses that pay a monthly bill rather than prepaying for service). That was down 13% from 318,000 a year earlier.
The company reports third-quarter results Wednesday, two days after Verizon.
SpaceX is also reportedly seeking cell sites to build a rival wireless network, even though T-Mobile’s T-Satellite service runs on SpaceX’s Starlink.
Samson, who joined Sprint in 2016 and stayed on after its 2020 merger with T-Mobile, became CMO earlier this year. He previously ran the company’s broadband business and was CMO of T-Mobile for Business. He said T-Mix has been his pet project since taking his current role, starting with interviews with hundreds of consumers.
Samson said it’s too early to say how T-Mix will affect the business. “Ask me in six months once I have about six months under my wings nationwide,” he said, “and then we’ll have some actuals to report.”
October is slowly coming to an end, but Halloween is still a top priority for Netflix. The streamer has plenty of horror hits for spooky season, including The Black Phone and Fear Street. I don't mind watching something that can scare me, but I prefer to stream thrillers.
Spooky season has officially kicked off, and this month, there are a lot of scares in store for Netflix viewers. From classic horror hits to new-age thrillers, the platform's horror collection is extensive enough to keep your watch list loaded until Halloween.
Who's up for some brilliant documentaries? At the moment, there are a few fresh Netflix documentaries trending in the Top 10. One of those is Tyson, a limited series about one of the "baddest men on the planet," Mike Tyson. On the comedy side, Norm Macdonald's documentary is winning over viewers thanks to the late comedian's indelible humor.
As reported by Music Business Worldwide, Spotify appears to be stepping up enforcement of existing policies regarding Family and Duo subscription plans by requiring users to scan a QR code in person on the plan manager's device in order to maintain access to it. Those who fail to scan the address verification QR code within seven days will see their account demoted to the free tier and be barred from joining any other Duo or Family plan for 12 months.
Spotify's QR code plan enforcement.
Credit:
Spotify
Spotify's support documentation verifies the policy after users on Reddit began posting reports of receiving the QR prompt. The enforcement stems from Spotify's requirement that family plan members reside at the same address—a seemingly reasonable policy in concept. But what if you have a child away in college, a spouse who works on the road, or any number of other circumstances that might see families separated by physical distance? The policy could extend beyond friend groups looking to save a buck, affecting actual families who thought they were using the program as intended.
Goldman Sachs analysts, in their October 15 Music in the Air: 10 Years On report, made available by HITS Daily Double, estimate that "a meaningful share of family plan users are not actual household members, but rather friends sharing a plan to reduce costs." The report goes on to add, "We see additional monetization upside from tightening household verification on multi-user plans. Most family plans require members to reside at the same address, but enforcement has been minimal in practice."
© Spotify
With so many new releases coming to Netflix every week, it’s easy to miss some of the older movies in its catalog. I like going back through them for these award-winning picks, and this week, there are a few interesting titles worth adding to your watchlist.
The Netflix machine keeps on pumping out shows. One of the streamer's notable advantages over its competition is its ability to turn licensed shows into hits. Look at what happened with Suits, a show that soared to new popularity in 2023 on Netflix despite having concluded its run on the USA Network in 2019.
Netflix makes it easy to stream movies and TV shows, but watching them offline can be less straightforward. You may want to watch a favorite film while traveling, play it on a device without the Netflix app, or organize your video collection on an external drive. In these situations, saving a movie as an MP4 file can be appealing.
The post How To Download Netflix Movies To MP4 For Offline Viewing [2026] first appeared on Redmond Pie.
Director Greta Gerwig could have made pretty much any movie she wanted after 2023's Barbie racked up nearly $1.5 billion at the box office. She chose to make Narnia: The Magician's Nephew for Netflix, an adaptation of C.S. Lewis' sixth novel in The Chronicles of Narnia series. Gerwig has said little publicly about the film, other than that she was inspired by 1960s-era David Bowie, although she said it would not be a musical. Netflix just released the trailer, set to "Stairway to Heaven," and it's quite the psychedelic ride.
The first book in the series, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, was published in 1950, and Lewis did not initially intend to write any more Narnia adventures. But then an acquaintance asked how the London lamppost ended up in the middle of Narnia's woodland, and Lewis was intrigued enough by the question to start a prequel, The Magician's Nephew, in order to find an answer. Lewis found it difficult to finish the book, however, writing four other Narnia books first before completing The Magician's Nephew in 1955.
There have been several adaptations, in various media, of The Chronicles of Narnia, most recently the early 2000s film franchise adapting the first three novels in the series. Those films showed diminishing returns, however, and by 2011 the film rights had expired. There were initial plans to adapt the fourth novel, The Silver Chair.
© YouTube/Netflix
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