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.
Netflix’s gift card catch: You can’t cancel them
Jared Newman | 
When you sign up for Netflix with a gift card, you might expect it to work like any other form of payment, allowing you to cancel and resume the subscription at any time.
But that’s not the case. If you cancel Netflix while paying with a gift card, the subscription will continue every month until the balance is depleted. You can’t put the subscription on hold and save some of the credit for later.
Disney has the same policy for Disney+ and Hulu gift cards. The rationale for the policies is unclear, as neither of the companies who do this would comment on the record about it.
Weekly rewind
YouTube TV’s skinny bundles: YouTube TV is just about ready to launch the cheaper genre-based packages that it teased back in December. Here’s an overview of what we know so far:
- Sports Plan ($65/mo.): Local broadcast channels, ESPN channels, Fox’s sports channels, TBS/TNT, NFL Network, and NBC’s sports channels, with ESPN Unlimited to be added in the fall.
- Sports + News Plan ($72/mo.): The above plan, plus CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, CSPAN, and business news channels.
- Entertainment Plan ($55/mo.): Local broadcast channels and general entertainment channels such as Hallmark, Comedy Central, HGTV, and Bravo.
- News + Entertainment + Family Plan ($70/mo.): Basically everything except sports, including kids channels such as Disney and Nickelodeon.
YouTube hasn’t actually started selling the new packages yet. It also hasn’t released full channel lists for each package or clarified whether you can just get the News and Family plans individually.
I’ll do a more detailed breakdown and comparison with other bundles once we have all the details. Meanwhile, the full YouTube TV package remains available for $83 per month.
MLB.TV’s new sign-up gotcha: If you’re subscribing to MLB.TV for out-of-market baseball this year, beware: Now that ESPN operates the service, it’s requiring all new subscribers to take a one-month trial of ESPN Unlimited. You have to sign up through ESPN, and you can’t opt out of the trial.
In other words, you have to cancel the ESPN Unlimited trial after signing up, otherwise you’ll get auto-billed another $30 per month, on top of the cost of MLB.TV. I suggest cancelling the trial immediately after sign-up, as this won’t affect your MLB.TV subscription in any way.
Existing MLB.TV subscribers can still renew without the ESPN Unlimited trial, and the trial isn’t included with MLB.TV’s single-team plan or the in-market plans I wrote about last week. (We’ll see what happens with T-Mobile customers, who should get an offer for free MLB.TV as the regular season approaches.
In any case, shame on ESPN for this sleazy sales tactic. It’ll almost certainly result in some people paying for an extra subscription without realizing it.
More catch-up
- AMC+ raises prices by $1 per month or $10 per year.
- Crunchyroll raises prices by $2 per month.
- No surprise here: Over-the-air TV was less laggy than streaming for the Super Bowl.
Save more money
This part of the newsletter has some affiliate links, which earn me a commission if you wind up buying or subscribing to something.
DirecTV is offering two months of its MySports package for $60 per month, which is $10 off the regular price. The package includes local channels, national sports networks, and cable news, similar to the “Sports + News” plan that YouTube TV is launching soon. The offer is for new subscribers only.
Other notable deals:
- Still available: $1 per month for two months of Paramount+ Premium with promo code BG2L7M. Select returning subscribers only, will not work for new subscribers.
- Woot has Amazon’s Fire TV Stick 4K for $16 with code FIRE30. This is just the current Fire TV Stick Plus (which Amazon has on sale for $25) without the new branding.
- Get a year of Starz for $24, or three months for $3 per month, a worse deal than Black Friday but better than usual.
As always, I keep a full list of active streaming deals on the Cord Cutter Weekly website.
New in the forum: Ask Me Anything!
Over the past week, I’ve been doing a cool thing with Advisorator members, answering questions as part of my first-ever “Ask Me Anything” forum thread.
We’ve gone over some general tech stuff, like how to undo some of iOS 26’s big design changes, and also some streaming stuff, like why more services don’t release entire seasons at once. This is a great place to get questions answered, and my plan is to spin up a new thread every month.
Forum access is exclusive to Advisorator’s paying members, who also get my full Tuesday tech advice newsletter (read this week’s issue here) and a bunch of other useful resources. Join us →
Thanks for reading!
That’s all for now. Catch you next week.
– Jared