😩 Your streaming ads doubled. Quietly.

🤯 WOW! Time the ads on seven streaming services, and Prime Video wins, for all the wrong reasons. Ads eat eight minutes and 20 seconds of a two-hour movie, more than triple what it ran the day ads first showed up. HBO Max quietly bumped its own load and never sent a memo. You’ll never guess the worst for ads.

📖 Read time: 2.5 minutes

When I saw these numbers, I knew I had to share with you. Somebody finally sat down with a stopwatch and timed seven streaming services, movies and shows both.

Here’s the ugly part first. 

When Amazon put ads on Prime Video in January 2024, you got two to 3.5 minutes an hour. Now it’s four to six. HBO Max quietly went from about four minutes to six. Nobody sent an email. The only way anyone caught Max was by comparing its own help page against an archived copy.

And Netflix’s ad tier blew past 250 million users worldwide, up from 94 million a year earlier. Ads aren’t the budget option anymore. They’re the plan.

Look at that flip. 

Paramount+ is tied for best on movies and second worst on shows. Peacock pulls the same trick. The right service for you depends on what you watch, which is not how anybody shops for streaming.

Netflix interrupted a movie nine separate times, more than anyone. But each break ran 30 to 45 seconds, so it added under five minutes total. Prime Video stopped you four times and ate eight and a half. The service that feels worst isn’t the one stealing the most of your evening.

FYI, cable runs about 15 minutes an hour. Even the worst streamer here is half that. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

Netflix with ads is $8.99. Ad-free is $19.99. That’s $11 a month to skip two minutes per episode. $132 a year.

Flip to Disney+ or Prime Video, where you’re losing eight-plus minutes an hour, and that upgrade starts looking reasonable.

Pay to go ad-free on the one service you watch most. Leave the rest on the ad tier. Watch two hours a night on Disney+, and you’re handing over about nine hours a month to commercials. Your call to make, not theirs. Full breakdown is here.

One more move before you upgrade anything. Check your phone plan and your credit cards. Plenty of them include a streaming service.

Turns out the TV ads were lying to us all the time. Aren’t you supposed to call the doctor if your election lasts this long? 🙃

📩 Send this to someone who complains about streaming ads every single night.

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(Starts at 1:23) That influencer’s private jet on TikTok? Probably fake. Most influencers pretend to be rich. All leads back to one thing. Selling you on a course.

Listen on Komando.com →

🎧 Or search “Komando” wherever you get your podcasts. I’m everywhere.

💳 Full Meta wallet: Meta’s robot has a path to your doctor, dinner plans and credit card. Muse launched Tuesday (paywall link), connecting email, calendars, health, shopping and payments, so it can book travel, complete forms and check out through Stripe. The service starts free, with $20 and $100 monthly tiers. Meta says you approve purchases and can cut access. Grant it the least you can live with. A butler this nosy wouldn’t make it to Friday.

🏡 A deed theft ring got busted: Four people in Louisville were filing forged deeds on vacant homes of deceased owners, people who died without wills and couldn’t fight back. Here’s what keeps me up at night: They operated for over two years before anyone caught them. Your home could be targeted the same way. Only a dedicated title monitoring service can alert you to a fraudulent filing before the disaster hits. Get your free Title History Report today.* 

Braking bad: YouTube stunts are supposed to earn clicks, not turn your street into an involuntary brake test. A streamer kept jumping in front of a Tesla Cybercab, forcing the autonomous taxi to stop hard while traffic followed. Police say that can trigger a serious rear-end crash and endanger riders, drivers and bystanders. I care less about whether the robotaxi passed his test than whether the minivan behind it had room to stop. 

🧬 AI takes a run at cancer: This is tech worth getting excited about. Multimodal AI can compress parts of drug development that once took years. I want to believe it. Any family would. But custom cancer care changes lives only if trials confirm it and regular patients can afford it. Your tumor gets a personalized treatment plan while you’re still eating crackers over the sink and arguing with a hospital chatbot about a $900 aspirin.

📱 Apple goes Pro: Apple used yesterday’s Surprise and Shine event to unveil the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, Apple Watch Series 12, AirPods 5 and its first foldable phone, the iPhone Duo. Pro models start at $1,199 and $1,299, adding A20 Pro chips, better low-light cameras and up to 45 hours of video playback. Coming out Sept. 18. The Duo? Opens into a 7.6-inch display for $1,999, preorders Oct. 16. Two grand for a phone that folds. Take my money.

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Reread a Google Doc and spot the same word five times? Right-click it and hit Define. You’ll get synonyms you can swap in with no extra tab, no googling “another word for…” Stuck on a word’s meaning or how to say it? Same menu’s got you. The emergency thesaurus was there the whole time.

🚨 Microsoft shipped its biggest Patch Tuesday ever: Nearly 1,000 security fixes across Windows, Excel, SharePoint and more. Two of those holes are being exploited by hackers, and one could hand them full control of your PC. Every hour you wait is an hour they’re already in. Go to Settings > Windows Update > Check for updates ASAP. Mine took three minutes.

Crop to it: Forgot to stop Strava before driving home? To keep your friends from wondering when you went Olympic, fix the activity. Open it > three dots > Crop, then drag the sliders to trim the start or end. You keep what’s orange, drop the blue/gray, then hit Save. Easier than explaining that 55 mph “run.”

✂️ Steal the dog right out of the photo: Open any picture in Photos and press and hold on the subject. Your kid, your dog, the taco. It glows, lifts clean off the background, and you can tap Copy and paste it into a text, or Share > Add Sticker to use it forever in Messages. That's a $20-a-month Photoshop trick, built in, free. My dog is now a sticker. Still a good boy, now with better edges.

📲 Fling a webpage to your phone: Found the recipe on your computer but need it at the stove? In Chrome, right-click anywhere on the page > Send to your devices > pick your phone. A notification pops up there, tap it, and the exact page opens. No emailing yourself links like it's 2009. Works both directions, as long as you're signed into Chrome on both. Your phone and computer finally talk to each other. More than some married couples.

📝 Word never forgot your place: Open a Word doc and hit Shift + F5. Boom, your cursor jumps right back to the last spot you edited, even in a 40-page report, even after you closed the file and reopened it days later. Keep pressing it to hop between your last few edits. No scrolling, no hunting for where you left off. It's the bookmark that licks itself.

Welcome to the robot Olympics, where the thrill of victory is mostly watching $100,000 machines eat flooring.

At Beijing’s World Humanoid Robot Games, bots ran, boxed, jumped, lifted weights and played tug-of-war, with highlights including collisions, wall charges and implosions. 

During this ESPN meets a Best Buy protection-plan commercial, robots smashed into each other, charged walls, sparked from their hips and, in one case, caught fire. One long jumper even sent a bystander scrambling over a barrier. 

Check them out here. Listen to the show this weekend. I am going to talk about the conspiracy theory about these robots.

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🎓 What you learned today: Streaming ads aren’t all created equal, Meta’s robot wants access to your wallet, Cybercab stunts can put drivers at risk, the secrets hiding in Word and Chrome, and the robot Olympics looked like chaos with charging ports. Not bad for one email. Tomorrow, I’ll explain why emergency calls fail, why texts get through and the simple 10-minute setup that can help you reach your family when everyone else is panicking.

🌌 The answer: C) Two out of every three. Roughly 11,000 of them are SpaceX Starlink satellites, about 67% of everything working up there. At the start of 2019, the entire planet (every country and company combined) had fewer than 2,000 active satellites. One outfit now has more than five times that by itself.

Fun fact: The International Space Station is the third brightest object in the sky after the sun and the moon, and there are people living in it. Get NASA’s free Spot the Station app at spotthestation.nasa.gov, and it’ll buzz your phone before the flying lab passes over your house, then point you at the right patch of sky. So fun, bring the kids!

NASA had a supply of rib eye on the last flight to the ISS to see how meat cooked in space. They called it their most important mission. The steaks were never higher.

Kim Komando • Komando.com • 510+ radio stations • Trusted by millions daily

🏆 THE KIM CHALLENGE: Forward this to ONE person who needs to hear it today. Pick the person who popped into your head while reading. You know who it is.

Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, AKASO, FEPPO, @Physical-Bad-3689 via Reddit

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