The first is to replace the cable bundle with a streaming one, using services like YouTube TV, Hulu + Live TV, or Sling TV. The second is to cobble together various standalone services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu, perhaps throwing in a TV antenna for good measure.

Each approach has its pros and cons, and there’s room for overlap, but I’ve been predicting for a while that we’ll ultimately see more people choose the latter approach. As the best content becomes available outside the bundle, the ever-increasing costs of cable channels will become too much to justify.

Now, the coronavirus pandemic is accelerating that trend. With professional sports on hold, and millions of people facing unemployment or salary reductions, traditional TV bundles have entered free fall, and their streaming replacements have stopped growing.

While you might expect the TV industry to respond with lower prices or more flexible packaging, they seem to have accepted the bundle’s fate. Rather than trying to save the old business model, they’re accelerating its decline through even higher prices, which they’ll use to build their own a la carte alternatives. Read the full column on TechHive.

Not that the need for ATSC 3.0 gear is urgent anyway. The industry had planned to have 40 U.S. markets broadcasting in the new standard by year-end, but one of ATSC 3.0’s main backers now says the industry is about three months behind schedule despite earlier suggestions to the contrary. That’s largely due to—you guessed it—the coronavirus and its impact on both travel and construction work. Stations will have to simulcast their main channels in the current ATSC 1.0 standard until at least February 2022 anyway, so you needn’t go splurging on hardware that’s being rushed to market.

HBO’s Fire fight: With less than two weeks until the May 27 launch of HBO Max, AT&T CEO John Stankey has declared that the service may not arrive on Amazon Fire TV devices right away. As FierceVideo points out, HBO and Amazon could be tussling over Amazon’s Channels marketplace, which currently offers HBO as a $15 per month add-on for Prime subscribers. HBO Max will essentially be a super-sized version of HBO, with more content from AT&T’s WarnerMedia catalog, and this time around, HBO may want avoid Amazon Channels entirely. That would give it more control over the experience and presumably more of the subscription revenue.

My money’s still on the two companies resolving their differences in time, though, and it looks like most publications aren’t treating Stankey’s threats as gospel. I suspect they’ve wised up after Disney pulled a similar trick last fall, leaking the news that Disney+ may not arrive on Fire TV due to disputes over ad revenue. The two parties worked it out, of course, but not before a wave of panicky stories gave Disney some free PR leverage.

Watch HBO together: Speaking of HBO, the service has launched a nifty integration with Scener, a Chrome plug-in that lets you watch videos while simultaneously video chatting or texting with faraway friends. Scener already worked with Netflix, but now it supports HBO Go and HBO Now as well. Unlike with the Netflix integration, Scener actually has HBO’s blessing, though it may be all the same from a practical standpoint.

I rounded up a bunch of “watch together” options back in March, and at the time Scener felt a bit rickety, but the developers have been improving reliability since then and have now redesigned the video chat interface as well. If anyone gives this a try, I’d be curious to know how it goes.

Fire TV’s free stuff: Amazon has followed in Roku’s footsteps and added a “Free” section to the Fire TV home screen. As you might expect, the new section is mainly a promotional vehicle for Amazon’s own free IMDb TV service and the free streams in its News app. It does spotlight other free apps such as Tubi, Pluto TV, and Crackle, but only integrates a small amount of their content directly. You can find the section by scrolling to the top of your Fire TV screen and scrolling over a few clicks.

I’m not crazy about the Smart Soundbar’s audio quality, but the whole thing is extremely easy to set up, and it has a convenient on-screen menu for settings like dialog boost and loud sound reduction. Roku also lets you build a 5.1 surround sound system over time with its wireless satellite speakers and subwoofer, which sound a lot better than the soundbar on its own. Those add-ons, however, aren’t on sale right now.