Hi there! My name is Janko Roettgers, and this is Lowpass. This week: Niantic’s founding CEO John Hanke on his changing role, and Netflix’s new Playground app.

Niantic Spatial’s John Hanke: The don’t-call-it-an exit interview 

Niantic Spatial, the company best known for having made Pokémon Go, brought on former IBM executive Inhi Cho Suh as its new CEO at the end of last month. Suh is succeeding Niantic’s founding CEO John Hanke, who is now taking on the executive chairman role.

Niantic has changed a lot since Pokémon Go launched a decade ago. The company built a few would-be successors to the game that didn’t quite catch on, leading to closures and layoffs. At the same time, it also kept working on perfecting the spatial mapping technology that powered its games, including by incorporating Gaussian splats. A year ago, Niantic sold its gaming business, renamed itself to Niantic Spatial, and refocussed entirely on mapping and geospatial AI.

I had a chance to sit down with Hanke a few days before the leadership change announcement and talk about the reasons behind it, the Pokémon Go sale and his thoughts on AR, VR, and AI.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you decide to leave the CEO post now?

For me, the Niantic journey started as a skunk works [project] inside of Google in 2011. We spun out of Google in 2015, and we completed the transaction in 2025. As we were contemplating that transaction and decided that we wanted to form this entity, I was thinking about who should run it.

Hi there! My name is Janko Roettgers, and this is Lowpass. This week: YouTube gets into the FAST channels game, with a twist.

YouTube's TV takeover continues with 24/7 streaming ‘Stations’

When Coachella returns to YouTube next week, the music festival will be offering more than just live performances. Viewers will also be able to tune into something YouTube calls Stations — 24/7 linear streams preprogrammed with videos from artists performing at the festival, perfect for playing in the background or vegging out on the couch.

Stations are essentially YouTube’s take on FAST channels: free linear streaming TV channels that have gained popularity on services like Pluto and The Roku Channel, and are now baked into the EPGs of most smart TV operating systems.

One of the reasons FAST channels have become so popular is that they bring back passive leanback viewing, doing away with the need to find something to watch when you just want to hit play. As YouTube viewing has grown in the living room, the service has seen its viewers interested in the same thing.

“I want to put something on,” says YouTube’s senior product management director, Kurt Wilms. “I want it to be hands-free. I want it to stay in the same lane.”

YouTube quietly started testing these stations with around 40 bands and musicians in recent weeks, and plans to make the feature available widely in the future. One of the early adopters is Bruno Mars, who is currently promoting his new album with a YouTube Station. 

To a viewer, such a station looks a lot like a live broadcast, complete with an audience chat. Some YouTubers have actually used YouTube’s livestreaming feature to set up similar linear feeds. However, rolling something like this on your own isn’t exactly easy, as it involves broadcasting software running on a PC 24/7 to create livestreams from prerecorded assets playing in an endless loop. If the PC ever goes down, the stream stops. 

Stations are a lot easier to set up. “A creator can come onto YouTube, go into our studio product, set up a playlist of videos,” explains Wilms. “They click ‘Start Station,’ and we'll do all the work to start the livestream for them.”

YouTube isn’t ready to share a timeline for when Stations will be made available to all creators. Wilms is already thinking about taking the feature further and opening it up to regular viewers. “We're going to democratize it,” he says. “Anyone will be able to go in, make a playlist, and click ‘Start a Station.’ That’s what we want to get to, ultimately.” 

Stations is just one of the features YouTube is looking to roll out to make its living room experience even more sticky. Earlier this week, the service launched its conversational AI tools, which debuted on web and mobile last year, within its TV app. With that, viewers are now able to ask a wide range of questions about a video with their TV’s voice remote.

Vievers can, for example, ask for substitutions while watching a cooking video, search for the moment a goal was shot during a soccer game, or even get more information about the biographical background of a creator. Answers are being presented next to the actual video and often include deep links to specific moments in the video. At times, YouTube also surfaces links to third-party websites for further reading, which viewers can access with a QR code.

“The sky is the limit on how you can use it,” Wilms says, stressing that the Gemini-powered feature doesn’t require users to rely on specific predefined queries.

YouTube is bringing its conversational AI to all TV platforms, which in itself is a testament to the power the streaming service has in the living room these days. Smart TV platforms generally like to be in control of their own voice search and assistant functionality. 

However, with YouTube now responsible for 12.5 percent of all TV viewing, the service has been able to convince these platforms to hand over control of the microphone when viewers start a voice search while in the YouTube app — a rare exception that is often unavailable to other streaming services. This now allows YouTube to roll out its new conversational AI everywhere. “We've worked hard over the years with [our] partners to do voice routing for search,” Wilms says.

Besides Stations and conversational AI, YouTube is also working on a new second-screen feature dubbed TV Companion. With it, viewers will be able to open the YouTube app on their phone and instantly see additional information about the YouTube video playing on their TV. This will, for instance, allow viewers to easily comment on a video, look for additional clips from the same creator, or control playback.

YouTube’s TV Companion works without any kind of manual pairing, and even when the phone is not on the same Wi-Fi network, as long as both apps are logged into the same account. “This is all identity-based through the cloud,” Wilms says. “You don't need to do any kind of dance with networking.” 

YouTube will continue to support traditional casting, but banks on the TV Companion feature to increase engagement in the living room. There’s no official launch date for this feature yet, but viewers won’t have to wait too long to try it out. “It's going to start rolling out soonish,” Wilms says.

What else

Meta launches two new Ray-Bans. The two new models are called Scriber and Blayzer … now where have I heard that before?

Rec Room is shutting down. The social VR platform was once valued $3.5 billion. Now, it’s closing down on June 1.

Why OpenAI shut down Sora. The generative video app had just 500,000 daily average users, but maintaining it cost $1 million per day. 🤯

TCL acquires majority of Sony’s TV business. As previously reported, TCL will own 51 percent of a joint venture that will continue to make Sony-branded TVs.

Half of France is on YouTube every week. 48 percent of the country’s population uses the service every single week, according to data from local regulators.

Bare your soul to teach AI. This is a weird and fascinating story from my former Protocol colleague (Protocolleague?) Issie Lapowsky about a startup that pays strangers to talk to each other — including topics you’d otherwise only tell your therapist about — and then uses the recordings to train AI models.

That’s it

Don’t write in the CMS, they say in my line of work, which basically means that you should not write your stories in the same platform that you use to publish those stories. Because if there’s a hiccup, your story is gone. For the most part, I’ve stuck to that rule. But small things (like these lines) I still do write directly in my newsletter editor. Living on the edge! Well, let’s just say I learned a valuable lesson this morning …

Thanks for reading, have a great weekend!

YouTube play button photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Microdramas are booming, and some of tech's biggest companies don’t want to be left behind: Both Google and Amazon have taken first steps to add the soapy short-form storytelling format, with its one-to-two minute episodes and high-octane storytelling full of hooks and cliffhangers, to their products.

Both companies are at least for now staying clear of some of the more questionable business practices often employed by microdrama services. But as they try to play it safe, Google and Amazon also risk shying away from what makes microdramas so successful in the first place.

Google was first to jump on the microdrama bandwagon when it added select microdramas from services like ReelShort, DramaBox and ShortMax to its Google TV app this month. Just like on the native apps of these respective services, viewers can watch anywhere from four to ten episodes per drama for free, after which they’re being asked to pay.

However, unlike on microdrama apps, Google’s pricing for these series is relatively straightforward. The Google TV app charges around $3 to unlock nine additional episodes, while unlocking an entire series costs $10 to $12.

That’s very different from the way many microdrama apps work: Apps like ReelShort often use gamified purchase models that obfuscate viewing costs, including coin packages and complex rewards systems that allow viewers to unlock a limited amount of episodes in exchange for watching ads. In practice, the experience is often so convoluted and time-consuming that signing up for a subscription seems like a better deal, despite high fees of up to $20 per week.

Check out my story Hollywood is in love with microdramas, for all the wrong reasons for a first-hand look of what it’s like to watch microdramas on these apps.

Amazon’s first foray into microdramas is also sidestepping these kinds of issues: The company is reportedly integrating  a new microdrama service into its MX Player app in India. Dubbed Fatafat, the new service is being made available entirely for free, with Amazon monetizing the service with advertising.

The big question is whether Amazon and Google are willing to embrace the edgier aspects of microdramas that have drawn in millions of viewers. That includes highly suggestive content with lots of shirtless men, women in various states of undress and story lines that touch on subjects like BDSM and the Omegaverse (googling that one may not be safe for work).

In contrast, all of the microdramas available through the Google TV app appear to be rated PG-14.

This article was first published as part of Lowpass, a weekly newsletter about AR, VR, streaming and more. Sign up now for free.

Hi there! My name is Janko Roettgers, and this is Lowpass. This week: Meta’s next Ray-Bans, and Amazon’s and Google’s newfound love for short-form storytelling.

Meta gets ready to launch two new Ray-Ban AI glasses

Meta and its AI glasses hardware partner EssilorLuxottica are getting ready to launch the next generation of their Ray-Ban AI glasses. That’s according to a series of FCC filings for two new Meta Ray-Ban models that were published by the agency earlier this month.

The filings describe the tested devices as production units, suggesting that Meta may launch them soon. When the company unveiled its second-generation Ray-Bans in late 2023, it did so a little over a month after the devices passed through the FCC.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

As is customary, the FCC filings are heavily redacted, so we don’t know yet exactly what the two models will look, or what new features they will offer. However, the filings did reveal a few interesting details:

Hi there! My name is Janko Roettgers, and this is Lowpass. This week: Roku’s plans for Howdy, and Meta’s 180 on Horizon Worlds.

Roku’s bet on budget streaming

Streaming is getting expensive: This week, Amazon Prime Video became the latest streaming service to increase prices. In addition to the annual $139 fee for Prime, consumers now have to pay $4.99 for ad-free viewing. The increase comes after Netflix, HBO Max, Disney Plus, and Discovery Plus all raised their prices in 2025.

Those price increases don’t go unnoticed. About half of US consumers think they’re paying too much for streaming, and two out of three people who canceled a service in recent months say they did so because it was too expensive.

Roku is betting that many of those consumers turned off by high streaming prices will sign up for the company’s Howdy service instead. Launched in August, Howdy offers more than 10,000 hours of movies and TV shows, ad-free, for just $2.99 a month.

Roku CEO Anthony Wood told the audience of an investor conference earlier this month that he has been closely involved in getting Howdy off the ground. “I personally think it’s going to be a huge business for us,” he said.

With inflation picking up again, an aggressively priced streaming service for budget-conscious consumers does look like an intriguing bet. And with Roku now looking to bring Howdy to other platforms, cheap streaming may just be having a moment in 2026.

First things first: Howdy is not directly competing with Netflix, HBO Max, or any of the other premium services. You won’t find any new TV shows or expensively produced original dramas on the service. Instead, its catalog is mostly made up of older titles. Think Sleepless in Seattle, the first Paddington movie, or largely forgotten series like The Michael J. Fox Show.

“This is a lot of catalog content,” says Parks Associates entertainment research director Michael Goodman, using industry shorthand for titles making up Hollywood’s back catalogs 

While Howdy’s initial catalog didn’t exactly live up to its promise of offering “almost everything you want to watch,” Roku has been steadily expanding its library: Just this week, the company announced new deals with Sony Pictures and Disney, as well as an extended partnership with Warner Bros., to beef up Howdy’s catalog.

There’s also a fair bit of overlap between Howdy and Roku’s free streaming efforts: Many of Howdy’s titles are also available for free, with ads, on the company’s Roku Channel.

The Roku Channel has been a massive success story for the company, with usage now surpassing that of Netflix among Roku households. Except not everyone wants to watch advertising. And even if you’re okay with the occasional ad break during a TV show, you might want to keep your movie nights ad-free. 

“There is not one business model that fits everybody,” says Goodman. Adding ad-free streaming to its portfolio is a smart move for Roku, he argues. “You need to have multiple platforms to reach the consumer.”

Roku arguably has a long history of being able to reach budget-conscious consumers. The company never positioned its $30 streaming sticks as direct competitors to a $149 Apple TV device, and isn't catering to people who spend thousands of dollars for the latest and greatest Samsung QLED. Instead, it became big by selling streaming dongles at cost at Best Buy and Walmart. And when it expanded into the smart TV space, it did so by teaming up with Chinese TV makers like TCL and Hisense, known for solid TVs that often retail for less than $500.

With plans to be in 100 million households globally this year, Roku also has a built-in advantage when it comes to marketing Howdy. Search for a movie like A Star Is Born on Roku, and the platform will automatically suggest subscribing to Howdy for $3 a month. Do the same on a Google TV device, and all you get is an option to rent the same film for $3.99.

Soon, you might be able to watch the Cooper-Gaga flick on platforms like Google TV with Howdy as well: Roku plans to bring the budget streaming service to third-party devices this year. “To become the scale of business I think it can be, it needs to be everywhere all major streaming services are,” Wood said about Howdy this month. “It needs to be international, [in] different countries. It needs to be off platform. It needs to be everywhere.” 

If Howdy catches on, other free streamers may follow with their own paid plans, predicts Goodman. “There is potential for this to expand to other services.”

In fact, one could argue that one company has already embraced ad-free budget streaming: YouTube began offering its Premium Lite plan, which offers ad-free viewing of “most videos” for $8 a month, in the United States a year ago. (YouTube also offers a more full-fledged Premium plan that includes an ad-free music subscription, among other added benefits, for $14 a month.) Google hasn’t broken out how many subscribers Premium Lite has. Altogether, YouTube generated about $20 billion with subscriptions last year.

The big question is whether Roku can grow Howdy while keeping content licensing costs low enough to actually make a profit with it. “Subscription growth at any cost — that’s not the model today,” says Goodman, alluding to the billions of dollars the industry poured into streaming a few years ago.

When services like Apple TV Plus and Peacock launched in 2019 and 2020, respectively, they bet on undercutting Netflix with deeply discounted subscription plans — only to double the costs of those plans in the following years. 

Could the same eventually happen to Howdy subscribers? Goodman thinks so. “Over time, the price will rise,” he says.

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Image courtesy of Meta

Meta changes course on Horizon Worlds VR shut-down

One day after announcing the wind-down of its Horizon Worlds metaverse platform on Quest headsets, Meta is changing course: CTO Andrew Bosworth revealed during an Instagram AMA Wednesday evening that the company will keep Horizon Worlds working in VR for the "foreseeable future.”

Bosworth’s statements suggest that Horizon Worlds in VR will essentially be in a kind of maintenance mode. “The Horizon Unity Runtime Games, they’re not going to work on mobile, they will just work in VR. We’re not going to be bringing in new games. Again, most of our energy is going towards mobile and the Meta Horizon engine there. [...] But for people who already have games they like, [they] will be able to download the Horizon Worlds app and use it in VR for the foreseeable future.”

Bosworth said that the decision to keep Horizon Worlds running in VR was “to support the fans who have reached out.”

Meta had originally announced Tuesday that Horizon Worlds would shut down in VR on June 15, and that the company would only support mobile Horizon Worlds going forward.  Existing Horizon users heavily criticized the company, with many commenting on the announcement page itself to express their displeasure. Creators who built their worlds for Horizon’s VR version also reacted with disbelief.

Meta’s announcement to close Horizon Worlds in VR, and the reversal of that decision the next day, came two months after significant cuts to Meta’s VR efforts, which included the layoff of 1000 employees. They do also reflect the challenges Meta faced as it tried to transform the Horizon Worlds VR app into a social metaverse platform for the masses. Meta sold tens of millions of Quest headsets to date. And yet, when you visited Horizon in VR, even popular games often only had a few dozen simultaneous players.

Meta’s attempts to promote Horizon Worlds within the Quest app store also led to significant backlash from VR developers, who felt that the free worlds were taking attention away from their paid games. When Meta Reality Labs director of games Chris Pruett announced that Horizon Worlds had been removed from the Quest store at GDC this month, he got loud applause from the audience 

This story first appeared on Lowpass.cc.

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What else

AI companies are hiring improv actors. Yes, and: Applications will be training AI models on replicating human tone and emotions.

Deezer is profitable. In other news: Deezer still exists, actually grew in 2025.

Music loses its Apple lawsuit. The Spotify competitor, which used to stream YouTube videos instead of striking licensing deals, won’t have its app reinstated to the App Store.

Spotify lets users mess with the algorithm. Premium subscribers will be able to tweak recommendations with natural language prompts; the feature is first being made available in New Zealand.

Paramount+ is gobbling up BET+. This leaves Paramount with just one paid streaming service in the US … until the Warner Bros. deal goes through, that is.

That’s it

Sometimes, the news just does what it does … like breaking at 9pm at night, for instance. That’s when I found out about Meta backtracking on the close of its Horizon Worlds VR app yesterday. And since the newsletter wasn’t going to go pout for another 12 hours or so, I decided to just publish it on the web. Blogging, baby! And just like in the old days, Techmeme took notice …

Here’s my question for you though: Do you want an email news alert the next time something like this happens, or are you fine waiting for the regular newsletter?

Thanks for reading, have a great weekend!

Photo of Roku TV courtesy of Roku.

One day after announcing the wind-down of its Horizon Worlds metaverse platform on Quest headsets, Meta is changing course: CTO Andrew Bosworth revealed during an Instagram AMA Wednesday evening that the company will keep Horizon Worlds working in VR for the "foreseeable future.”

Bosworth’s statements suggest that Horizon Worlds in VR will essentially be in a kind of maintenance mode. “The Horizon Unity Runtime Games, they’re not going to work on mobile, they will just work in VR. We’re not going to be bringing in new games. Again, most of our energy is going towards mobile and the Meta Horizon engine there. [...] But for people who already have games they like, [they] will be able to download the Horizon Worlds app and use it in VR for the foreseeable future.”

Bosworth said that the decision to keep Horizon Worlds running in VR was “to support the fans who have reached out.”

Meta had originally announced Tuesday that Horizon Worlds would shut down in VR on June 15, and that the company would only support mobile Horizon Worlds going forward.  Existing Horizon users heavily criticized the company, with many commenting on the announcement page itself to express their displeasure. Creators who built their worlds for Horizon’s VR version also reacted with disbelief.

Meta’s announcement to close Horizon Worlds in VR, and the reversal of that decision the next day, came two months after significant cuts to Meta’s VR efforts, which included the layoff of 1000 employees. They do also reflect the challenges Meta faced as it tried to transform the Horizon Worlds VR app into a social metaverse platform for the masses. Meta sold tens of millions of Quest headsets to date. And yet, when you visited Horizon in VR, even popular games often only had a few dozen simultaneous players.

Meta’s attempts to promote Horizon Worlds within the Quest app store also led to significant backlash from VR developers, who felt that the free worlds were taking attention away from their paid games. When Meta Reality Labs director of games Chris Pruett announced that Horizon Worlds had been removed from the Quest store at GDC this month, he got loud applause from the audience 

This is Lowpass, a weekly newsletter about AR, VR, streaming and more. Sign up now for free.

Nex Playground, the motion gaming console for young kids and their families, is getting ready to take a leap beyond the home: Nex Playground owners will be able to compete against friends and family members over the internet later this year.

However, the company is approaching these so-called play dates very differently from the way online multiplayer games usually work. Instead of letting kids just connect with random players online, they’ll have to ask their parents to make the initial connection. 

“The parents, the account owners, will need to add each other’s device with mutual intent,” explains Nex CEO David Lee. “I need to input your code, you need to input my code, we need to have a conversation about it in real time.”

This is meant to make sure that Nex’s young players – the device is catering to kids age 3 to 11 – won’t be able to connect with random strangers online. It’s in line with how Nex has been approaching trust and safety throughout its product, says Lee. “Trust is extremely important. It’s a device with a camera. We take that very seriously.”

Nex is running all of its computer vision algorithms locally on device, and never uploads any video footage to the cloud. The company also uses an all-inclusive subscription model for access to its games, and never uses in-game advertising. “With our business model, our customer is not the product,” Lee says.

That approach seems to be working for the company: Nex revealed during GDC this week that it is on track to surpass a million device sales this month.

Nex began selling its motion gaming console in 2023 after previously developing motion games for mobile devices. The company also had a partnership with UK TV provider Sky to bring motion games to Sky’s short-lived connected TV camera, and has been powering some motion games on Telly’s free TV.

The idea behind motion gaming is not new: Microsoft pioneered TV-based motion games with the Xbox Kinect accessory, which got discontinued in 2018. Nex has found more success with the idea by squarely focusing on active play for young kids and their caregivers. “It's a family entertainment market that's structurally underserved,” Lee says.

Now, the company wants to expand its business into new geographic markets. Nex plans to bring its game console to the UK later this year and is eyeing an expansion to Japan in 2027.

This article was first published as part of Lowpass, a weekly newsletter about AR, VR, streaming and more. Sign up now for free.

Hi there! My name is Janko Roettgers, and this is Lowpass. This week: Meta hopes its VR teens will grow up, and Nex plans online multiplayer feature, with a twist.

Meta’s Chris Pruett on the state of VR

“It is a pretty rough time for the game industry.”

Meta Reality Labs director of games Chris Pruett did not mince words when he returned to GDC for his annual talk on the state of VR gaming this week. “I have been in the industry for almost 30 years at this point,” he said. ”This is the roughest period I have ever seen.”

“It’s rough for everybody,” Pruett said. “It’s rough for VR. We are not immune.”

Pruett made these remarks two months after Meta cut more than 1,000 VR-related jobs and significantly cut back on first-party game development. “We shut down several of our studios,” Pruett acknowledged. “And make no mistake: Those were top-class studios.” 

Meta’s significant cutbacks have led to unease among VR developers, especially since many third-party studios have had layoffs of their own. Granted, revenue in the Quest store was still up slightly in 2025, according to Pruett. However, much of the medium’s growth has been driven by free-to-play titles like GorillaTag and UG, which are popular with young teens with little disposable income.

Even older hardcore VR gamers “are not spending as much as they used to,” Pruett admitted. However, he did have a message of hope for desperate VR developers: Those GorillaTag players won’t stay 14 forever. 

Hi there! My name is Janko Roettgers, and this is Lowpass. This week: Osmo’s revival, and Roku’s upcoming home screen changes.

Osmo is trying to crack AR edutainment (again) 

I still remember the first time I tried the kids edutainment system Osmo back in 2014: I was sitting in front of an iPad, placed vertically on a white iPad stand, that showed me pieces of a tangram puzzle, its squares and triangles arranged to make a shape.

In front of the iPad were matching wood puzzle pieces strewn across the table. I went to work to re-create the shape in question with those wood pieces. When I had managed to do so, the iPad played an animation and a sound, and showed me a new shape to crack.

This combination of digital and physical play felt like magic, especially because the physical side of it was so dead simple: In addition to the iPad and the custom white stand, Osmo only relied on analog objects — wood tangram pieces, as well as Scrabble-like letter and number tiles — forits various puzzles and other tasks. And all it took for Osmo’s apps to recognize these objects was a simple clip-on mirror that redirected the field of view of the iPad’s front-facing camera onto the table surface.

Osmo’s playful use of computer vision to bridge the physical and the digital world helped the company win over many millions of fans over the years, and ultimately led to a $120 million acquisition by India’s edutech giant Byju’s in 2019. Then, Byju’s imploded amid fraud accusations — and Osmo went down with the mothership, forced to shutter operations in 2024.

Now, a small group of former Omso employees is trying to bring its magic back: Together, they acquired Osmo’s IP and other assets for just $825,000 out of bankruptcy in December. Since then, they have been quietly restoring some of Osmo’s existing apps, and even started selling remaining hardware — all while brainstorming ways to take Osmo’s technology to the next level.

Two key members of the new Osmo team are Felix Hu and Ariel Zekelman, who met working on Osmo’s coding app, and have since married and become parents themselves. “Having kids just made us realize how special Osmo is and how there is nothing quite like it on the market,” Hu says. “We put so much love and energy into those products. We still want to see them thrive.”

As parents, Zekelman and Hu also realized that the problems Osmo was trying to solve in 2014 — kids zoning out with screens and ignoring the world around them — have only gotten worse over the years. “I really want to create healthy relationships with the digital space,” Zekelman says. “I don't want parents to feel like they can't introduce technology to children. I think that we just need to be more responsible about it.”

At the same time, Zekelman acknowledges that kids themselves have changed. They start using technology much earlier, and consume vastly different forms of media. “Ten years ago, the world was a very, very different place,” she says. “Kids were in a different mindset. We had a different relationship to technology.”

Zekelman and Hu didn’t want to talk too much about upcoming products just yet. Hu said the company is initially focused on regaining trust with its existing customers, including the thousands of schools that once used Osmo.

But the couple suggested AI could play a big role in Osmo’s future. In the company’s early days, its computer vision was often limited to recognizing a very small set of physical objects. Basically, whenever Osmo wanted to build a new iPad app, it also had to ship new play pieces to put in front of the iPad’s camera. 

“We were limited by the technologies that were available at the time,” Hu says. “Now that you have large language models, there's a lot more opportunities [to] put anything in front of [the iPad] and interact with it in a meaningful way.”

At the same time, AI could also be a godsend for a small, largely self-funded team. “We can dream much bigger and we can do much more exciting things to bring kids out of this digital world and into the physical world,” Zekelman says.

This combination of digital and physical play has been something many companies have tried to crack over the years. Amazon’s Glow — a projection mapping device for children and their caregivers — was clearly inspired by Osmo, down to the physical tangram puzzle (Zekelman briefly worked on Glow after leaving Osmo in 2022). The Nex Playground is using a Kinect-like approach to tackle the same problem in the living room. One could even argue that Pokémon Go, and the way it uses the physical world as a playground, falls into the same category.

It’s also something that’s a lot harder to pull off than building apps or games confined to phone screens. Case in point: Amazon killed its Glow product just over a year after its launch. Osmo is likely going to face challenges as well, starting with distribution. In its prior iteration, the company had a number of retail partnerships, including with Target and the Apple Store. Striking those kinds of deals requires significant capital. 

Hu didn’t want to comment on future distribution plans yet, but Zekelman suggested that the new Osmo may focus on slow, sustainable growth. “You can’t be held to VC growth standards, and you shouldn’t be,” says Zekelman about kids hardware like Osmo that isn’t optimized for constant engagement and growth. “You don't want to create these problematic play patterns. You don't want to create addictive garbage.”

Zekelman and Hu tell me that they’re clear-eyed about the challenges ahead, which include reminding the world that Omso even exists and staying clear of the temptation to chase hyper-growth. “We have an idea of what we're getting into,” Zekelman says. “We can't be stupid. I think that's it. We can't sell out.”

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Roku to launch its new home screen this year

Roku will finally launch a revamped home screen this year, the company’s CEO Anthony Wood confirmed during a fireside chat at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom conference Wednesday.

“We have been testing a bunch of different alternatives to our home screen, working on a next-generation home screen for a couple of years now, and those tests have been going really well,” Wood said. “We’re seeing great results in terms of user sentiment, monetization, engagement, and [...] we’re going to roll it out this year.”

Roku has long been a hold-out when it comes to smart TV home screen interfaces, with virtually all its competitors now emphasizing title-level recommendations over app icons. Over time, Roku introduced additional recommendations to its home screen, including through dedicated tabs for recommended content, sports, and live TV programming in its left sidebar.

A few years ago, Roku also added a row of recommended content sitting at the very top of the home screen. However, at the center of the screen are still icons for installed apps. Wood said Wednesday that the next iteration of the home screen would be better organized and have better personalization, but also feature more ad units.

Roku is testing several versions of the new home screen, Wood said. Some previously publicized tests included additional content rows, but also dynamically organized app lists based on the apps that consumers access the most.

Wood added that he was personally involved in the redesign process. “The home screen is so important that I spent a lot of time [on it]. For me, the fundamental principle number one is: Don’t screw up our home screen. We’ve got a great home screen. It’s iconic. It’s different than anything else, super simple.  One of the things that makes Roku popular is [that] it’s very easy to use, and a lot of that comes from our simple home screen.”

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What else

Netflix buys Ben Affleck’s AI startup. My latest for Fast Company: Netflix has acquired InterPositive, a startup working on AI tools for filmmakers that was founded by Affleck.

“There are easier ways to make $2.8 billion.” Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos talks losing Warner Bros. to Paramount, and why this was never about the breakup fee, with Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw.

David Ellison wants to merge Paramount+ and HBO Max to better compete with Netflix. My guess: It will be called Paramount Max for a year, and then inevitably rebranded as HBO.

Amazon is shutting down Wondery’s podcast app. The Wondery+ podcast subscription service will also be discontinued.

Pico teases new VR headset. The ByteDance subsidiary also unveiled its new VR operating system, which takes a few cues from Apple’s VisionOS.

BBC may open up its iPlayer. The British broadcaster is considering distributing other public television networks via the iPlayer app as it is looking to convince people to keep paying public TV license fees.

FCC approves Cox-Charter merger. The approval comes ten months after Charter announced its plan to buy Cox for $34.5 billion.

Meta is all in on FFmpeg. This is neat: Meta has been using the popular open source FFmpeg video encoding tool for years, but long relied on an internal fork optimized to run “tens of billions of times a day.” Now, the company merged all those code changes back into FFmpeg, meaning that other companies can easily make use of the same tech that helps Meta process more than one billion daily video uploads.

That’s it

Speaking of that $2.8 billion Paramount Skydance paid Netflix as a breakup fee after the streamer walked away from its Warner Bros. Discovery deal … I don’t know if David Ellison is reading this, but I am also open to giving up on my dream to one day buy Warner Bros.. I’d even do it for far less. Say, $2.8 million? Call me, David!

Thanks for reading, have a great weekend!

Microdramas continue to gain steam, and are starting to become viable competitors to major streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney: That’s the gist of new data released by Omdia this week, which found that microdrama app ReelShort clocked more than 35 minutes of mobile usage per day on average in the US in Q4 of 2025, compared to around 25 minutes for Netflix, 27 minutes for Amazon Prime Video and 23 minutes for Disney Plus.

The popularity of different microdrama services varies widely by geography, but the general trend seems to hold true for other markets as well. In the UK, FlickReels usage surpassed that of Amazon Prime Video, while (22.4 minutes vs. 21.5 minutes), while DramaBox outpaced Prime Video in Mexico (27.9 minutes vs. 23.8 minutes).

One important caveat is that these numbers are per-user averages. Look at the total user base, and the picture still looks very different. Netflix has 12 million monthly average mobile users in the US, while ReelShort only has 1.1 million such users per month (again according to Omdia, which got its numbers from SensorTower).

Still, with engagement numbers being so favorable for microdramas, one has to wonder how big of a challenge the format represents for the big streamers. I think there’s two ways to look at this:

The bull case for Netflix & co. goes a bit like this: Long-form content is still primarily being viewed on TV, and the bug streamers have little to fear from microdramas in the living room (if you’ve ever tried to watch a microdrama on TV, you know what I’m talking about).

But there’s a bear case, too. Netflix executives have long argued that they’re not just competing with Disney, Amazon (and increasingly YouTube),  but everything you could possibly spend your time on. 

If you opt to read a book instead of watching TV, Netflix loses an opportunity. The same goes for video games … which also explains why Netflix is so serious about gaming. And it’s of course also true for mobile video, be it on Instagram or ReelShort. By that logic, the growth of microdramas should worry every streaming service – and perhaps incentivize them to revisit their own mobile video plans.

For a deep dive on microdramas, check out my story from last October: Hollywood is in love with microdramas, for all the wrong reasons

This article was first published as part of Lowpass, a weekly newsletter about AR, VR, streaming and more. Sign up now for free.

Hi there! My name is Janko Roettgers, and this is Lowpass. This week: Residential proxy vendors try to monetize TV apps, and microdramas are catching up with other video services.

Your smart TV may be scraping the web for AI 

These days, if you sign up for a new streaming service, you generally have two options: Either pay a massive premium for an ad-free experience, or endure frequent commercial breaks and all the sneaky tracking that comes with ad targeting.

Web data aggregator Bright Data has been pitching streaming service operators on an alternative approach for apps running on Samsung’s Tizen and LG’s webOS platform — one that comes without ads and sky-high fees. All publishers have to do to unlock a new revenue source is integrate the company’s Bright SDK into their TV apps and convince viewers to opt into Bright’s monetization network.

“We don’t do any kind of tracking,” explained Bright Data’s chief product officer, Ariel Shulman, during a webinar for streaming industry insiders two years ago. “We work silently in the background, and completely anonymously. Users don’t actually see or don’t feel anything.”

The catch? With Bright’s SDK, a viewer’s smart TV becomes part of a massive global proxy network that crawls and scrapes the web. Including apps running on desktop PCs and mobile devices, the company claims to operate 150 million such residential proxies worldwide. Together, these devices gather petabytes of public web data from a wide range of different locations and IP addresses. This approach allows the company to capture localized versions of websites, but also helps to circumvent web crawler blacklists. The gathered data is then resold to companies to train AI models, among other things.

Here’s how Bright’s smart TV partnerships work:

Hi there! My name is Janko Roettgers, and this is Lowpass. This week: A new music app looks familiar, and streaming services are adding more sports content.

One man’s 15-year quest to break down streaming music silos 

Wouldn’t it be great if you could exchange music recommendations with your friends, no matter whether they use Spotify, Apple Music, or Bandcamp? What if you could follow DJs and other tastemakers online and automatically turn their social media feeds into playlists? Or what if you could fine-tune your music recommendations with AI to only get recommendations for songs you’ve never played before?

Those are a few of the tasks the new music app Parachord is trying to take on by freeing music metadata from individual subscription service silos. In essence, Parachord wants to one day make songs universally playable and shareable, no matter what services you subscribe to. For now, Parachord is still very much in its infancy, with a series of unstable, experimental builds slowly laying the path to a beta release.

But the idea behind it is something Parachord mastermind J Herskowitz has been noodling over for a long time. Not only is Herskowitz a music tech veteran who’s worked at Spotify, LimeWire, and AOL Music, he also built this very app before. 

Back in 2011, Herskowitz banded together with a small group of likeminded misfits to build a music app called Tomahawk that used a plug-in architecture to tap into the music libraries of services like Rdio, Grooveshark, and Beats Music. The app also offered access to a social layer for music fans and allowed bands to share their latest tracks with universal links. 

It was a fascinating idea, but without a clear business model, it was ultimately not sustainable. Tomahawk development effectively ended in 2015. “We all needed to get jobs,” Herskowitz remembers. “I was very sad when Tomahawk went away.”

Except, it never fully went away.

As an open-source project, Tomahawk’s code continues to be available on GitHub. Around a month ago, Herskowitz decided to take another look at it, with some help from AI. “I fired up Claude Code, pointed it at the Tomahawk repo on GitHub, and said: Look at this, understand what it does, and let's see if we can rebuild it.”

Herskowitz freely admits he's not a developer in the traditional sense. “My whole career was in product management,” he says. “I never [wrote] real code.” But with Claude Code, he managed to rewrite Tomahawk and turn it into a working version of the new Parachord app within a couple of weeks, without hiring a developer.

The music industry has changed quite a bit over the past 15 years, as has the way many people listen to music. A bunch of once-promising streaming services have since disappeared. Consumers have largely flocked to three or four major services, with Spotify leading the pack. “When it comes to subscriptions, Spotify won,” Herskowitz says, acknowledging that people who only care about listening to their Discover Weekly likely won’t get a whole lot out of his app.

Parachord is built with a different audience in mind. People who buy songs on Bandcamp, track their listening history with Last.fm, and religiously follow bands on Bluesky. Back in his Tomahawk days, Herskowitz used to think there was a huge audience like this out there. Now, he realizes that it’s much more niche and at times even wonders if anyone other than himself really cares about the ideas behind Parachord. Not that that has stopped him. “That's the beauty of where we are today,” he says. “Technologically speaking, I can build an app for [just] me.”

Vibe-coding is often being talked about in the context of productivity apps, but there are some fascinating implications for the media space as well. Fifteen to 20 years ago, a bunch of developers tried to figure out new ways to consume music and video online, often with surprising results: Songbird turned MP3 blogs into playlists. Boxee pioneered universal movie and TV show libraries across streaming services. Miro experimented with alternative, P2P-powered distribution models for video podcasts. The list goes on.

In the end, many of these efforts were more passion projects than businesses. Back then, that  was often a death sentence for niche apps. These days, vibe coding can give these niche projects a new lease on life.

Of course, other things have changed, too: Most major media services are a lot more restrictive when it comes to data sharing and API access, forcing Herskowitz to rely on complicated work-arounds. Users who want Parachord to play nice with Spotify have to register it as a personal app in their Spotify developer profile, and then generate an individual API key. That personal key model also extends to the integration of AI services like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT.

The flip side: By relying on personal keys, Parachord requires far fewer resources. “I don’t need to limit features to paid tiers to cover third-party API or hosting bills - because there aren’t any,” Herskowitz wrote on LinkedIn last week, adding: “I’m building Parachord as a personal app because music listening is personal. Your taste, your library, your preferred sources, your friends, your desired social experiences around listening to music, your history—these aren’t things that should live inside someone else’s walled garden.”

And while Herskowitz is building Parachord as a personal passion project, he also hasn’t given up on the idea that there are business models waiting to be unlocked if you can break free of the silos of the big music streaming services.

“Nobody’s going to start a streaming business from the ground up to compete with Spotify,” he says. “[But there is] an opportunity for a little cottage industry to build experiences on top of the content that people are already paying for.”

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Sports is growing across streaming

The amount of sports content available to stream keeps growing, with both paid and free streaming services both bulking up on matches and related content. That’s according to Gracenote, which noted in a news release out today that the amount of sports shows on paid subscription services grew by 12.5 percent between January 2025 and January 2026.

That may not sound all that much, especially considering that the same services also saw the number of movies and TV shows go up by 21 percent and 20 percent, respectively.

However, it’s also a bit of an unfair comparison: Streamers like Amazon or Netflix tend to treat sports league seasons similar to the way they catalog TV show seasons. Netflix, for instance, has all of the 52 RAW matches it carried live in 2025 organized in a single season. If you break out individual matches, sports content actually grew by 52 percent year-over-year.

And sports isn’t just growing behind the paywall. Sports content on FAST channels (free, ad-supported streaming channels) grew 32 percent year-over-year, according to Gracenote.

You can find more of Gracenote’s latest findings here.

---

The ne

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What else

The new Fire TV UI is here. It brings more apps to the home screen, among other things.

Apple is working on Ray-Ban clone, AI pendant. The iPhone maker is reportedly looking to launch its own smart glasses next year; the company is also exploring a pendant with integrated camera.

Amazon’s new immersion reading feature syncs ebooks, audio books. The Kindle app now lets you read along to audio books from Audible.

The memory shortage is squeezing phone, PC & TV manufacturers. "Consumer electronics will see a large number of failures,” this year, according to the CEO of a memory maker.

Apple’s Podcasts app is embracing A/V hopping. Listeners can now seamlessly switch back and forth between the audio and video versions of a podcast, thanks to HLS.

The state of video gaming in 2026. Lots of interesting data from Matthew Ball, now available as an early-access slideshow.

How much is this link worth to you? You can now make your own offer on a sponsored link in this section of Lowpass (fully disclosed as such, of course) for as little as $75.

That’s it

Happy lunar new year to all those who celebrate! And happy carnival, and Ramadan Mubarak, of course. Speaking of lunar new year: Panda Express — I know, that transition made me cringe too, but hear me out — is celebrating the occasion with a special Lofi Girl collaboration … and what can I say? I do appreciate a marketing campaign that’s both smart and chill.

Thanks for reading, have a great weekend!

Hi there! My name is Janko Roettgers, and this is Lowpass. This week: Gorilla Tag’s media ambitions beyond VR.

Gorilla Tag breaks VR records, plans TV show, mobile app and Gorillacon

The VR industry has been on edge since Meta’s massive job cuts earlier this year: One exec called the layoff announcements “one of VR’s darkest weeks.” There's talk of a VR winter, and multiple VR studios have conducted significant layoffs of their own.

For Gorilla Tag maker Another Axiom, however, it’s monkey — or monke, as they'd say — business as usual. The most popular game on Meta’s Quest VR headset reached a new audience high this past weekend, when 119,000 players joined its five-year anniversary event in-game at the same time.

“We broke the world record, as we understand it, of concurrent players in VR,” says Another Axiom chief marketing officer Jake Zim. (Social VR app VRChat boasted 150,000 concurrent users over New Year’s, but that number included people who accessed its 3D worlds on flat screens).

It’s not just special events: Gorilla Tag attracts up to a million VR users every day. Most of them are Gen Alpha, and they all battle each other in chaotic games of tag, powered by its unique style of arm-swinging locomotion. The free-to-play game frequently leads the bestseller charts of Meta’s Quest store. The game’s characters, known as monkes, have become so popular that Another Axiom regularly sells out of plush toys; total merch sales have reached close to $10 million, according to Zim.

“The fandom is bigger than just VR,” Zim tells me. 

That’s why Another Axiom now has plans to expand beyond headsets: The company is working on a mobile game, a live event, and even a TV show. “We believe that the lore and the world of Gorilla Tag can tell so many stories,” Zim says.

Of course, there is a flip side to those planned expansion moves: Five years in, and with no bigger titles to catch up to, execs at Another Axiom are acutely aware that there may be a ceiling to VR, and that Meta’s cutbacks are clouding the medium’s future. “VR as an ecosystem is very challenged,” Zim admits. “With all the changes at Meta, this is a transition moment at best for VR.”

Hi there! My name is Janko Roettgers, and this is Lowpass. This week: Netflix and the PS3 go way back, and YouTube’s subscription business now rivals Disney’s.

It’s the end of an era as Netflix says good-bye to the PS3

It’s been a rough couple of days for gamers who also love to binge their favorite TV shows with their consoles: At the beginning of the week, Netflix began informing PlayStation 3 owners with an onscreen message that it would discontinue support for its PS3 app after March 2nd. And today, Hulu is pulling the plug on its app for Nintendo’s original Switch.

Netflix’s decision to discontinue its PS3 app, which was first spotted by multiple Reddit users, is particularly noteworthy: The console used to be at the forefront of Netflix’s living room tech efforts, only to eventually be outflanked by the growing popularity of more modern and capable smart TVs and streaming devices.

Netflix first launched an app for Sony’s PlayStation 3 in late 2009, with a twist: Instead of shipping a downloadable app for the device, the company initially distributed discs with its app to its members.

Netflix eventually began distributing its app through the PlayStation Store, and quickly became a hit. By 2012, the PS3 was the most popular streaming device among its customer base. “PS3 is our largest TV-connected platform in terms of Netflix viewing, and this year, at times, even surpassed the PC in hours of Netflix enjoyment to become our number one platform overall,” said then-CEO Reed Hastings at the time.

But the game console wasn’t just a boon for Netflix’s streaming hours. It also quickly became a key part of Netflix’s app development strategy. On other platforms, Netflix had to ship a new app version every time it changed anything about the app’s features or design. The PlayStation app, on the other hand, was based on HTML5, which allowed Netflix to swap out individual components and test features and design choices with subsets of its audience on the fly. This quickly turned the PS3 into a cornerstone of Netflix’s A/B-testing strategy.

“PS3 is a natural fit for Netflix in terms of developing and first deploying our most advanced features,” Hastings said in 2012. “We can transparently update our application with new features on a daily basis.”

As a result, PS3 owners also got to see many Netflix features before those features arrived on Roku and other streamers. This included casting support, which Netflix debuted on the PS3 close to a year before Google launched its own Chromecast streaming adapter.

Netflix isn’t the only streaming venture that owes a debt to game consoles: In 2002, enthusiasts built the Xbox Media Player to watch videos they had downloaded from the internet or ripped from DVDs on Microsoft's original Xbox. The project soon became known as XBMC, or the Xbox Media Center, and has since morphed into Kodi, a cross-platform media player. XBMC also laid the foundation for Plex, which has since outgrown its media center roots to also become a streaming service for ad-supported content.

However, as streaming matured and smart TVs became more popular, the share of consumers streaming media with their consoles has been declining. In early 2018, 21 percent of US households used a game console as their primary streaming device, according to Parks Associates data. By the end of 2025, that number had declined to just 7 percent. The number of households streaming with their smart TVs increased from 39 percent to 61 percent during the same time, while streaming dongle usage essentially remained flat.

With that, there’s a lot less need for streaming services to be available on these devices. Plus, as streaming services evolve to add new features, it often simply doesn’t make sense for them to keep supporting older and less capable hardware. Netflix, for instance, has been adding cloud-streamed games and interactive livestreams to its catalog, and discontinued some legacy device support in the process. Just last month, the company disabled support for casting across most devices.

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YouTube is now a $20B subscription video service

When Google reported Q4 2025 earnings Wednesday, it once again posted some massive YouTube numbers: The video service surpassed $60 billion across ads and subscriptions in 2025, making it bigger than any other media business with the exception of Disney, which gets a lot of its money from its parks and cruises these days.

But while all eyes were on YouTube’s whopping advertising business – the service surpassed $11 billion in ad revenue in Q4 alone – another quite staggering number didn’t get nearly as much attention: With YouTube ad revenues for the year totaling $40.4 billion, the service’s subscription revenue comes in at around $20 billion for the year.

For comparison’s sake, Disney’s online video subscription revenue for its fiscal year 2025 was $20.7 billion.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: YouTube isn’t just one single thing, which makes these kinds of comparisons complicated. YouTube Premium includes ad-free viewing as well as access to Spotify-like music streaming. Viewers can also buy third-party video subscriptions through YouTube, and YouTube TV offers access to a pay TV bundle.

Then again, one could make similar arguments about Disney’s subscription business, which includes not just Hulu and Disney Plus, but also ESPN Unlimited and Hulu TV. Ultimately, it comes down to this: No matter how you slice it, YouTube is a media juggernaut, and it’s increasingly competing with traditional media on every front.

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What else

Everyone is stealing TV. I wrote a 3800-word feature for The Verge about the growing popularity of rogue streaming boxes.

Amazon will test AI tools for MGM productions. An internal AI studio is working with Maleficent director Robert Stromberg and others to test a variety of tools.

Crunchyroll is raising its subscription fees. The Sony-owned anime subscription service is adding a download option to its cheapest tier to make up for the price hike. Imagine if others followed their lead and made 4K available to everyone?

Netflix will stream a BTS concert next month. Does it feel like there are suddenly a lot more live streams on Netflix?

How GDC is preparing for ICE. The things organizers of big, international conferences have to think about these days …

The Switch has now outsold all other Nintendo consoles. The company has sold more than 155 million Switch consoles to date.

That’s it

It’s been another bad week for journalism, with the Washington Post laying off 300 journalists, including entire departments and foreign bureaus. Over on Business Insider, Peter Kafka rightfully notes that hoping billionaires will pick up the tab for quality journalism isn’t really a winning strategy (even though Bezos absolutely could have funded the Post for years to come).

So what is the solution? I wish I knew. Independent publications like Lowpass are definitely part of the mix, and we all should make an effort to send more money to small newsletters, local news sites and the likes. But I think part of it — at least in tech — also has to do with companies being more sensible about the way they spend their money.

Do you really need to pay thousands of dollars to have one of your employees on a conference panel, talking to a room of people who paid to have one of their people on the next panel? Do you think it’s healthy to give “retainer” money to publications that promise you to print your next press release, near verbatim but reframed as a work of journalism, in return? Do you need to spend thousands of dollars to wine and dine journalists, all while those journalists anxiously tell each other about the latest layoffs?

Or could you, perhaps, use some of that money to pay for a few extra subscriptions for your staff, or sponsorships that are actually disclosed, and fund quality journalism — even if you don’t agree with every story?

I, for one, do believe that there’s not just a need for quality journalism, but also enough money to fund it, and enough people willing to do so. Sometimes, they just need a little nudge.

Of course, I would be remiss, of course, if I didn't use this moment for such a nudge for Lowpass itself… but I also don’t want to do that at the expense of my newly-laid-off colleagues. So here’s the deal: If anyone signs up for a new annual or lifetime Lowpass subscription between now and next Thursday, I’ll donate half of the money to the Washington Post layoff fund Gofundme. And heck, I’ll do the same if you buy a sponsorship. 

Thanks for reading, have a great weekend!

PlayStation 3 photo by Nikita Kostrykin on Unsplash

Meta undertook the most significant cuts to its metaverse efforts to date earlier this month, laying off a reported 1500 employees and closing multiple VR game studios. Still, CEO Mark Zuckerberg isn’t done with immersive media just yet.

On the company’s Q4 2025 earnings call Wednesday afternoon, Zuckerberg laid out a somewhat murky vision for a future in which AI and spatial computing turn all kinds of media into immersive 3D worlds, including all of the videos on your Instagram feed.

After briefly recapping the evolution of social media from text to images to video, Zuckerberg said: “I don't think that video is the ultimate kind of final format. We're going to get more formats that are more interactive and immersive. [...] There's definitely a version of the future where you can tap on and jump into any video that you see, engage, and experience it in a more meaningful way.”

“I think that the Investments that we've done in both a lot of the virtual reality software and Horizon, as well as a number of other areas around the company are actually going to pair well with these AI advances to be able to bring some of those experiences to hundreds of millions and billions of people through mobile,” he added.

Zuckerberg did not call any of this the metaverse, and he notably also didn’t suggest that VR would play a role in consuming any of this content. He did, however, say earlier in the call that Meta’s goal was to turn VR into “a profitable ecosystem over the coming years,” while most Reality Labs investments going forward would shift towards glasses and wearables.

“Sales of our glasses more than tripled last year, and we think that they are some of the fastest growing consumer electronics in history,” Zuckerberg said, reiterating that he envisioned most glasses to become AI glasses in the future.

Among those lofty predictions, Zuckerberg did have some hard news for investors: Meta expects that Reality Labs losses will be similar to last year in 2026, he said, adding: “This will likely be the peak as we start to gradually reduce our losses going forward while

This article was first published as part of Lowpass, a weekly newsletter about AR, VR, streaming and more. Sign up now for free.

Photo courtesy of Meta.

Hi there! My name is Janko Roettgers, and this is Lowpass. This week: Smart TV implications of Netflix’s WB deal, and Mark Zuckerberg’s new vision for immersive videos.

Netflix’s Warner Bros. acquisition puts a spotlight on its deals with TV makers 

If you’re in the market for a new TV, you’ll have plenty of different options these days, ranging from display technologies (OLED vs. QLED vs. micro RGB) to styles (shiny home theater displays vs. matte art TVs) to operating systems (Roku vs. Google TV vs. Tizen vs. Fire TV).

However, you’ll find that all these different TVs still have something in common: Every TV comes with a remote that has a Netflix button, and most will feature the Netflix app prominently placed on the homescreen, usually in the first spot of the TV’s homescreen app rail.

That’s no accident: Netflix has long forced TV makers and smart TV platform operators to follow strict guidelines if they want to ship their devices with its app. A lot of these rules are technical in nature, and meant to ensure that Netflix runs without hiccups on any device certified by the company. Others seem more designed to cement the company’s market position, and prevent Netflix content from drowning in a growing sea of streaming titles from other services.

Device makers have little choice but to accept those terms. Netflix is responsible for 19 percent of all streaming in North America, and its app is the second-most-popular app on smart TVs after YouTube. That makes the Netflix app a must-have, as shipping a device without it would be commercial suicide.

Now, some smart TV industry insiders are wondering what this all means for Netflix’s acquisition of Warner Bros. and its HBO Max service. Will Netflix extend its requirements to the HBO Max app and its content, perhaps through an HBO-branded remote control button? Or could regulatory pressure, and Netflix’s desire to get the deal done despite a competing bid from Paramount Global, force it to ease up on some of its policies, and for instance give TV makers more access to its data?

Netflix declined to comment on specific aspects of integrating the two services when contacted for this story.

Hi there! My name is Janko Roettgers, and this is Lowpass. This week: A Telly scoop, and Ted Sarandos on whether YouTube is TV or not.

Leaked Telly data reveals small user base, high breakage rate

When free TV startup Telly came out of stealth in 2023, it did so with big promises: Company executives told the media at the time that Telly would ship 500,000 units of its unique TV set, which incorporates a second screen for ads and widgets, before the end of the year.

"Shipping 500,000 TVs [...] that's not going to be a problem," chief strategy officer Dallas Lawrence told Stream TV Insider in May of 2023. Two months later, Telly executives told the same outlet that the company was going to ship “millions more” in 2024.

Two years later, the company was still far from reaching that goal. In a Q3 update sent to investors in November 2025 that I was able to review, Telly revealed that it had just 35,000 TV sets in people’s homes. Telly ended the prior quarter with 28,000 TVs in the field, according to the same note.

The startup did suggest that it was about to significantly ramp up deliveries, and order another 100,000 TVs from its hardware supplier, Foxconn. 

Telly declined to comment on the record on specifics included in its investor update when contacted for this story.

Telly’s promise is a simple one: Consumers will get a free TV in exchange for watching ads displayed on the device’s second screen. That secondary screen, positioned under the TV’s soundbar, also displays widgets with sports scores, news headlines, and even minigames. Telly TVs also come with their own voice assistant and have an integrated camera for video calls and motion games.

Interest in the device has been significant: Telly announced in June 2023 that it had gotten preorders for 250,000 TVs. However, fulfilling all those orders appears to be a lot more challenging than the company initially anticipated.

One major challenge has to do with Telly’s decision to forgo traditional retail channels: The company lets consumers preorder TVs for free online and then ships them straight to their doorsteps. Unfortunately, a lot of them have arrived damaged. On Reddit, Telly owners have posted photos of dozens of broken TVs, with some complaining that their replacement TVs arrived damaged as well.

In its Q3 investor update, Telly revealed just how widespread this problem has been: A whopping 10 percent of Telly TVs shipped via FedEx arrived broken, according to the letter. The company has since switched to a new logistics partner, and breakage has gone down significantly since, according to the letter. Posts on Reddit reveal that Telly now uses RXO, a company that is also being used by Samsung to deliver and install TVs.

Telly executives have in the past called their devices “$1,000 TVs.” Turns out giving high-priced hardware away for free, even to a small group of consumers, can be quite capital-intensive: In recent months, Telly raised two rounds of debt funding totaling $350 million, according to the investor update. (It’s unclear how much equity Telly has raised since its founding.)

There does appear to be some silver lining for Telly: The startup reached $22 million in annualized revenue in Q3 of 2025, according to the investor note. Taking into account the small number of Telly TVs in people’s homes, this suggests that each TV set could generate more than $50 in advertising revenue for the company per month. That would be significantly higher than other smart TV businesses: Roku’s average revenue per user reached $41.49 for all of 2024. (The company stopped reporting ARPU in 2025.)

In other words: Having a dedicated second screen in people’s homes that shows a constant stream of ads can be a lucrative business. Scaling that business to be more than a novelty is the hard part.

At least publicly, Telly’s leadership kept brushing off such concerns even as the company’s internal numbers remained dismal. “When investors told me [that] hardware is hard, it just didn’t sit well with me. I just called bullshit on that,” said Telly CEO Ilya Pozin during a September podcast appearance. Arguing that some of the world’s largest companies like Apple, Google, and Tesla are all doing hardware, Pozin added: “That’s what we’re doing here with Telly. I think we have an opportunity to build a trillion-dollar company.”

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Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos: YouTube is TV

Show me the money: Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos during the company’s Q4 2025 earnings call

Ever since YouTube’s massive rise in the living room, folks in Hollywood and beyond have engaged in a spirited debate about whether it's fair to compare YouTube to traditional TV networks, or even streaming services like Netflix and HBO Max. YouTube, some argue, doesn’t count as TV because its content is so different from what TV has always been.

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos chimed in on the debate during his company’s Q4 2025 earnings call Tuesday, and he didn’t mince words.

 “YouTube is not just UGC and cat videos anymore," Sarandos said during the call, using industry shorthand for user-generated (amateur) content. “YouTube has full-length films. New episodes of scripted and unscripted TV shows. They have NFL football games. They have the Oscars! The BBC is going to be producing original content for YouTube soon. They are TV!”

Netflix executives have long said that the streaming service was competing with YouTube for the time and attention of consumers. On Tuesday, Sarandos explained there is more to this competition these days. “We all compete with them in every dimension,” he said. “For talent, for ad dollars, for subscription dollars, and for all forms of content.”

YouTube accounted for 12.7 percent of all TV-based streaming in North America last month, according to new Nielsen data released this week, with Netflix coming in second with 9 percent. Together, the two services were responsible for more TV viewing than cable or broadcast TV.

Netflix has responded to YouTube’s ascent by signing distribution deals with select YouTube talent. That strategy appears to be working, according to this week’s earnings report: The eponymous show of early childhood entertainer Ms. Rachel, which struck a deal with Netflix a year ago, became the 9th-most-watched show on Netflix globally in the second half of 2025.

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JWX, the video technology company previously known as JWPlayer, has acquired the AI video startup Aug X Labs, best known for its Augie video studio. JWX now plans to incorporate Aug X’s video generation and editing tech into its own JWX Studio product. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but the Augie team will join JWX, where the startup’s co-founder and CEO Jeremy Toeman will now serve as the SVP of AI Innovation.

I”ve followed Augie for a while, and decided to catch up with Toeman this week to get his perspective on the evolution of the AI video startup space. Augie has seen great demand for content transformation among publishers, according to Toeman. “You've got hours and hours of video footage, but you now need 45 seconds here or two minutes [there].”

While publishers have been warming up to the use of AI for this, they’re also increasingly wary of creating content that misses the mark. “Nobody wants to be making slop,” Toeman says. “Even if they're going to use AI for everything or nothing, they don't want it to be perceived as slop.”

Augie is just one of a number of tools aiming to help publishers use AI, and Toeman tells me that he’s already seen signs of consolidation. “Oodles of the companies we used to call our competition have just disappeared,” he says. Trying to avoid that fate was one reason for the deal with JWX. “I recognized last summer that we were going to [have to] find ourselves in a bigger position very quickly if we wanted to keep playing the game.”

“2026 might be a tough year for sort of single function startups,” Toeman predicts.

This article was first published as part of Lowpass, a weekly newsletter about AR, VR, streaming and more. Sign up now for free.

Hi there! My name is Janko Roettgers, and this is Lowpass. This week: casting at a crossroads, and Augie gets acquired.

The history and future of casting

Last month, Netflix made the surprising decision to kill off a key feature: With no prior warning, the company removed the ability to cast videos from its mobile apps to a wide range of smart TVs and streaming devices. Casting is now only supported on older Chromecast streaming adapters that didn’t ship with a remote, Nest Hub smart displays, and select Vizio and Compal smart TVs.

That’s a stunning departure for the company. Prior to those changes, Netflix allowed casting to a wide range of devices that officially supported Google’s casting technology, including Android TVs made by companies like Philips, Polaroid, Sharp, Skyworth, Soniq, Sony, Toshiba, and Vizio, according to an archived version of Netflix’s website.

But the streaming service didn’t stop there.