Pets, like children, come with the responsibility to keep them happy, healthy, and mentally stimulated - obligations I readily committed to before getting my cat, Trevor. I work from home, so he's never lonely, and play with him using a mountain of toys at every opportunity outside of my working hours. But younger cats can be incredibly demanding of your attention. I simply don't have the capacity to physically entertain Trevor every time he yowls at me (constantly) or distract him from chewing every cable he can get his paws on (also constantly).

Unlike children, one of the perks of having a blissfully simple animal is that there are far f …

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ABC News has officially introduced Searched, a livestreamed show that highlights stories people are discussing on social media and searching on the web, as reported earlier by Variety. Though the network just announced the show now, Searched began airing on the ABC News Live streaming channel in April, which appears on both Disney Plus and Hulu.

In the press release, ABC News says Searched "pulls real-time data from the top search engines and social media platforms to provide topical news for the audience." A recent episode of Searched highlighted an Illinois Powerball winner, NBA star Russell Westbrook's retirement, and Tropical Storm Lala …

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YouTube will soon count a view as soon as a video starts to play, lining up with the system used by Instagram, TikTok, and its Shorts videos. The update will go into effect on August 24th, "which means creators will likely see their total view counts increase faster moving forward," the platform says.

Instagram and TikTok similarly add a view to a video when it starts to play or replay, while X counts a view when a user watches a video for at least two seconds. YouTube applied Instagram and TikTok's view-counting method to Shorts last year.

YouTube says it's going to keep its original view-counting method under an "engaged views" metric in …

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For better or worse, the state of the contemporary game industry has always been reflected in Rockstar's blockbuster Grand Theft Auto series. The mid-2000s push toward gritty realism (i.e. putting a brown filter on everything), the emergence of ruthlessly exploitative live-service elements, even the 3D sandbox tropes we now take for granted — GTA has always been a time capsule of the triple-A gaming sphere at large. — Read the rest

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The annual Disney fan event showed off the cast of Marvel’s X-Men movie, plus a new trailer for Avengers: Doomsday, and our first look at the VisionQuest TV show for Disney Plus. For Star Wars fans, there was a teaser trailer for season two of Ahsoka, plus a special look at Star Wars: Starfighter with an appearance from Ryan Gosling.

Other new announcements included a few updates about Pixar, The Simpsons, Bluey, and others you can find below.

• Disney is giving Tomorrowland a long-overdue update.
• Matt Groening lets slip that Simpsons: Hit & Run might be making a comeback
• Pixar is getting spooky in Ghost Market.
• Disney is making a Kingdom Hearts anime.
• The Bluey Movie teaser shows Keepy Uppy in Disneyfied CG.
• Star Wars: Ahsoka season 2 and Starfighter get teased at D23
• A new Avengers: Doomsday trailer focuses on Robert Downey Jr.’s Doom.
• The first trailer for VisionQuest reunites Paul Bettany and James Spader.
• Marvel reveals the new X-Men cast, including Inde Navarrette and Adam Driver
• Kingdom Hearts will be featured at Disney’s big D23 expo in August.
• Square Enix teases Kingdom Hearts 4 at Nintendo Direct

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 140, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, don't forget to hydrate, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I've been reading about Will Ferrell and Fabrizio Romano and Heather Cox Richardson, scrolling and scrolling through Ordinary Abundance, watching Avatar Aang (which is as good as you said it was), finally getting proficient in CapCut, obsessing over the latest scandal unearthed by PTFO, rewatching Tires now that the third season is out, trying Spark's AI tools for solving my inbox (so far… meh), revisiting …

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The version of The X-Files: I Want to Believe that premiered in 2008 was not exactly the movie co-writer / director Chris Carter intended to make. Carter wanted to bring agents Mulder and Scully back to the big screen with a grisly story about faith and the supernatural. But executives at 20th Century Fox felt that Carter's ideas were too dark, and he was pushed to turn the project into a PG-13 feature. Now, almost two decades after I Want to Believe's theatrical debut, Carter is back with a new director's cut of the film for Hulu that's much closer to his original vision.

"We got to tell a good X-Files story," Carter said of the original …

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Netflix plans to shut down two of its gaming studios, as reported by Game File and Variety, as it makes a bigger shift toward party games and titles streamed to TVs.

One of the studios being shut down is Night School Studio, creators of the Oxenfree series. Netflix bought Night School in 2021, and it just released a horror experience called Unhinged for TVs and launched a mobile game in 2025 tied to Black Mirror. The other studio that's set to close is Helsinki-based Moonloot Games, which was created in 2022.

Netflix's big push into TV-based games kicked off late last year and was a pivot from a mobile-focused approach that featured presti …

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Google TV Freeplay, the company's free, ad-supported streaming service, now supports video on demand. Instead of tuning into Google TV Freeplay's selection of always-on channels, you can now choose from over 10,000 shows and movies to watch whenever you want.

The update introduces titles like Lady Bird, Seventeen Again, and Hell's Kitchen, according to Google's announcement. The company has also expanded its live TV lineup to include more than 300 channels dedicated to news, sports, reality TV, true crime, and more. Some of these new channels include World of Love Island, Yahoo! Sports Network, Bloomberg TV Plus, and The Martha Stewart Chan …

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Starting February 1st, 2027, creators who want to monetize their channel through YouTube's Partner Program (YPP) will need at least 1,000 subscribers and either 8,000 qualified watch hours over the past year, or 20 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days. That's a sizeable jump from YouTube's current requirement of 1,000 subscribers with 4,000 watch hours in the past year, or 1,000 subscribers with 10 million Shorts views in the last 90 days. Creators will also need to maintain 10 million Shorts views over 90 days to earn money from the Shorts Creators Pool, though falling below this threshold won't result in removal from YPP.

Ad …

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The appeal of free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channels has always been the way they make it easier to (re)discover classic films and series. But Roku's latest experiment in the FAST space has less to do with traditionally produced entertainment and is entirely focused on giving viewers access to a constant source of AI-generated content.

This week, Roku added four new channels to its library of streamable programming. Along with dedicated feeds for old episodes of Mad TV, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, and a variety of Black sitcoms, the platform also debuted a 24/7 stream filled with projects from Colin Petrie-Norris' AI startup, …

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Disney is testing a new AI-powered tool for Disney Plus that uses a natural language search, a voice query, or a suggested prompt to create a customized row of show and movie recommendations.

Disney Plus, like other streaming services, can recommend shows to watch based on your viewing history. But the company says this new tool, which is "a limited beta experiment" that's in testing with a "small group of select subscribers," is intended to recommend content that "fits the moment."

The feature is the latest in a broader push to offer AI-powered recommendation tools that help you find something to watch among massive catalogs of streaming …

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Suno's watermarking feature comes as the company is fighting legal battles on several fronts.

Disney is looking into launching a free streaming option. When asked about Disney's plans for free, ad-supported streaming during an earnings call on Wednesday, Disney CEO Josh D'Amaro confirmed the company is "exploring a free product for consumers."

D'Amaro added that a free tier will help drive growth and expand the streaming service's reach "to a customer segment that's more price sensitive." Though D'Amaro said that there's "nothing specific to announce today," he noted that a free tier is "definitely something that we're considering."

In July, Business Insider reported that Disney's chief product and technology officer, Adam Smith, b …

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Disney is introducing fan-created TikTok content to its Disney Plus app in its latest attempt to break into short-form creator videos. The Walt Disney Company announced today that it's partnering with TikTok to bring "an expansive collection of thoughtfully curated Disney-centric fan-created content" to the Verts video feed it launched on Disney Plus earlier this year, providing creators with access to assets from "hundreds" of movies and TV shows.

The partnership will be piloted in the US "in the coming months," according to Disney, with plans to launch in other markets later. Videos from TikTok creators who opt-in to the program will be h …

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2026 is shaping up to be an excellent year for Apple TV. Apple's streaming service has built out an impressive slate that spans returning favorites like Silo and Sugar to all-new hits including OnlyFans-inspired dramedies, terrifying comedies, and paranoid tech thrillers. But the most important release might be a feel-good sports sitcom. After what seemed like a definitive finale, Ted Lasso is back with a fourth season that doubles as a soft reboot for the show, mixing up familiar characters with a substantially new cast. And as Apple TV continues its push for a bigger piece of the streaming market, the return of its most culturally impactfu …

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After previewing HDR10 Plus Advanced late last year, Samsung's not-Dolby Vision 2 spec will launch globally on Amazon's Prime Video this month. The first TVs announced with support are Samsung's 2026 lineup, which will be able to make use of the extra metadata to deliver more precise HDR that is optimized for what you're watching, and tone mapping that can adjust for specific areas of the screen instead of applying one setting to the whole frame.

Samsung's press release didn't mention which titles will have support initially, or how many there are, other than including a press image showing off Amazon's series Ride or Die. The news also co …

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Spotify says Merlin, which represents more than 30,000 independent labels and distributors, has joined Universal Music Group in backing its upcoming AI-powered remix and covers product. The paid tool will let fans create AI-generated covers and remixes of participating artists’ music while ensuring artists opt in, receive credit, and are compensated.