Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

Disney is shuttering Hulu. They're migrating its content to Disney Star, which is apparently its home for more adult-themed content.

Hulu began almost twenty years ago in 2007 as one of the older streaming services. But, of course, Disney can't leave good enough alone and has got to absorb it into its own branding. We began watching Hulu a while back with Only Murders In The Building and a couple of other shows, but we haven't been watching much in the way of television of late. I've been wanting to cut down on our streaming subscriptions, and ABC/Disney cancelling Kimmel was a good excuse. Their bringing him back wasn't nearly enough for me to consider paying again for a service that we don't watch enough.

https://www.pennlive.com/life/2025/10/disney-to-officially-shut-down-hulu-after-20-years.html

I'm looking forward to this, even though we haven't finished Season 2 yet!!!

Why the URL contains the word 'cancelled', I do not understand.

https://gizmodo.com/good-omens-season-3-cancelled-amazon-neil-gaiman-1851099234

Plex is interesting stuff. Disclaimer: I don't own it or have it running in my house, so my comments might be slightly inaccurate. It is a personal media server where you can rip your media - music and movies - and stream it to your TV and other devices across the internet. You can also share your server with friends. This assumes that you probably have A LOT of storage space on your PC in the form of a network-attached storage system (NAS or SAN).

Pretty cool, right?

Until last week.

Last week, Plex sent out an email to your friend's list showing what you've been watching! After all, your friends might have similar viewing interests. Like what kind of porn floats your boat. From the 404 Media article: “I can see that one of my friends is apparently watching a ton of cheesy, soft porn stuff (think classic ‘skinemax’ fare) from some server (it’s not mine) or Plex channel, and I am 100 percent sure they would be mortified to know that I know this,” one user wrote on the Plex Forums. “Now replace this friend, who’s just enjoying their downtime with some cheeky T&A, with a teenager who may be having difficulty figuring out feelings about their sexuality and are just trying to explore by watching LBGT dramas to see if anything there resonates or can help them figure things out. Suddenly, one of their intolerant friends or parents gets a detailed email report with a cheery title listing every little thing they’re watching…This is a dystopian nightmare of a feature and I honestly can’t believe it’s been rolled out as opt-out like this. SHAME ON YOU, PLEX!”

“I wonder how many people just had their week’s porn selections emailed to their Plex friends,” another user posted. “I just got an email about a friend’s watching habits which he definitely didn’t want to share. He insists he’s never opted into any data sharing, but…it went out anyway.”

And these emails are OPT-OUT, not OPT-IN!

This is a good example why whenever some program asks for access to my contact/address book, my reply is not just 'no, but hell no!'

Plex is taking a lot of flack over this in their forums, and probably throughout the universe of social media. I expect it will become opt-in with lots of filters on what you're willing to share.

https://www.404media.co/plex-users-fear-discover-together-week-in-review-feature-will-leak-porn-habits-to-their-friends-and-family/

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/23/11/27/1836216/plex-users-fear-new-feature-will-leak-porn-habits-to-their-friends-and-family

Sony is about to remove programs that people 'bought' via their PS from the Discovery Channel, including Myth Busters and Naked and Afraid. All gone, bye bye. And I would say the odds of getting any money back would be similar to playing an XBox game disc in your PS, i.e. zero.

The issue is the merger between Discovery and Warner, apparently Sony got sliced out of the deal and now no longer has license to carry or resell their programming, which means all that Discovery content that people thought they purchased is going away. They bought a license to view it, and not in perpetuity.

This is why you buy physical media, peeps! I will on rare occasion rent a movie off my Apple TV, but I never buy programming through it for just this reason. You can get a standard Bluray player for less than a hundred bucks, no reason not to have one.

https://kotaku.com/sony-ps4-ps5-discovery-mythbusters-tv-1851066164

There's a lot going on here.

Teslas have never had AM radio in their cars. Recently, Ford announced that they were eliminating AM from their 2024 Mustang and probably from future models. WELL, Congresscritters can't have that! So they've stepped in and eleven of them have co-sponsored a bill to REQUIRE car manufacturers to include AM radio at no cost to the buyers!

There's a few issues at play here.

The bill's originators say the government needs a medium that ensures emergency broadcasts can be received by everyone.

Contrary point: for a broadcast to be received, the radio must be turned on and tuned to the correct frequency. And an awful lot of people carry portable radios in their pockets most of the time these days that can receive emergency broadcast messages. This was demonstrated with people receiving government broadcast messages during the pandemic.

Additional point: AM radio - and FM - are rapidly declining markets due to streaming. Is this an effort to prop up a buggy whip market?

For the car makers, there is a very, verymajor technical issue here: EMI. Electro-magnetic interference. You might have noticed EMI first-hand if you've ever listened to Bluetooth headphones while making microwave popcorn: it's not uncommon for there to be a little bit of EMI leakage from the microwave, and Bluetooth is a very weak signal, so your headphones are frequently a little staticky while making your popcorn.

Guess what?

Electric cars - I'm not sure whether hybrids also have this problem - generate HUGE amounts of EMI! It is extremely hard to get a clean AM radio signal inside an electric car.

THIS is probably the biggest reason why car makers don't want to bother with AM radios in future cars - they know it's going to be one giant humongoid PITA! They don't want to have to repeatedly try to explain to the average customer why the AM signal, which is never of that great of quality, is even worse in their brand-new car.

I'm not going to get into the details of what the differences are between AM and FM radio types. But if you've spent any significant time listening to AM during the summer, you've probably heard the *pop* with nearby lightning strikes and such. AM is very sensitive to EMI. FM is not. AM has the advantage of the signal carrying a lot further than FM, but with much poorer signal quality. each mode has its trade-offs, but each is also losing market share to the internet and streaming. For me, the only time I listen to the radio is when I'm in Phoenix and I'm frequently listening to NPR or the local classical station. Otherwise, I'm streaming music or podcasts from my iPhone. And I've been doing that for 20+ years now.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/05/ev-advocates-join-tech-groups-and-automakers-to-oppose-am-radio-mandate/

This is an old story from last November, I've been slow cleaning up some tabs. Relevant nonetheless. The first paragraph really says it all.

It’s been less than a year since Vizio became a publicly traded company, and one consequence of that is we know more about its business than ever before. The TV maker released its latest earnings report on Tuesday and revealed that over the last three months, its Platform Plus segment that includes advertising and viewer data had a gross profit of $57.3 million. That’s more than twice the amount of profit it made selling devices like TVs, which was $25.6 million, despite those device sales pulling in considerably more revenue.

Now, that's not the only problem with these devices. I believe it was Samsung that rendered useless an entire segment of smart TVs a year or two ago from simply not updating their software. They moved on from that generation of software and let it whither and die and lose all functionality.

The solution? There's two. Well, there's a third and that's to simply let it be if you don't care. If you like your TV being smart and have some tech savvieness, get yourself a RaspberryPi and set up a PiHole. You can trap the ads going to the TV and the telemetry going back to the vendor. That might impair functionality. The simple solution is to ignore the smart TV's functionality and never connect it to WiFi: plug in an Amazon Fire Stick, Google Chromecast, Roku device, or Apple TV device. Or a Play Station or similar gaming console. Use them for your streaming. It's guaranteed that your streaming sites are going to get your data, people like NetFlix or Disney, and you know they're going to monetize it, but why should the TV vendor? Apple has a good privacy policy, and while they're going to monitor your use patterns to see how you use their device, they've never sold information.

Now, keep in mind Vizio is not unique in this: all smart TV makers do this, this is just a nice blatant demonstration of how much your consumer information is worth to them and how much it scales. Next year it will easily be 3:1 instead of 2:1 because those TVs sold last year will still be generating revenue, albeit at a slower pace as some are replaced with non-Vizio TVs. And Google is just as bad at monetizing off your data: when they announced their corporate motto as "Don't be evil", what they meant was "Don't get caught being evil." They monetize the hell out of data through keyword searches of your email and our Google Searches through selling adverts that are vaguely accurate.

Remember: when you're not paying for a service online, YOU are the thing being itemized and being profited from. And that's why Facebook, Google and Amazon are so desperate to track you across everything you do online. All of those behavioral analytics are worth a fortune to them when applied internally to sell you shit or when packaged and sold to advertisers. Facebook can literally sell ad impressions to "30-35 year old stay at home moms in Des Moine who drink wine and lean Conservative". No problem. All through tracked analytics. Easy peasy. And tracking TV viewing is one such method, as is Facebook analytics.

Personally, when I buy a TV I look for the dumb ones. Less stuff to go wrong in the TV and the remotes. It also saves money. If I were ever given a smart one, it would never get connected to my home network. I'd just plug in my Apple TV via HDMI, just like nothing had changed.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/10/22773073/vizio-acr-advertising-inscape-data-privacy-q3-2021