Curated playlist
Internet television streaming services
- YouTube TVYouTube TV launched on the 5th of April 2017, not in every city at once, but in just five: New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and San Francisco. Google was betting that millions of Americans were ready to cut the cord, to…
- HBO MaxHBO Max arrived in the United States on the 27th of May 2020, and its first major test of judgment came within days. On the 9th of June 2020, amid protests following the death of George Floyd, the service removed Gone with the Wind from…
- Amazon FreeveeAmazon Freevee's first name lasted five months. Through three names and six years, the service offered free television supported by advertising and required no subscription. How a movie database became a free-streaming platform is one…
- Amazon Prime VideoAmazon Prime Video holds about 205 million paid memberships worldwide, placing it second only to Netflix among subscription streaming services globally. The platform launched on the 7th of September 2006, under a completely different name.…
- NetflixNetflix started not as a streaming service but as a company that mailed DVDs in red envelopes. Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings founded it on the 29th of August 1997, in Scotts Valley, California, and within months they had a website where…
- HidiveHidive is an American subscription streaming service that delivers Japanese anime to paid subscribers, its name always stylized in capital letters. It launched in June 2017, taking over for a smaller predecessor called Anime Network…
- Vix (streaming service)Vix is a streaming service for Spanish-language audiences. It carries live football from Europe and the Americas, original telenovelas, and biopics of Mexican cultural icons. It began not as a media company but as a digital radio startup…
- TubiTubi is an American streaming television service that runs on ads instead of charging a subscription fee. Stylized as tubı, the service reached 100 million monthly active users by June 2025. That figure had climbed from 97 million that…
- Peacock (streaming service)In January 2024, Peacock broadcast its first exclusive NFL playoff game. No postseason NFL game had ever been available only through a streaming service outside local television markets before that broadcast. An average of 23 million…
- Disney+Disney+ launched at midnight Pacific Time on the 12th of November 2019, in three countries simultaneously: the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands. Before the day was out, more than 10 million people had subscribed. Roughly…
- HuluHulu launched on the 29th of October 2007, and its name came from a pair of Mandarin Chinese phrases. The CEO at the time, Jason Kilar, explained that the word evokes the image of a gourd, which in Chinese tradition is a holder of precious…
- CrunchyrollCrunchyroll launched on the 14th of May 2006 as a pirate site. It hosted East Asian shows subtitled by fans, operating entirely outside the law. Nobody at the time would have predicted that this scrappy, infringing platform would…
- Paramount+Paramount+ did not start under that name. On the 28th of October 2014, CBS Corporation switched on a service called CBS All Access. It was priced at $5.99 a month with advertising or $9.99 without. CBS had announced it twelve days earlier,…
- FunimationFunimation started not in a boardroom but in a conversation between two relatives. In the early 1990s, a Japanese-born businessman named Gen Fukunaga received a phone call from his uncle, Nagafumi Hori, who was a producer at Toei Company.…
- SnapchatSnapchat launched on the 8th of July 2011 under the name Picaboo, and the core idea was almost recklessly simple: what if the photos you sent just vanished? Three Stanford University students brought it to life. Reggie Brown came up with…