Day: January 16, 2020

Apple showed up to the streaming wars with Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon. Disney arrived with Baby Yoda and the Avengers. HBO Max is bringing Friends.

Now it’s Comcast’s turn. And the cable and TV giant thinks it can get a leg up on its rivals by offering something very different: free video, plus ads.

Which, it turns out, is pretty much exactly how Comcast’s NBCUniversal group described its new Peacock service at a Thursday rollout: Like other services, Peacock will boast a mix of old TV movies and TV shows, including The Office (in 2021), and …

The first official Game of Thrones spinoff series is finally happening: House of the Dragon, a story exploring the rise of the Targaryen dynasty and set 300 years before the events of Thrones, will receive an initial 10-episode run at HBO. The prequel is the first of HBO’s original five pitched spinoffs to make it through to a confirmed series order.

The show doesn’t have a premiere date, but HBO president Casey Bloys told TV Line in January that a 2022 launch date seemed likely.

Colony co-creator Ryan Condal created the series with author George R.R. Martin, upon …

Fifty-three seconds into the first episode of Netflix’s docuseries Cheer, teenaged Morgan talks about pain. Fifty-four seconds into Cheer, she’s thrown into the air, twisting and flipping like a jittery fish on a line. She comes careening back down into three sets of arms one second later, and she lands with a thunderclap of brutality, muscle smacking against muscle.

“Are you okay, Morgan?” someone asks. My untrained eye can’t pick up what’s wrong — just that something is wrong. And though Morgan walks off the rough landing, her body, gingerly stiff and wobbling unevenly, is what I think …

A 14-year battle to enact a voter ID law in Missouri hit a speed bump on Tuesday, when the state Supreme Court struck down key provisions of a 2016 law making it harder for many voters to cast a ballot.

Voter ID laws require voters to show photo ID at the polls before they can cast a ballot. Although they are often defended as a way to prevent individuals from impersonating another voter, this particular kind of voter fraud barely exists in the United States.

Meanwhile, critics of voter ID argue that they are disproportionately likely to disenfranchise students, …

Mike Bloomberg will ask tech billionaires to support his presidential campaign in a private reception with some of Silicon Valley’s biggest power brokers on Thursday evening, Recode has learned.

The briefing behind closed doors shows how Bloomberg is not shy about seeking the backing of Big Tech — a group whose favor with the public has fallen so low that candidates like Elizabeth Warren have said they’ll reject taking their money entirely. The event is also a reminder of the support that Bloomberg, the world’s eighth-richest person, is drawing from the mega-wealthy who are concerned about the anti-billionaire rhetoric from …

The brewing feud between 2020 contenders Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders came to a head this week on the Democratic debate stage and, inevitably, on Twitter. But is the online brawl as widespread and as vitriolic as it seems? That’s actually a hard question to answer because when it comes to online political discourse, it can be very difficult to discern between manipulative disinformation and authentic, organically shared content.

Here’s the situation: Tensions between Warren and Sanders, longtime progressive allies, have been rising in recent days as 2020 primary voting approaches. Sanders’s campaign reportedly gave supporters a script encouraging …