There's a fun new way to watch YouTube: by channel surfing like a boomer with cable TV. This creative idea comes from London-based developer Steven Irby, who has just launched a web app called Channel Surfer, which presents interesting YouTube videos in an interface resembling a retro-looking TV guide. At launch, there are 40 of these custom-built 'channels' to choose from, including those focused on general topics like news, politics, sports, and lifestyle content, as well as a selection of music channels and others with a more tech focus. As you move between channels, you join the video being played mid-stream. Meanwhile, the guide informs you of the upcoming content on all the channels and what time of day it will play. You can also scroll ahead to look at programming planned for the next 24 hours. This makes watching YouTube feel a lot like watching old-school live television ' an experience that's proven popular on free streaming services like Plex, Pluto TV, Tubi, and others, which offer lineups of live channels playing TV shows and movies. YouTube itself, meanwhile, dominates TV streaming in the U.S....
According to new estimates from research firm Moffett Nathanson ' as reported by The Hollywood Reporter ' the platform pulled in a staggering $40.4 billion in ad revenue, which is more than Disney, NBC, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery's (WBD's) combined ad revenue, whose total came to $37.8 billion. YouTube's ad revenue for 2025 not only topped the combined haul from the four major Hollywood studios, but also marked a huge turnaround from the previous year. In 2024, YouTube's ad revenue of $36.1 billion fell short of the $41.8 billion in ad revenue collectively earned by Disney, NBCU, Paramount, and WBD. The tables have now turned. For decades, these studios have been the kings of entertainment, captivating audiences with big-budget films and hit TV shows. But as traditional studios struggle with shrinking linear TV audiences and the ever-rising costs of production, YouTube is speeding ahead. Even as these companies pour millions into their own streaming platforms, it's getting harder to keep up with YouTube's momentum....
Since Donald Trump's election in 2016, popular entertainment has struggled with how to reflect the resulting upheaval in American politics and culture. Many Hollywood projects have taken a heavy-handed approach: Think of how often you've been told that a certain movie or TV show is 'exactly what we need right now.' During Trump's first term, these direct, if unsubtle, approaches felt like honest reactions to the moment. Now nearly 10 years later'and one year into Trump's second term'audiences are savvier and more suspicious about such transparent messaging. Perhaps sensing this wariness, the creators of some of the more politically compelling movies and TV shows of the past year have instead explored how being alive feels during a tumultuous period. They capture the atmosphere, the mood, the ambient existence of everyday people who are living through a transformative time in history, whether or not they recognize that they are doing so. Consider James Blaine 'J.B.' Mooney, the museum-robbing protagonist of Kelly Reichardt's The Mastermind, which is set in suburban Massachusetts in 1970. Played as both a careful schemer and a lazy layabout by Josh O'Connor, J.B. is not pushed into a life of crime'he chooses it because he's just that bored. This wayward boredom is more striking when you consider what he ignores: Whenever the news is on, J.B. listens nonchalantly, apathetic about the war in Vietnam. He behaves as though current events are so far beyond his control or influence that participating at all is utterly pointless. He may as well try robbing an art museum if nothing matters....
Models are born, not made, to tweak Simone de Beauvoir's famous saying. Every once in a blue moon, a human being arrives on Earth as a freak accident of genetic alchemy, gifted with bone structure, height, and the uncanny positioning of features that registers to other humans as beauty. When they grow up (some barely), models have to be distinctive enough to be recognizable but bland enough to be chameleonic, a canvas for constant reinvention. They should look assertive in images but be compliant in the studio. They cannot overshadow the clothes, or the designers, or the photographers. The idea that a normal person could work to transform themselves into a model is preposterous, like spinning straw into gold. But, for much of the 2000s, reality television insisted that this was possible, never with more fervor, ruthlessness, and capitalist commitment than on America's Next Top Model. Because why not' Reality television was still in its infancy in 2003, when the show first started airing, but the genre had already spawned pop stars, celebrity comebacks, even marriages (short-lived but legal ones). To Tyra Banks'a bona fide supermodel with a career spanning runway shows, Vogue, and guest stints on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air'the formula seemed obvious. 'I wanna marry American Idol and The Real World and set it in the modeling industry' is how she recalls things now, on the new Netflix series Reality Check: Inside America's Next Top Model. Idol was devoted to discovering hidden talent and steering it all the way to the bank; The Real World made an art of watching ordinary people crack in manufactured high-stress environments. Add in fashion, an industry practically built on demoralizing vulnerable girls, and what could go wrong'...
