Hey there! I’m Jared Newman, and this is Cord Cutter Weekly, my newsletter on how to save money on TV and make the most of streaming. Sign up here if someone shared this newsletter with you.

This week’s column: Max shows 50% more ads now

When HBO Max launched its ad-supported plan in 2021, it promised no more than four minutes of ads per hour. Now, it’s quietly backtracked.

A support page for Max’s Basic with Ads plan says to expect six minutes of ads per hour, a 50 percent jump. According to the Wayback Machine, that same page listed four minutes of ads per hour as recently as February 2025. And despite its original promise not to show ads during HBO programming, Max has been breaking up HBO shows with commercials as well.

Max isn’t alone in stuffing more ads into its ad-supported plan—more on that shortly—but it once touted “a commitment to the lowest commercial ad load in the streaming industry.” Now it has one of the highest among its subscription-based peers.

Read the full column on PCWorld →


Weekly rewind

More ads on Amazon Prime Video: My inspiration for this week’s column was an earlier story about Amazon doubling the ad load on Prime Video, from 2 to 3.5 minutes per hour to between 4 and 6 minutes per hour.

Much like Warner Bros. Discovery with Max, Amazon once aimed to have “meaningfully fewer ads” than other streaming platforms. I recalled hearing similar claims from other streamers, which is how I came across Max’s backtracking as well. This story always ends the same way.

More Max autoplay: In other HBO-related news, the Max app will now auto-play videos throughout the menu system, not just in the top feature carousel. It’s also rolling out “Drop-in Moments” of memorable scenes that appear in those auto-play previews, which admittedly sounds sort of neat.

In any case, you can turn off autoplay under Settings > Playback. You’ll have to do it for each of your devices.

Roku menu refresh: Roku is continuing to pull more menu options into what used to be a straightforward app grid. As The Verge reports, you may soon see tiles for things like “Featured Free” (currently a shortcut in the left sidebar), along with useful-sounding links like “The Best Across Your Streaming Services” and “What are you in the mood for?”

I’m not opposed to the Roku interface becoming less app-centric, but the question as always is to what extent it’ll serve users rather than Roku’s business interests. Traditionally Roku’s changes have leaned too far toward the latter.

More catch-up


Save more money

This part of the newsletter has some affiliate links, which earn me a commission if you wind up subscribing to something.

Good news, everyone: Peacock has revived the free three-month promo that it was offering earlier in the year. Just sign up with this link if you’re a new or returning subscriber. (You might also want to set up a limited-use card such as Privacy.com to avoid being auto-billed at full price when the trial period’s over.)

Other notable deals:

Also: Since a lot of you have asked about Paramount+, I have not seen any new discount codes or links lately. I’ll keep an eye out, of course, but after five-plus years, the free ride might finally be over.


Thanks for reading!

Quick heads up that I’ll be sending out an extra email on Monday with a special announcement on the future of this newsletter. Exciting!

In the meantime, let me know if you have any questions.

Until next time,
Jared