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YouTube TV could lose Fox channels this week
Gaming Gear

NBCUniversal’s new YouTube TV deal includes some shows on YouTube

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They didn’t reveal the dollars involved, but a press release mentions that it includes an agreement for some full TV shows, clips, and highlights on regular YouTube, as well as confirming the relaunch of NBC Sports Network (NBCSN) after it shut down four years ago.

“We’ve secured long-term access to our full portfolio of broadcast and cable networks on YouTube TV, and we’re advancing our Peacock strategy with an upcoming launch on YouTube Primetime Channels and ongoing presence on Google TV,” said NBCUniversal exec Matt Schnaars.

The details revealed today are:

As Awful Announcing points out, while NBCUniversal has been snapping up sports broadcast rights for Peacock, relaunching the NBCSN channel to put it in subscription packages could let it make money from people who don’t sign up for Peacock after it spins off its other cable networks with Versant.



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Alphabet will pay $22 million to settle President Trump’s YouTube lawsuit

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Alphabet will pay President Donald Trump $22 million as part of a settlement in a class action lawsuit brought against the company over the suspension of various YouTube accounts following the January 6 riot at the US capital, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal. The suit includes other plaintiffs whose YouTube channels were banned that will split an additional $2.5 million in settlement payouts.

Trump filed the suit in 2021, alongside lawsuits against Twitter and Facebook over similar suspensions, claiming they infringed on his first amendment rights. Twitter, now known as X since its acquisition and rebrand by Elon Musk, paid President Trump roughly $10 million to settle that suit. Meta also settled its suit with the president over his suspension from the platform for $25 million earlier this year.

This settlement comes shortly after Alphabet wrote a letter to the House Judiciary Committee lambasting government pressure to moderate content on its platforms. The company also shared that YouTube would be offering a path to reinstatement for accounts previously banned for COVID-19 or election integrity related misinformation.

The settlement from Alphabet will be paid to the Trust for the National Mall, a nonprofit partner of the National Park Service, and will be earmarked for construction of the ballroom that President Trump is building at The White House. The monies from the Meta settlement were similarly earmarked.

This summer Paramount, parent company of CBS, settled a lawsuit brought by the president over claims that the network intended to “confuse, deceive and mislead the public” by editing an interview with Kamala Harris. The media company paid $16 million to settle the president’s suit. Three weeks later the FCC approved the $8 billion acquisition of Paramount by Skydance.



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Game Updates

MrBeast Promises Latest Grotesque YouTube Stunt Was Completely Safe

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The latest YouTube video stunt by one James “MrBeast” Donaldson has already wracked up over 46 million views in just one day and it’s not hard to imagine why. Titled “Would You Risk Dying For $500,000?” it shows a series of challenges in which people brave flame-engulfed obstacles in exchange for money. It’s kind of like David Blaine if, instead of doing absurd and wild stuff himself, he paid other people to do it while also explaining how it was all incredibly fake and just for grim lulz.

The infernal trap that’s been drawing the most attention is one in which a stuntman is tied to a chair inside a “burning house” and has to escape and save as much money as he can from inside the house in order to earn the highest cash prize possible. Donaldson bounces back and forth between urgent warnings about how real the flames are and mugging the camera with jokes about MrBeast product placement. The entertainment concept is more grotesquely mundane than anything Phillip K. Dick could have imagined and also, clearly, highly entertaining to millions of people.

This blew up, if you’re curious obviously we had ventilation for the smoke and a kill switch to cut off the fires. We had professionals test this extensively and the guy in the video as stated is a professional stunt man. I take safety more serious than you could ever imagine.

— MrBeast (@MrBeast) September 29, 2025

Donaldson defended his uniquely gifted intuition for creating the debased content people crave by promising the whole stunt was tested with professionals multiple times, responding to viral posts about the stunt with additional context. The last thing Donaldson needs after lawsuits last year over alleged safety violations on his Amazon Prime show is people thinking he doesn’t take the premise of potentially roasting another human being alive for less than the median home price after taxes seriously.

“We had professionals test this extensively and the guy in the video as stated is a professional stunt man,” he wrote on X over the weekend. “I take safety more serious than you could ever imagine.” He expanded on the setup in a comment on the YouTube video as well.

Content creators tend to think any spectacle is defensible if they can say health and safety concerns have been attended to behind the scenes, but that’s not really it imho. Mr. Beast’s whole thing is that his subjects’ desperation for cash allows him—a wealthier person—to indulge his sadism.

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw.bsky.social) 2025-09-29T12:45:09.235Z

“In case there’s any concern about the safety of the stuntman contestant, I just wanted to mention that we take safety extremely seriously,” he added. “Every challenge was tested by multiple stuntmen, we have a full rescue team on standby with firefighters, EMTs and divers equipped with an ambulance and fire truck. We also had a pyro team controlling the fires and multiple fire suppression methods on every challenge to ensure we could essentially turn off the fire if there was ever an issue. But our stunt coordinator did an amazing job as always, and none of these systems were ever needed. Just wanted to be transparent with you all since I saw some concern!”

This is the Catch-22 at the heart of this entire genre of extremely watchable algorithm-bait. Either the entire thing is so real and authentic that it’s an absolutely monstrous thing for everyone involved to be associated with and signals the utter depravity of modern capitalism, or the stunt is all so fake and performative that none of it matters and you’ve been conned out of 25 minutes of your week just so some guy can hock candy bars.

Either way, it kinda sucks!





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Gaming Gear

YouTube Premium adds high-quality audio and 4x playback for iOS, Android and desktop

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Google is expanding access to YouTube Premium features like faster playback speeds and high-quality audio to more types of devices. Most people subscribe to YouTube Premium to remove ads from YouTube and access to YouTube Music, but Google also includes a variety of “power-user” features that give subscribers more granular control over their viewing or listening experience. Now those features will be available in more places.

YouTube Premium’s faster playback speeds (in 0.5x increments from 1x to 4x speed) are now available on Android, iOS and the web, after initially only being available in the mobile YouTube app. The ability to have YouTube automatically download Shorts to view offline or watch Shorts in a picture-in-picture window is now also available on both iOS and Android, after originally launching on Android. Google says Premium’s Jump Ahead feature for skipping to “key moments” of a video is now also available on smart TVs and game consoles.

In terms of the music side of the house, the big change has to do with audio quality. When you’re watching a music video, Google says you’ll now be able to select “High” from the audio settings and listen at a 256kbps bitrate. This change applies to “Art Tracks” as well, which are videos of songs available on the wider YouTube platform that don’t have an official music video. The “High” quality option was originally only available in the YouTube Music app, but now Google says you can access it across the Android and iOS version of both YouTube Music and YouTube.

None of these updates change what the main benefit of a $13.99-per-month YouTube Premium subscription is, of course, but for the price, it’s good Google is trying to unify the experience across devices.



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Esports

Twitch finally catches up to YouTube with highly-requested Stream Rewind feature

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Twitch is finally giving viewers the power to rewind and catch up on moments of live broadcasts they may have missed in a new feature they’ve dubbed ‘Stream Rewind.’

Twitch is one of the internet’s most popular live streaming services, attracting numerous high-profile content creators who have made a name for themselves on the website.

Over the years, it’s introduced a slew of helpful features for both broadcasters and their viewers, such as the ability to clip streams or support streamers by gifting bits and subscriptions.

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However, one feature that was sorely missing was the ability to rewind an ongoing broadcast. If you were watching something live, you wouldn’t be able to directly go backward to see what you missed or rewatch a funny moment — instead, you’d have to clip the broadcast or watch the VOD when it was all said and done.

Twitch introduces long-awaited rewind option for streams

On September 25, 2025, Twitch revealed that this is finally changing. As told in a Twitch support article, the platform is rolling out ‘Stream Rewind,’ which is exactly what it sounds like — the ability to rewind a stream as it plays in real time.

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Viewers can pause, resume, or scrub back at any point in the stream if they so choose, and get right back to the live broadcast by clicking the ‘live’ button on the video player. Additionally, live chat will continue despite pausing and rewinding, helping to avoid missing out on any important moments.

However, broadcasters have to manually enable this feature on their channels for viewers to use it. On top of this, Stream Rewind is solely available for Affiliated or Partnered broadcasters, and is currently limited to viewers who are subscribed to a streamer’s channel or Turbo subscribers on web only (sorry, mobile users).

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According to a statement from Dan Clancy in a September 24 Patch Notes stream, the rollout for Stream Rewind is being limited to subscribers until the platform figures out a way to prevent it from being used to avoid ads.

“We are launching initially for channel subs and Turbo subs,” Clancy explained. “We are working to make it available for everyone. The reason we are limiting it initially is because there’s work we need to do to make sure ads still work with ad blockers and it doesn’t become a way to get around ads, and that’s important to our streamers to help them sustain their revenue. That takes a little more work.”

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With this latest update, Twitch has now caught up to YouTube, which has allowed viewers to rewind live streams on its site for some time now, as long as creators had the feature enabled – without fans having to pay to use it.

Twitch had initially announced this feature all the way back in June, and over three months later, it’s finally here.



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YouTube TV could lose Fox channels this week
Gaming Gear

YouTube gives creators who spread covid misinformation a chance to return

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Google has announced it will reverse a major content moderation decision: YouTube will offer channels that were banned for spreading covid and election misinformation in 2020 a pathway back onto the platform.

In a letter sent to the House Judiciary Committee, Alphabet’s lawyers claimed that the Biden administration had previously “pressed the Company” to remove user-generated Covid-19 content that had not violated Alphabet’s policies, and that the “political atmosphere” had forced their hand. “It is unacceptable and wrong when any government, including the Biden Administration, attempts to dictate how the Company moderates content,” they wrote.

Stating that YouTube’s Community Guidelines around election integrity and covid-19 content had evolved significantly since 2020, Alphabet said that, in order to reflect their “commitment to free expression,” they would offer an opportunity for creators to return to YouTube if the rules they’d broken back then “are no longer in effect.” YouTube will also stop using third-party fact checkers, which the GOP and the MAGA influencer world previously argued undermined conservative content that spread misinformation.

“YouTube values conservative voices on its platform and recognizes that these creators have extensive reach and play an important role in civic discourse,” Alphabet continued.

YouTube also posted a separate statement on X clarifying the nature of the program, calling it a “limited pilot project that will be available to a subset of creators in addition to those channels terminated for policies that have been deprecated.”

House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) has subpoenaed Google and Alphabet several times over the years, most recently to ask whether the Biden administration had pushed them in any way to suppress “free speech”. On Tuesday, he celebrated Alphabet’s policy change in a thread on X, stating that YouTube was making “amends” to the American people by giving deplatformed content creators such as Dan Bongino, now the deputy director of the FBI, a way back on. “This is another victory in the fight against censorship,” he wrote, and laid out Google’s other political concessions, such as joining the American right-wing in opposition to European content moderation laws, which they claim censor American free speech.

Alphabet is also currently dealing with antitrust lawsuits from the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, which have not let up under the Trump administration. Itrecently got a slight reprieve in its search results trial, when a federal judge ruled that Google is allowed to keep Chrome despite holding an illegal monopoly on search engines. In another case, after being found guilty of holding an illegal monopoly in digital advertising, Google is now arguing in federal court that its lucrative ad tech business should not be broken up.



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YouTube Thinks AI Is Its Next Big Bang
Gaming Gear

YouTube Thinks AI Is Its Next Big Bang

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Google figured out early on that video would be a great addition to its search business, so in 2005 it launched Google Video. Focused on making deals with the entertainment industry for second-rate content, and overly cautious on what users could upload, it flopped. Meanwhile, a tiny startup run by a handful of employees working above a San Mateo, California, pizzeria was exploding, simply by letting anyone upload their goofy videos and not worrying too much about who held copyrights to the clips. In 2006, Google snapped up that year-old company, figuring it would sort out the IP stuff later. (It did.) Though the $1.65 billion purchase price for YouTube was about a billion dollars more than its valuation, it was one of the greatest bargains ever. YouTube is now arguably the most successful video property in the world. It’s an industry leader in music and podcasting, and more than half of its viewing time is now on living room screens. It has paid out over $100 billion to creators since 2021. One estimate from MoffettNathanson analysts cited by Variety is that if it were a separate company, it might be worth $550 billion.

Now the service is taking what might be its biggest leap yet, embracing a new paradigm that could change its essence. I’m talking, of course, about AI. Since YouTube is still a wholly owned subsidiary of AI-obsessed Google, it’s not surprising that its anniversary product announcements this week touted AI features that will let creators use AI to enhance or produce videos. After all, Google Deepmind’s Veo 3 technology was YouTube’s for the taking. Ready or not, the video camera ultimately will be replaced by the prompt. This means a rethinking of YouTube’s superpower: authenticity.

YouTube’s Big Bang

I had that shift in mind when I recently interviewed YouTube CEO Neal Mohan at his office at YouTube’s San Bruno, California, headquarters. Mohan took over as CEO in 2023 when his boss, Susan Wojcicki, left her post due to a fatal cancer. But first we chat a bit about the company’s history. Mohan reminds me that his own connection with the service began even before he joined Google in 2008, after his ad company DoubleClick merged with the search giant. He was struck by how the YouTube founders were first with a revelation that, he says, remains the core of the service. “It was not just that people were interested in sharing short clips about themselves and that it was done without a gatekeeper,” he says, “but that people were interested in watching them. That was the big bang inflection point. Our mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world.”

Critics of Google’s power often argue that not only the public but also YouTube itself might benefit from a split from the mother company. Just think what the world’s biggest video company could do if it were truly independent. Mohan, a self-admitted Google loyalist, disagrees. “I don’t believe YouTube would be where it is if it weren’t part of Google,” he says. He says that being part of a giant company allowed YouTube to make long-term bets on things like streaming and podcasting. When I ask whether YouTube might be even more innovative on its own, he reminds me that YouTube has been sufficiently innovative to challenge legacy media in things like live sports while fending off challenges from competitors focusing on the creator economy.

YouTube has an advantage in breadth that Tiktok and Reels can’t dream of … “everything from a 15-second short to a 15-minute traditional long-form YouTube video to a 15-hour livestream and everything in between,” Mohan crows.

It’s currently pressing another advantage: Google’s AI technology. The announcements this week range from fun features like putting you or your friends’ bodies into videos showing astonishing acrobatic feats or allowing podcasters to make instant television shows from their audio conversations by having AI create visuals that resonate with the content of the chatter. Mohan says that, in a sense, AI is just the latest enhancement of the service. “When YouTube was born 20 years ago it was about using technology for more people to have their voice heard,” he says. “With AI, it’s the same core principle—how do we use technology to democratize creation?”



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Esports

YouTube launches Netflix-style crackdown on password-sharing Premium subscribers

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YouTube Premium users may soon find themselves cut off if they’re sharing their family plan outside of their household as the platform begins enforcing long-standing rules in a Netflix-style crackdown.

Subscribers who share a YouTube Premium or YouTube Music family plan with people at different addresses have started receiving warning emails. According to Android Police, the notices state that memberships will be paused within 14 days if all members don’t comply with YouTube’s household policy.

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The email reads: “Your YouTube Premium family membership requires all members to be in the same household as the family manager. It appears you may not be in the same household as your family manager, and your membership will be paused in 14 days.”

Losing Premium means subscribers can still use YouTube and YouTube Music, but only with ads and without extra features.

YouTube takes aim at password sharing

The enforcement mirrors Netflix’s controversial password-sharing crackdown, which blocked non-household members from using accounts unless they paid for additional slots.

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YouTube first rolled out its same-household requirement in 2023, but this marks the clearest sign yet that it’s ramping up enforcement.

Unsplash: Ella Don/YouTube

Despite the wave of warning emails, YouTube insists nothing has officially changed. A spokesperson told CNET: “Our family plan policy hasn’t changed and we are continuously enforcing it.”

Still, the move comes as YouTube faces backlash over Premium price hikes. In some cases, families pay close to $500 annually for access to ad-free videos and music, a steep cost that makes sharing accounts an appealing workaround.

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The password-sharing crackdown is just the latest controversy surrounding Premium. The Google-owned platform has also faced criticism over alleged hidden “restricted content” in search results, which it denies.

Between rising prices and tighter restrictions, many subscribers could soon be asking whether YouTube Premium is still worth the cost.



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Game Reviews

Mysterious Cyberpunk 2077 YouTube Video Spurs Fan Speculation

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Cyberpunk 2077 isn’t without its unsolved mysteries. Between the seemingly unsolved FF06B5 enigma and the lasting impact of cryptic quests like the Peralez storyline, plenty of cybersleuths are still hard at work on the streets of Night City trying to uncover the game’s secrets. Fittingly, A recent social media post by official Cyberpunk accounts has led fans on another strange quest for truth, and it centers a strange, unlisted video that, at first glance, looks to be just 24 minutes of uninterrupted static.

On September 1, 2025, CD Projekt Red shared an image of an in-universe recruitment message from Rosalind Myers, president of Cyberpunk’s fictional NUSA (New United States of America). Over at the decaying corpse of Twitter known as X, the official Cyberpunk 2077 account threw cold water on any notion that this post was a teaser for new content, clarifying that it was simply “part of an activity tied to the Phantom Liberty anniversary [the studio’s] celebrating this month.” But fans convinced there was something more to this message were on to something.

As documented by ArcticXWolf on Reddit, the binary of the image had a link that points to an image of a Roman coin. Using the anonymous messaging platform secretMSG, the link redirects to the unlisted YouTube video mentioned earlier,  titled “Secret Message from NUSA,” which seemingly contains nothing more than 24 minutes and 53 seconds of static. Despite my affinity for avant-garde works of art, even I don’t think it’s very pleasant to listen to.

Things get a little weird from here on out. Select frames from this video can be seen to spell out the words “FILES DETECTED CLASSIFIED.” Unfortunately, this seems to be the last concrete, provable thing anyone’s sussed out thus far. Some have turned to LLMs for help–which (shocker!) isn’t turning up anything meaningful. Others have pointed to a possible similarity between this cryptic static video and something apparently hidden in the Edgerunners 2 teaser, which may or may not have something to do with Cyberpunk’s space-exploration-themed conspiracies. And yet another well-read fan quoted the opening line of William Gibson’s classic cyberpunk novel Neuromancer:

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

Spooky stuff! The cryptic video remains unlisted and no social media accounts from Cyberpunk 2077 or CD Projekt Red actually seem to have given any more clues. Cyberpunk 2077’s stories are often at their best when there’s a mystery to unravel, so this is cool and on-brand. Now hopefully someone figures this one out, as well as whatever the hell the true meaning of FF06B5 is.



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