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1 Feb 2025

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FireAid benefit for Los Angeles had everyone from Nirvana to Stevie Wonder to Billie Eilish
When the first song of the night features record-smashing pop icon Billie Eilish out the front of pop-punk royalty Green Day, you know you're in for something special.

'Maybe we'll play with 12 men next game': England captain fumes over concussion sub controversy
Jos Buttler was furious that India replaced a batting all-rounder with a fast bowler in his side’s 15-run T20 loss.

Homicide investigation launched after man dies overnight in Opotiki
The man died after a violent altercation, police said.

BestStart investigating how toddlers managed to escape daycare after door left open
A teacher accidentally left an exit door open and two children gained access to the carpark.

Deep impact: China’s AI tidal wave hits Trump, and Australia
The cheap, open AI model has sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley. Has Australia already been left behind or does DeepSeek’s rapid rise, despite limited resources, mean something similar could emerge locally?

Flights restricted as Trump claims helicopter in Washington mid-air crash was flying too high
Federal authorities restricted helicopter flights near the US capital's Reagan Washington National Airport indefinitely, two days after a midair collision between a passenger jet and a military helicopter killed 67...

Amazon hiked Music Unlimited prices. Here’s why Apple and YouTube are next
For video streamers, another price hike just means it’s Tuesday. For music streaming, however, price increases are bigger deals, and they tend to reverberate for everyone. Take Amazon, which just hiked the price of its individual Music Unlimited plan to $11.99 a month, or $10.99/month for Prime members. The new price is effective immediately for new subscribers, while existing users will see the price hike on their next bill, TechCrunch reports. That price increase brings Amazon’s music streaming prices up to par with Spotify’s, which raised its individual Premium plan to $11.99 a month last June. (Spotify’s Family and Duo plans got price hikes, too.) This news story is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best music streaming services. Meanwhile, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and Tidal are holding the line at $10.99 a month for their music streaming plans—so for now, if you want to stream unlimited tunes, doing so on those services is a relative bargain. But that’s probably not going to last for long, and if I had to wager, I’d bet Apple, YouTube, and likely also Tidal will all hit that $11.99-a-month price for individual music streaming before the year is up. Qobuz, meanwhile, already charges $12.99 per month (discounted to $10.83 per month if you pay up front for a one-year subscription). Before we get to “why,” let’s consider the key difference between the music and video streaming businesses. The big video streamers like Netflix, Disney+, and Max have their own unique lineups of shows and movies—only Netflix has Squid Game, only Hulu has that buzzy new Paradise show, only Max has The Pitt. So yes, you could jump from one to another to save money, but then you’d be missing out on, say, House of the Dragon or Tulsa King. The music streamers, on the other hand, all have fundamentally the same catalogs. So if, say, Spotify hikes its prices, you could always just jump to a cheaper music streamer without missing a beat. (Yes, you’d have to say goodbye to your playlists, but there are plenty of tools that solve that problem.) Raising prices in the music streaming market is like a game of chicken. All the big streamers want to raise prices, but no one wants to be first. That’s why individual music streaming prices held steady at $9.99 a month for more than a decade, until finally Apple Music broke ranks in October 2022 and boosted its individual streaming price to $10.99 a month. Pretty soon, $10.99 a month was the new norm for individual streaming, but that price point stuck for only about two years rather than a decade, with Spotify making the jump last summer to $11.99 a month for its individual Premium tier. So here we are, with Amazon Unlimited Music matching Spotify. And for now, that means Apple Music and YouTube Music are cheaper. But probably not for long.

Man dead after suspected gang fight in Opotiki
The police have launched a homicide investigation after a man died in the Bay of Plenty overnight.

Live: France v Wales - Six Nations rugby
Follow live coverage of the Six Nations Championship opening match between France and Wales at the Stade de France in Paris.

How I save big money on streaming services: Ruthless disloyalty
Remember when you first signed up for Netflix streaming? It was nice. A few bucks a month for tons of good movies, some pretty decent original shows, zero ads, and you could finally ditch the nightmare that was cable. Fast forward to 2025, and streaming is the nightmare. It splits up everything you want to watch across a dozen different platforms, all of which now have ads just so they can make you pay to remove them. They remove content constantly, they’re full to bursting with things you don’t care about or need (Hades the video game, a dozen horrible Christmas movies every year, and NFL games on the same ticket, what?) and the price is always, always, always going up. From the consumer perspective, streaming video services are objectively worse than they were a decade ago. Frankly, these services are absolutely milking and bilking their users. There’s no real alternative at this point, at least if you want to watch new shows or the occasional streaming-exclusive movie that isn’t terrible. But there are ways to maximize your enjoyment and minimize your money spent. Step one: quit. Quit early, quit often This isn’t a new idea — I first heard about it from my colleague Eric Ravenscraft years ago, and we’ve advocated for it on TechHive more than once. But it bears repeating. The streaming services don’t have any loyalty to you, and you’ll gain nothing by being loyal to them. Quit your subscriptions constantly, month by month if you want, and move on to the next one. Heck, we’ve said that cancelling your subscription immediately is the one trick all cord cutters should know. The watch-and-bail setup is pretty simple. You sign up for any singular streaming service for just one month, taking advantage of any deals or promotions they’re offering to entice new suckers customers. You go through whatever you want to watch on that service which is exclusive to that service alone. Then you bail, and move on to the next one. Rinse, repeat, try to never be subscribed to more than one at a time. ibreakstock / Shutterstock.com There are some obvious advantages here. Shows and movies financed or produced by one service tend to stay on that service and not move around. Netflix made House of Cards, so you can’t watch House of Cards on Disney+. Hulu made The Handmaid’s Tale, so you can’t watch it on Max. So watch only the exclusive stuff one one service while you have it. These aren’t universally true — Paramount+, “the home of Star Trek,” unceremoniously dumped Prodigy, and Netflix picked it up for its second season. Disney clawed back Daredevil and other Marvel series when it started making its own for Disney+. But in any given month you can generally rely on the exclusive content that’s already on a service to stick around for at least a month. Have a plan The way to maximize this process is to go in with a plan. I keep a list of all the upcoming shows (including returning seasons) that I want to see on any particular service, so when one of them gets three or four piled up, I switch to it and binge as much as my schedule will allow. For example, right now I’ve got Castlevania: Nocturne season 2 and A Man on the Inside qued up on my Netflix list. I’ll wait for at least one more show or movie to catch my eye (like, say, the Knives Out threequel) before I plan my next Netflix month. Streaminganbieter rafapress/Shutterstock.com Also, it doesn’t hurt to memorize the general landing places for movies, if you’re waiting on them to transition from theaters to streaming. Some are obvious: Disney movies (including Marvel, Star Wars, et cetera) will come to Disney+, Paramount movies will come to Paramount+, two to four months after they leave theaters. Warner Bros. movies will eventually land on Max, the service that it owns. Some (but not all) Universal Pictures movies will come to Peacock, as that’s an NBC-Universal brand. Sony Pictures is the only major Hollywood studio without an accompanying streaming service at the moment. And of course, any movie released to theaters explicitly by Netflix, Apple, or Amazon will make their way to those respective services before long. Keep an eye out for deals Obviously this approach will save you some money by keeping your subscriptions down to one or two a month. I like to use that savings to upgrade to ads, which again, are only there to make you pay more so they’ll go away. Enshittification strikes again. But even beyond maximizing your allotment of time and money, you can game this system to be better for you. Streaming services are constantly hungry for new users. They’ll try to entice them with a free week or month of trial service before they charge, or several months at a discount rate. Keep an eye out for those discounts — for example, at the time of writing Hulu will offer you a month of service for free, and Apple TV+ is doing a week. Watch the usual deal sites for these opportunities, especially if one of your singular service lists is getting long. Hulu Sometimes these are restricted to truly “new” users, i.e., if you’ve signed up and unsubscribed before you’re not eligible. You can sometimes get around this by making a new account: use a burner email (or a slightly tweaked one) and a method of payment you haven’t associated with that service before. If you can swing it, these freebies are a great way to watch just one show or movie that’s exclusive to a service you otherwise don’t care about. Infrequently there are some pretty good deals on year-long plans. I’m currently part way through a Paramount+ year-long package — I got it for $30, plus another $30 upgrade to remove ads. That’s half off the price, only $5 a month total, and I watch enough Star Trek releases throughout the year that it makes sense. (At least for the moment — damn you, Paramount, for canceling Lower Decks.) Bundles of media are less appealing to me, if only because they tend to offer diminishing returns. Hulu and ESPN are both owned by Disney, so there’s a package combined with Disney+, naturally. But each overlapping circle of that Venn diagram narrows the appeal to users. It might be different for you, of course, especially if you’re sharing services among a big family. Manufactured headaches The streaming services are aware of these bouncing customers, and trying to minimize that behavior as much as possible. That’s why the “drop all the episodes at once” binge model that Netflix pioneered is no longer the de facto standard. You’ll need a minimum of three months subscribed to get through a new ten-episode season on a weekly schedule. The solution is to wait until all the episodes are posted…but that requires some temperance, and leaves you out of “the conversation” and at risk of spoilers. Again, patience is your friend if you’re trying to maximize your money. A newer wrench in this system is live sports. Previously the exclusive domain of “live TV” bundles, a la Hulu+ Live TV or YouTube Live, streaming services are increasingly claiming major sports events for their own walled gardens. Netflix got an exclusive on NFL games on Christmas day last year, with no way to catch them over-the-air, and many Thursday night games are now exclusive to Amazon Prime Video. …just don’t ask about Monday, or Thursday, or Saturday, or Christmas. NFL That’s going to be extremely frustrating if you’re subscribed to the ludicrously expensive Sunday Ticket on YouTube, plus ESPN for Monday Night games…you get the picture. Enshittification in action. There’s no real way to counter this from a penny-pinching perspective, though you can always go to a sports bar or a friend’s home (or invite them to log in at your place) to catch a singular game you don’t want to pay for. God, this just sucks If this all seems like a lot of complication and effort just to save some money, it is! That might be the point — the easiest thing to do is just spend more money and make fewer choices. A lot of people are so sick of it they’re just going back to old-fashioned physical media, and who could blame them? The silver lining here is that you have more choices for entertainment than ever before, frustrating as they might be. There are smaller, niche services like Dropout.TV, Crunchyroll, or Brown Sugar which are also more affordable. There are practically endless hours of things to watch on YouTube, and a lot of options to keep from paying Google’s ever-increasing premium to block ads. And if you don’t mind ads, and you’re not picky, there are completely free options like Crackle and Tubi. Droput is great and it’s cheap.Dropout There’s a stunning variety of video games in every shape and shade, and even ways to get them cheaply like Xbox Game Pass. You could also just, you know, do something not on a screen. I suppose that’s theoretically an option. They still make books, right? All joking aside, both your time and your money are limited, no matter how much you have of either. Remember that if a service isn’t earning your money, you should stop giving it to them. I recommend an “entertainment audit” once a year, during which you evaluate what you’re paying for in relation to what you’re using, and seeing if you really want to keep it up. Things are better than they were when your only choices were regular TV and cable. But not by much. And with other factors putting the squeeze on consumers even in affluent countries, I think streaming services that keep offering less and less while they charge more and more are going to meet some of the same harsh realities that the rest of us are dealing with sooner rather than later. Further reading: The best streaming devices of 2025