Content producers are churning out data in unprecedented volumes, with high-definition images and 4K/8K video content consuming an enormous amount of storage space. Creators typically need to store several versions of their projects, including the initial raw files, edited versions, and the published format.
Catering to this need, Western Digital has launched a new external SSD, the SanDisk Desk Drive, which comes in 4 and 8TB capacities.
External SSDs can operate at incredibly high speeds compared to their HDD counterparts, which means that content creators can not only store, but also edit their photos and videos directly from the drive itself, decreasing the time spent on transferring files, accelerating work efficiency while ensuring that the data is securely stored.
16TB versions planned
“As digital content creation continues to soar, there is an increasing need for high-performing and high-capacity storage solutions to help manage and preserve it. Expanding our SSD portfolio is the first step in offering creators backup solutions that deliver the speed and flexibility they need to unlock their creativity,” says Susan Park, Vice President, Consumer Solutions, Western Digital.
The SanDisk Desk Drive boasts read speeds up to 1000 MB/s, and fast backup capabilities using Apple Time Machine or the included downloadable Acronis True Image for Western Digital backup software. The device also sports a modern Red Dot award-winning design.
Retailing at $379.99/£359.99 and $699.99/£663.99 for the 4TB and 8TB versions respectively, these devices can be purchased now from the Western Digital Store and other retailers.
Western Digital doesn’t intend to stop at 8TB however. Susan Park says, “By next year, we expect to double the capacity of the SanDisk Desk Drive from 8TB to 16TB on a single desktop SSD.”
Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed!
We’re getting into the busy tech season, folks. Apple had its massive 2024 iPad event this week, Google I/O 2024 is coming next week, and there are so many more announcements on the way.
But before we get into next week, we need to catch up on the week we’ve just had. So, to lend a hand, we’ve gathered the 8 biggest tech news stories of the week and bundled them here for you to read through them. This list includes Apple’s iPad news, Amazon‘s terrible ad plans, a new Superman suit, and another major Windows 11 bug that could slow down your PC.
If you’re looking for more tech news, why not check out episode two of our podcast (it just dropped), and be sure to return next Saturday for another ICYMI news round-up.
8. A new iPad Pro and iPad Air were revealed
(Image credit: Future)
This week, Apple’s iPad category went from a sleepy utility product to the center of its tech universe, debuting not one but two brand-new technologies. First was the surprising inclusion of a brand-new chip: the M4. This is the first time a new bit of Apple Silicon has debuted inside an iPad. It’s powerful and appears to prime the pump for a big AI reveal across all Apple products when the tech giant hosts its developer conference (WWDC) in June.
The second big innovation is the Ultra Retina XDR Display, which is Apple’s fancy way of describing a tandem OLED screen, which is also another way of describing two OLED panels sandwiched together. The result is an iPad (and maybe tablet) display unlike any other.
OLED display technology enables another first: Apple’s thinnest tablet ever, even thinner than the iPad Air. That tablet lineup also got a big boost and is now available in a 13-inch model alongside an 11-inch model, both powered by an M2 chip. And, thank goodness, Apple finally moved the Facetime camera to the wider, landscape side of the device. Did we mention the Air is now thicker than the iPad Pro?
7. The M4 chip made its debut… in an iPad?
(Image credit: Apple)
Apple debuted its latest piece of Apple Silicon at its iPad event with the M4 chip. This upgraded module houses a 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU, up from the 8-core CPU and 8-core GPU of the base M3 chip, and supports up to 38 trillion operations per second in its neural engine (Apple’s version of an NPU). It contains 28 billion transistors, up from 25 billion in the M3, and can support up to 128GB of unified memory.
Get the hottest deals available in your inbox plus news, reviews, opinion, analysis and more from the TechRadar team.
We don’t have any direct comparisons to the M3 – and we haven’t had the chance to properly test it out yet – but Apple says that the CPU performance is a 50% increase over the Apple M2, and its GPU performance is up to 400% faster than the M2’s GPU. The M2 was chosen because that’s what the last-gen iPad Pro used.
6. Apple handed its best Pencil so far to digital artists
(Image credit: Apple)
If you primarily use tablets for drawing or sketching, Apple’s new Pencil Pro was arguably more exciting news than its new iPads. Unfortunately, the stylus is only compatible with the new iPad Pro (2024) and iPad Air, which is a shame. But on the plus side, it has many new tricks – including a new squeeze gesture for quickly switching between app menus.
Another notable new feature is ‘Barrel Roll,’ which lets you twist the Pencil Pro to rotate on-screen objects or change the orientation of a digital brush. There’s also now Find My support to help you track down the stylus when it inevitably goes missing – potentially saving you from splashing out $129 / £129 / AU$219 on a new one.
5. We found out Prime Video ads might get worse
(Image credit: Amazon MGM Studios)
Earlier this year, Amazon added ads to its Prime Video streaming service for everyone – unless you pay an extra $2.99 / £2.99 per month on top of your subscription (Australian viewers are spared for now).
But this week, things got worse. Ahead of an upcoming ‘upfront’ – an event where TV networks sell commercial space to advertisers – the streamer unveiled three new types of advertisements that could be coming to its platform: carousel, interactive, and pause ads.
These are all designed to convince you to buy products from Amazon’s store with just a few clicks. It’s all very scary and annoying, and it’s one of the reasons why this writer is canceling their Amazon Prime subscription.
4. Asus announced the ROG Ally X
(Image credit: Asus)
Asus officially confirmed that the ROG Ally X is on its way this week, revealing that the hardware is aimed at hardcore gamers hoping to see major changes compared to the OG Asus ROG Ally portable gaming handheld.
We heard a few details, like improvements are coming to its RAM, ports (with a mention of a proper fix to the SSD port), battery life, and the UI Armory Crate. Unfortunately, we’ll need to wait a little longer for the full details.
A full stream showcasing all of the changes coming to the ROG Ally X will drop on June 2, 2024.
3. Windows 11 was found to hurt your SSD performance
(Image credit: Shutterstock/Stokkete)
According to a new report that came out this week, Microsoft may be auto-enabling software encryption BitLocker in the upcoming Windows 11 update.
That might not sound too bad (encryption means you’re more secure, right?), but the problem is that BitLocker can cut your SSD’s performance in half. What’s more, the encryption it provides isn’t even that good – hackers with a $10 Raspberry Pi Pico, physical access to the target endpoint, and overall knowledge can crack it with ease – so the security benefits are seen as negligible.
Luckily, there is a way to disable this annoying encryption by diving into your PC’s settings.
2. James Gun’s “Superman” found his suit
(Image credit: DC Studios/Warner Bros. Pictures/James Gunn)
James Gunn’s Superman movie is still over a year away from flying into theaters, but the DC Cinematic Universe’s (DCU) co-creator is slowly peeling back the layers of one of 2025’s most anticipated new movies.
Earlier this week, we were finally treated to a first official look at the Man of Steel’s new suit, which has certainly got fans talking. The new image of David Corenswet’s Son of Krypton didn’t just show off the costume, though. It also teased the arrival of another fan-favorite Superman villain (you know, outside of Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor) which would be another pleasing inclusion for the exciting flick. July 2025 can’t come soon enough for the DCU Chapter One’s first film.
1. Sonos unveiled a new app, and speakers were leaked
(Image credit: Sonos)
If you thought you were desperate to get to the weekend, spare a thought for the folks at Sonos after the last few days.
A few weeks ago, we wrote how Eliyan’s NuLink PHY could do away with silicon interposers and integrate everything into an single, elegant package. How, essentially, the socket could become the motherboard.
At the recent 30th annual North America Technology Symposium, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) revealed plans to construct a version of its chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) packaging technology that could lead to system-in-packages (SiPs) over twice the size of the current largest ones.
“With System-on-Wafer, TSMC is providing a revolutionary new option to enable a large array of dies on a 300mm wafer, offering more compute power while occupying far less data center space and boosting performance per watt by orders of magnitude,” the company said.
An enormous amount of power
TSMC’s first SoW offering, a logic-only wafer based on Integrated Fan-Out (InFO) technology, is already in production.
A chip-on-wafer version using CoWoS technology is expected to arrive in 2027, and will enable the “integration of SoIC, HBM and other components to create a powerful wafer-level system with computing power comparable to a data center server rack, or even an entire server.“
Reporting on the move, Tom’s Hardware expands on this saying, “One of the designs that TSMC envisions relies on four stacked SoICs mated with 12 HBM4 memory stacks and additional I/O dies. Such a giant will certainly draw an enormous amount of power – we are talking about thousands of watts here and will need a very sophisticated cooling technology. TSMC also expects such solutions to use a 120x120mm substrate.”
TSMC’s ambitious pursuit to create gigantic chips, however, is dwarfed by Cerebras Systems’ newest Wafer Scale Engine 3 (WSE-3), termed the “fastest AI chip in the world”. The WSE-3 boasts four trillion transistors and is twice as powerful as its predecessor, the WSE-2, while maintaining the same energy consumption and price. This new chip created on a 5nm TSMC process, provides a staggering peak AI performance of 125 petaflops – which is equivalent to 62 Nvidia H100 GPUs.
Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed!
It’s no secret that the race is on to produce the first 1000TB SSD. At its Tech Day in 2022, Samsung revealed ambitious plans to “stack over 1,000 layers” in its most advanced NAND chip by 2030, meaning a petabyte SSD could arrive by then.
Last year the company dropped hits that it might be in a position to deliver it much sooner, but that looks to have been wishful thinking on the tech industry’s behalf.
That said, it’s clearly full steam ahead on the development of future NAND chips. The South Korean electronics giant recently announced it would commence mass production of its newest 290-layer ninth-generation vertical (V9) NAND chips shortly, and it’s widely expected it will reveal a staggering 430-layer tenth-generation (V10) NAND chip next year.
Hafnia Ferroelectrics
So while we don’t know much about what’s going on behind the scenes in the company’s quest to produce the first Petabyte SSD, some clues have appeared online.
At this year’s VLSI Technology Symposium in Honolulu, there’s going to be a Technical Session presented by Giwuk Kim, a Ph.D student at the department of Electrical Engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). His research interests include hafnia-based FE-NAND memory, FeRAM, and In-memory computing application, and this will be the focus of the session, which is titled “In-depth Analysis of the Hafnia Ferroelectrics as a Key Enabler for Low Voltage & QLC 3D VNAND Beyond 1K Layer Experimental Demonstration and Modeling.”
The summary of the work which – spoiler alert – has been co-authored by Samsung Electronics, reads as follows: “We experimentally demonstrate a remarkable performance improvement, boosted by the interaction of charge trapping & ferroelectric (FE) switching effects in metal-band engineered gate interlayer (BE-G.IL)-FE-channel interlayer (Ch.IL)-Si (MIFIS) FeFET. The MIFIS with BE-G.IL (BE-MIFIS) facilitates the maximized ‘positive feedback’ (Posi. FB.) of dual effects, leading to low operation voltage (VPGM/VERS: +17/-15 V), a wide memory window (MW: 10.5 V) and negligible disturb at a biased voltage of 9 V. Furthermore, our proposed model verifies that the performance enhancement of the BE-MIFIS FeFET is attributed to the intensified posi. FB. This work proves that the hafnia FE can play as a key enabler in extending the technology development of 3D VNAND, which is currently approaching a state of stagnation.”
Quite what role Samsung will play in the demonstration (if anything) isn’t known at the moment, but the firm isn’t alone in exploring the potential of hafnia ferroelectrics. Giwuk Kim’s talk is part of a parent session at the symposium titled “Non-Volatile Memory Technology – Hafnia Based Ferroelectrics-1” which will be chaired by Deoksin Kil, Head of Material Development at Samsung’s archrival SK hynix.
Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed!
Intel Arrow Lake appears to be on the horizon according to new insider information which claims a total of 21 CPUs will be available in the upcoming lineup.
As spotted by Wccftech, Intel Arrow Lake-S Core Ultra-200 processors are rumored to be announced at Computex next month with a full suite of processors headed for store shelves this year. According to Benchlife, this is set to include the Core Ultra 9 285K, Core Ultra 7 265K, and the Core Ultra 5 245K.
Interestingly, it’s believed that there will be no Core Ultra 3 or Core i3 equivalent included in the slew of Ultra 200 processors so the mainstream lineups are now considered to be Ultra 5 models. That’s not entirely a surprise given that even the best processors for gamers on a budget omit the underpowered i3.
It is believed that as well as the three aforementioned K models at 12W5, there will be a total of five non-K SKUs at 65W and a total of 13 processors set to release later which will run at just 35W. That’s a wide net and should give options to the vast majority of users; while gamers will want a K model, budget builds could benefit from a lower power, and cheaper chip.
Hyperthreading appears to be a thing of the past with the leading Intel Arrow Lake-S models. That’s because the Core Ultra 9 is speculated to run 24 cores and 24 threads with the Core Ultra 7 to feature 20 cores and 20 threads, and the Core Ultra 5 at 10 cores and 10 threads; all of which utilize a mixture of E-cores and P-cores.
All chipsets will run on the LGA 1851 socket with its longevity planned until 2026 which, much like AMD‘s AM5 socket, will just be using DDR5. That means it could be time to upgrade to some of the best RAM alongside a new motherboard so that you aren’t left behind.
It’s still a little confusing
We’ve previously reported on the Intel Arrow Lake-S naming conventions being confusing and the advent of so many Ultra 9, Ultra 7, and Ultra 5 models isn’t helping matters. While enthusiasts are going to want to stick to the 285K, 265K, and 245K, there are a lot of things to unlearn after nearly 16 years of being used to Intel Core branding.
Get the hottest deals available in your inbox plus news, reviews, opinion, analysis and more from the TechRadar team.
It remains to be seen exactly how disaggregated architecture will work when on desktops, especially with the transition over to AI computing and what that will mean for gamers. We’re hoping that Computex will clear things up with an official announcement going over the full flagship models and the other 65W variants.
It looks like Peacock is raising prices again for the second time in less than a year. According to Variety, the monthly Premium with ads plan will “increase by $2 to $7.99”, officially making it more expensive than Netflix’s Standard with ads option. The platform’s Premium Plus (which the report points out is “mostly ad-free”) is seeing a similar hike as it’ll cost $13.99 a month. Variety states “Peacock’s Premium annual price” will soon become $79.99, “while Premium Plus is going from $119.99 to $139.99” for the year.
These changes apparently take effect at different times for different groups. For new customers, they’ll see the increase on July 18. Current subscribers won’t see the hike until or after August 17. It depends on “their next billing date”.
So the main question on everyone’s mind is “Why?” Why are they allegedly doing this again so soon? No one knows for sure. NBCUniversal has yet to make an official announcement for the second price bump. However, if you look online, people are pointing their fingers at the Olympics.
The Paris 2024 Summer Olympics kick off on July 26 and go on until August 11. NBCUniversal bought the rights to broadcast the games in the United States “with coverage likely to spread across Peacock TV and its suite of TV channels.”
Recent updates
The timing of rumors seemed suspicious to many since the games are only a few months away. Granted, Peacock has made content updates in 2024 that could necessitate charging users more. The platform, for example, gained exclusive rights to stream Oppenheimerback in February.
But, other features like the introduction of Multiview and Live Actions are too big to ignore. If you’re not familiar with them, the former lets you watch up to four different Olympic sports at once. The second allows viewers to continue watching an event rather than move “with the broadcast” to another. On top of that, Roku has revealed it’s partnering up with NBCUniversal to introduce the new NBC Olympic Zone where people can enjoy the summer games on their “Roku TV or device.”
We contacted NBCUniversal for clarification, asking if they would like to comment on the rumors. This story will be updated if we hear back. Hopefully, the rumors remain rumors forever.
Get the hottest deals available in your inbox plus news, reviews, opinion, analysis and more from the TechRadar team.
If you’re excited about the Olympics and are thinking of buying a new display, check out TechRadar’s list of the best TVs for 2024. We have a lot of recommendations at different price points.
In the past few years, Samsung has seen a tremendous slowdown in its semiconductor chip foundry business. No big-name chip firm (apart from Samsung’s System LSI division that makes Exynos chips) has used Samsung Foundry’s 3nm and newer-generation 4nm process nodes. However, the company is still marching ahead with the development of newer chip process nodes, including 2nm nodes.
Samsung to start mass production of second-generation 3nm chips in 2024 and 2nm chips in 2025
A new report from Business Korea revealed that Samsung Foundry is developing next-generation Gate All Around (GAA) technology, which will be used in the company’s 2nm process technology. The mass production of 2nm semiconductor chips based on this technology is planned for next year. The South Korean firm will reportedly present a paper on third-generation GAA technology, which will be used for 2nm chips, at the VLSI Symposium 2024 expo. This expo will be held in Hawaii, USA, from June 16 to 20, 2024.
The VLSI Symposium is among the top three global semiconductor conferences where top technologies in the field are discussed. The other two top semiconductor chip conferences are the International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) and the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC).
What is the advantage of GAA?
GAA is a new type of transistor design that improves current flow and power efficiency. It was introduced with the first-generation 3nm process node from Samsung Foundry. However, it hasn’t been used by any other chip firm, including AMD, Apple, MediaTek, Nvidia, and Qualcomm. Samsung’s own System LSI division is expected to be the first to use Samsung Foundry’s 3nm process for its next-generation Exynos chips for phones and smartwatches.
Compared to chips fabricated on Samsung Foundry’s 5nm process, first-generation 3nm GAA chips showcased a 16% area reduction, a 23% performance improvement, and 45% higher power efficiency. The second-generation 3nm process is estimated to offer a 35% area reduction in chip size, 30% performance improvement, and 50% better power efficiency. Third-generation GAA, which will be used in 2nm chips, will reportedly offer 50% area reduction and 50% higher performance.
Samsung’s primary rival, TSMC, is yet to use Gate All Around technology in its advanced process nodes. Samsung plans to mass-produce second-generation 3nm GAA chips (like for the Galaxy S25) in the second half of this year. Intel and TSMC are expected to use GAA in their next-generation 2nm processes.
Ampere Computing unveiled its AmpereOne Family of processors last year, boasting up to 192 single-threaded Ampere cores, which was the highest in the industry.
These chips, designed for cloud efficiency and performance, were Ampere’s first product based on its new custom core leveraging internal IP, signalling a shift in the sector, according to CEO Renée James.
At the time of the launch, James said, “Every few decades of compute there has emerged a driving application or use of performance that sets a new bar of what is required of performance. The current driving uses are AI and connected everything combined with our continued use and desire for streaming media. We cannot continue to use power as a proxy for performance in the data center. At Ampere, we design our products to maximize performance at a sustainable power, so we can continue to drive the future of the industry.”
AmpereOne-3 on its way
Jeff Wittich, chief product officer at Ampere, recently spoke with The Next Platform about future generations of AmpereOne. He told the site that an updated chip, with 12 memory channels and an A2 core with improved performance, would be out later this year in keeping with the company’s roadmap. This chip, which The Next Platform calls AmpereOne-2, will reportedly have a 33 percent increase in DDR5 memory controllers and up to 50 percent more memory bandwidth.
However, what’s coming up beyond that, at some point in 2025, sounds the most exciting.
The Next Platform says the third generation chip, AmpereOne-3 as it is calling it, will have 256 cores and be “etched in 3 nanometer (3N to be precise) processes from TSMC”. It will use a modified A2+ core with a “two-chiplet design on the cores, with 128 cores per chiplet. It could be a four-chiplet design with 64 cores per chiplet.”
The site expects the AmpereOne-3 will support PCI-Express 6.0 I/O controllers and maybe have a dozen DDR5 memory controllers, although there’s some speculation here.
Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed!
“We have been moving pretty fast on the on the compute side,” Wittich told the site. “This design has got about a lot of other cloud features in it – things around performance management to get the most out of all of those cores. In each of the chip releases, we are going to be making what would generally be considered generational changes in the CPU core. We are adding a lot in every single generation. So you are going to see more performance, a lot more efficiency, a lot more features like security enhancements, which all happen at the microarchitecture level. But we have done a lot to ensure that you get great performance consistency across all of the AmpereOnes. We are also taking a chiplet approach with this 256-core design, which is another step as well. Chiplets are a pretty big part of our overall strategy.”
The AmpereOne-3 is reportedly being etched at TSMC right now, prior to its launch next year.
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter.
iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple’s annual developers conference WWDC on June 10.
The lack of an official Calculator app on the iPad has been a long-running meme on social media, as users have waited for its arrival. In the meantime, iPad users have relied on calculator apps in the App Store, such as PCalc and Calcbot.
AppleInsider last week reported that macOS 15 will feature a revamped Calculator app with integration with the Notes app, a resizable window, a sidebar that lists recent calculations, and more. While we have not independently confirmed those details, it is possible that the updated Mac app will be based on the new iPad app.
The first beta of iPadOS 18 is expected to be released immediately following the WWDC keynote, and the update should be widely released in September.
Now, if only we could get Instagram and WhatsApp for the iPad…
Apple has stopped production of FineWoven accessories, according to the Apple leaker and prototype collector known as “Kosutami.” In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Kosutami explained that Apple has stopped production of FineWoven accessories due to its poor durability. The company may move to another non-leather material for its premium accessories in the future. Kosutami has revealed…
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of “Let Loose” and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more …
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU…
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has “fallen sharply beyond expectations.” As a…
The lead developer of the multi-emulator app Provenance has told iMore that his team is working towards releasing the app on the App Store, but he did not provide a timeframe. Provenance is a frontend for many existing emulators, and it would allow iPhone and Apple TV users to emulate games released for a wide variety of classic game consoles, including the original PlayStation, SEGA Genesis,…
Apple Vision Pro, Apple’s $3,500 spatial computing device, appears to be following a pattern familiar to the AR/VR headset industry – initial enthusiasm giving way to a significant dip in sustained interest and usage. Since its debut in the U.S. in February 2024, excitement for the Apple Vision Pro has noticeably cooled, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Writing in his latest Power On…
Streaming television was supposed to kill cable and broadcast TV. Ad-free, endless choice, on-demand, and on your schedule meant the no-compromises television experience of our dreams. Except it hasn’t quite turned out that way and now it’s starting to look like the old models, the ones that buoyed cable and broadcast television for decades are rising like phoenixes from the ashes and will soon be coming back to you through, naturally, all of the best streaming platforms.
This week, The Information is reporting that Disney Plus is now considering adding a selection of genre-based channels that, instead of on-demand content, just run through a 24/7 schedule of content that will include commercial breaks.
If this sounds familiar, it only means you were watching cable and broadcast television in the years before the rise of Netflix, Disney Plus, Hulu, Paramount Plus, Amazon Prime Video, and countless other options.
The details on what Disney Plus may or may not do are scant, but they are more than plausible. In recent months, most of the majors have reshaped their streaming platform strategies to offer a more affordable tier that, while still on-demand, includes commercial breaks (Amazon did it to existing Prime customers with little to no notice).
And as I discovered when I cut cable earlier this year, there are ample FAST (free ad-supported streaming TV) options to fill the gaps in between your streaming appetite.
A schedule to view by
FAST has more in common with Disney Plus’ possible plans in that networks like Tubi have dozens of channels that are, just like cable, running content on their own schedules. This means that instead of searching for something to watch, you can just turn on Tubi (or FuboTV), open the guide, choose a channel, and start watching whatever’s on, in progress. Right, just like old-school cable.
This change is partly about your habits, in that people still like to have TV on in the background and that means you’re not watching a movie or even a discreet streaming series where if a family member watches it without you they are excommunicated. No, these channels, like the ones Disney Pluys might launch, are about passive viewing while, perhaps, you do the laundry or work from home.
In my house, I like to have Paramount Plus’ CBS broadcast stream running while I work. I pay no mind to The Talk, The Bold and the Beautiful, or The Price is Right, but I like the white noise of these mostly innocuous shows.
Pay their way
For the streamers, though, this is more than just another viewing option, it’s a potential major revenue stream. Disney Plus which remains a premium service whether you pay to remove the ads or pay less to suffer through them, could get paid again by advertisers willing to deliver commercials to this less attentive audience.
In the highly competitive streaming space, Disney (now with Hulu), Paramount, Netflix, and others are in a knife fight for consumer eyeballs and dollars and the only way to hold onto them is with more fresh content, which costs money. Put another way, these companies will never stop looking for new ways to generate revenue from, your views, attentive or otherwise.
The result, though, is a landscape that looks more and more like the broadcast cable world of the early oughts and less like the fast-growing streaming wars of, says 2018.
Eventually, I expect all the streamers to offer 24/7 programming schedules and guides, It’ll be a value-add and could lead to the rise of a lot more entry-level programming. Think game shows, talk shows, and cheap laugh-track-bound series, to fill this pipeline. They won’t have the same kind of quality we’ve come to expect from streaming original programming but they’ll serve their purpose and viewers like me will probably eat it up.
