• In late February, Hulu dropped the price of its ad-supported service from $8 per month to $6 per month. It also started bundling subscriptions with Spotify Premium ($10 per month) for free in March as a limited-time offer.
• Last month, Disney announced an aggressive price of $7 per month (or $70 per year) for its Disney+ streaming service, which will launch in November. Disney has also hinted at bundling Hulu and ESPN+ with Disney+ for further discounts.
• Last week, YouTube announced that Cobra Kai and other original shows will become free (with ads) this fall, so they’ll no longer require a $12-per-month YouTube Premium subscription.
• Also last week, Viacom started streaming classic shows from MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and more for free on Pluto TV. Viacom acquired Pluto TV in March, seeing a bigger opportunity in ad-supported streaming than in premium subscriptions.

While these events might seem unconnected, together they demonstrate how a new kind of a la carte TV is emerging, in which media companies must compete directly for your money. Outside the confines of bloated channel bundles (which, by the way, keep getting more expensive), many of these services will discover that they can’t get away with charging too much for TV. Some will have to charge less, while others will have to abandon mandatory paywalls in favor of free streaming with ads.

In other words, competition is keeping prices in check. This is the system working as it should. Read the full column on TechHive.

That said, the timing for Roku OS 9.1 is still murky. Although Roku said in early April that was it was in the process of rolling out the update, none of the Roku players in my office have received it yet, and my attempts to get clarity from Roku’s PR department have been unsuccessful. (Any Roku folks reading, please reach out!) In any case, I’m looking forward to exploring OS 9.1 in-depth once it does become widely available.

Queuing up YouTube videos: As Android Police noticed last week, YouTube now lets you save videos to your Watch Later or other playlists through the TV version of its app. (This refers to YouTube proper, not the bundle of streaming cable channels known as YouTube TV.) To save a video, just click and hold the select button on your remote. It’s a nice way to queue up a playlist of videos to watch so you don’t have to keep reaching for the remote.

Android TV updates: Google is promising a couple of modest improvements for Android TV later this year. The first is a redesigned Play Store with a clever “subscribe and install” option. This will allow users to sign up for streaming services directly through the store with whatever billing information is on file with Google. It’s an answer, of sorts, to “Channels” marketplaces from Amazon, Roku, and (soon) Apple, though Google hasn’t announced any partners yet.

Android TV is also expanding its Google Assistant controls for live TV, so you can launch channels with voice commands. YouTube TV supports this already, but others including Philo will join in later in the year. Unfortunately, this week’s I/O developers conference brought no news on the hardware front for Android TV, and we’re still waiting to hear more about some of the bigger design changes Google’s been considering lately.

Compared to HDHomeRun’s cheaper Connect tuners, the Extend has a built-in transcoder, so it can stream live TV while using less bandwidth. It still provides excellent video quality on Android TV and Xbox One, and on Apple TV if you use the third-party Channels app. (I’ve found that Fire TV devices struggle to stream smoothly from the Extend unless you disable transcoding, which sort of defeats the purpose.)