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.

Speed-testing Amazon’s new Fire TV Stick 4K

Jared Newman   |   October 9, 2026

Last week, Amazon launched a new Fire TV Stick 4K with a bold claim: It’s nearly 20% to 40% faster, the company says, than “a similarly priced 4K streaming stick from another leading brand.”

Amazon won’t name the competitor, but in my own tests, the advantage over comparably-priced streamers isn’t so clear-cut.

Read the full column →

Weekly rewind

Sling Day Passes are dead: Sling’s Day Passes were a brilliant idea. For $5, you got single-day access to Sling’s Orange package (including ESPN and TNT), ideal for when you just wanted to watch a single sporting event. Now Sling has discontinued the passes without explanation.

The idea was never going to last. Programmers didn’t approve of day passes, and Disney and Warner had both sued Sling over them, so they’d presumably want the passes written out of any future contract renewals. The economics were also unclear given that programmers’ monthly carriage fees far outweighed the cost of a single day pass, and Sling’s parent company being in bankruptcy couldn’t have helped either.

But I still submit that programmers should have embraced day passes instead of fighting them, as they drew in new viewers and provided a valid alternative to piracy. (Sling at one point said the passes helped boost its subscriber numbers.) Too bad shortsightedness has once again prevailed in an industry full of it.

Paramount+ and HBO Max will merge, eventually: Paramount Skydance is once again insisting that Paramount+ and HBO Max will become a single streaming service someday, now that the company’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery is final. Nevermind what Casey Bloys, the company’s head of streaming, said last week about just bundling them at a discount instead. A Skydance press release makes clear that both services will “unify into a single service over time.”

My money’s on the Disney playbook: Offer an aggressive discount on the bundle, but then gradually raise each service’s a la carte pricing until you’re no longer saving any real money by getting just one. The only question now is how long that transition will take.

More catch-up

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.

Some notable deals this morning:

For a full list of active streaming deals, check this page on my website.

Advisorator: Free alternatives to expensive apps

I’m a proponent of paying for software that regularly delivers value, which is why I happily subscribe to Obsidian, Fastmail, Kagi, and Bitwarden, among others.

But having those subscriptions means it’s all the more important to weed out the ones that aren’t really necessary. For me, those are typically apps from big companies that I don’t use extensively, but nonetheless require ongoing fees.

As part of my ongoing goal to help Advisorator members save money, I’ve rounded up some free alternatives to popular programs such as Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop, all of which I have personally tested …

Keep reading this story with an Advisorator membership, and I’ll send you in-depth tech advice stories like this one every week.

Thanks for reading!

Got cord cutting questions for me? Reply to this email and I’ll do my best to answer.

Until next week,
Jared