Here’s everything you need to know about the world of television for Friday, February 6th, 2026:
CONTENT DISCOVERY BEGINS WITH PLATFORM SEARCH
I suspect most people who subscribe to Netflix, HBO Max or any other SVOD have had the experience of wanting to find a specific TV show or movie and not being able to find it. I don't mean not knowing what service to to watch it on - that is its own problem. I am talking about the situation in which you know, for instance, that a TV show is on Netflix. Maybe you've even watched it before. But you can't quite remember the name or maybe you just remember something vague such as "it's a thriller starring that guy from those James Bond movies."
Spotify has a new Beta service which allows users to build their own playlists based on any series of prompts. Ask it to create a playlist of songs released in 1987 featuring women who you have listened to before and it delivers a pretty solid playlist. Contrast that with SVOD services, whose search functions are almost entirely limited to searching by title and perhaps actor.
Engineers at Netflix know that is a problem and have been working on the problem for several years. But in conversations with project managers and other tech stack experts over the past few months, I've learned just how complicated and intractable the problem is for any video streaming service.
One big challenge is trying to figure out how users would search and given that, what is the best way to crunch data in a way that allows most people to find what they're searching for. As it was explained to me, getting to a 70 percent search success rate is reasonably doable. But closing that 30 percent gap is essential, because most users would consider a 70 percent success rate a failure.
The difference between assembling metadata for a music platform and for a video platform is a bit like the difference between alphabetizing a collection of hardback books versus that of a baseball card collection. Video has so many datapoints that matter to subscribers and just collecting the raw data is a challenge. To say nothing of figuring out how to put it to use.
Let's go back to the example I used at the top: "it's a thriller starring that guy from those James Bond movies." The system would have to know if a show is a thriller and that is the easiest part. On Netflix, most content comes up a number of tags already, one of them being "thriller." But the second part is more complicated. The search function would have to be able to pull up the cast list from every recent James Bond film and compare it to the cast list from every TV series tagged as "thriller." And while this data is available in theory, crunching it in a way that spits out the correct result is a challenge.
In some usability tests with subscribers, people would ask for things such as "that South Korean rom-com where the woman realizes she is in love with her best friend." In theory, that is a doable search. The problem is that specific data on each series isn't available - a brief logline wouldn't be enough to parse out that scenario. And while captioning data is available, it hasn't been ingested into search. And even if it was, testing has shown it leads to entirely too many false positives.
Despite all of the challenges, Netflix is apparently hopeful it can roll out an expanded search that would help users navigate its catalog of TV shows, movies, podcasts and other programming. It's not clear just how specific the resulting upgrade will allow results to be. But I have been told it will be well beyond the title and/or actor limits of 2026.
A FRESH WAY TO LOOK AT WESTERNS
The always thoughtful Ted Goia has a piece about Western movies and television shows. He hated them when he was growing up. But after deciding to rewatch them again recently, he writes that he understands their attraction:
Taylor Sheridan is straddling the same divide in his popular western shows. In Yellowstone he deftly balances the two agendas. Kevin Costner (playing rancher John Dutton) is a flawed person, but we still sympathize with his love of the land and rugged determination. He is both dysfunctional and idealistic—those traits coexist in the same complicated person. So you can watch this series either way, as deconstructing the myth or building it back up.
We still live with that dilemma today.
Do we trust our gunslingers and authority figures? Or do we fear them? And allow me to point out the obvious—this is not just a question about cowboy movies. It’s a question about our society as a whole.
So do you vote for Gary Cooper as president, hoping for a courageous man of conviction? Or do you pick Clint Eastwood, because you need a cruel bastard to maintain law and order?
Maybe the western film is a good place to explore these issues. It provides all the necessary archetypes, and is perhaps the purest setting where we can grasp the trade-offs between freedom and social order, independence and authority, toughness and benevolence, innocence and experience.
THIS WEEKEND ON ALLYOURSCREENS
Here is a rundown of the new stuff that was posted on AllYourScreens in the past couple of days:
* I have been watching MSNBC/MSNOW since its earliest days and it remains my go-to cable TV choice. But I really wish the network's anchors were harder on some of the Democratic legislators they interview.
* Here is a quick rundown of all the new primetime programming this week on PBS.
* The new Netflix video podcast The Side Dish From America's Test Kitchen is one I really wanted to like. Spoiler: I did not.
* New research from Ampere Analysis shows that scripted TV orders in North America were up 3% in 2025 year-on-year.
YOUTUBE COMES CLOSER TO ROLLING OUT MINI PROGRAMMING BUNDLES
Bloomberg's Lucas Shaw has an interview YouTube TV's Christian Oestlien, who provides some vague guidance on the streamers plans to roll out new genre-specific mini-bundles:
What are the plans and how did you select the pricing and the composition?
There will be just over 10 plans. They’ll be based on three main categories – sports, news, and entertainment. And you’ll be able to buy each one of those plans individually. One of the things that’s exciting about this is finally being able to deliver a standalone sports plan.
Do you feel like your sports package has enough? If you’re a sports fan, can you get everything?
This is the most complete sports product that’s put on the market to date. We will have all of our major broadcast partners. And we’re pulling a lot of the content that had been made exclusive to their [streaming] services into YouTube TV. NBC is relaunching the NBC Sports Network with us. We’re going to be pulling in the entirety of the sports content that sits within ESPN Unlimited.
Is it going to be enough of a discount for sports fans?
$64.99 is a pretty compelling price point. It’s almost $20 off.
There's still no official launch date for the mini-bundles or any sense of price points for the non-sports bundles or what programming might be available. So I suppose we'll see.
If you recall, I wrote a couple of weeks ago about my frustration over the various streaming services unwillingness to provide even the slightest transparency when it comes to revenue or other success metrics. And this exchange provides another example of how companies such as YouTube don't want to even answer the simple question: "Are you making money?"
Is YouTube TV profitable?
I don’t think we disclose financials, but I will say if you looked at public estimates on the size of YouTube TV and then just looked at our price point, you can get a rough estimate of how the business is doing. (Analysts estimate YouTube TV will generate more than $10 billion in sales this year.)
Top line, it makes a lot of money. We care quite a bit about the sustainability of that business. It’s one of the reasons I think you’ve seen us have some more challenging and protracted negotiations, some of them that have played out in public.
And then from a subs perspective, YouTube Premium is far and away our biggest success.
AAAAaargh....
ODDS AND SODS
* HBO Max will launch in the UK & Ireland on Thursday, March 26th.
* GQ has a great piece on why it is nearly impossible to buy a reasonably priced concert or live event ticket. Personally, I like the proposal to limit resale to 20% above the original ticket price.
* NBC denies that it edited the crowd audio to remove booing of Vice President JD Vance. But it did admit to adding audio of people screaming "BRUCE! BRUCE!"
* Polygon's Brian Vanhooker asks why Disney hasn't brought back Chip N' Dale's Rescue Rangers.
* The least-noticed tv commercial that ran during the Super Bowl might be the one for 404 Media: "We Googled "smallest TV markets in the United States" and bought an ad for $2,550 that only ran in Ottumwa, Iowa, population 25,000. That still counts."
TWEET OF THE DAY
WHAT'S COMING TODAY AND TOMORROW
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 9TH:
* 90 Day: The Single Life Season Premiere (TLC)
* The Creature Cases Season Premiere (Netflix)
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10TH:
* Chef's Kiss (The Roku Channel)
* Frontline: Crisis In Venezuela (PBS)
* Katt Williams: The Last Report (Netflix)
* Motorvalley Series Premiere (Netflix)
* The Artful Dodger (Hulu)
* This Is I (Netflix)
SEE YOU TUESDAY!