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Received β€” 18 August 2026 ⏭ Ars Technica - Gadgets

Peacock raises prices by 18 percent after becoming profitable

18 August 2026 at 17:42

For the fourth time in four years, Peacock has raised its prices.

The Select plan, which has ads and doesn’t include sports, movies, or Peacock originals, went from $8/month to $9/month. The monthly fee for the standard ad plan (Premium) went from $11/month to $13/month, and the ad-free plan (Premium Plus) went from $17/month to $20/month. Annual pricing, as previously, offers 12 months for the price of 10 months.

Peacock’s previous price hike was in July 2025, when the middle tier (with ads) went from $8/month to $11/month, and the ad-free plan increased from $14 to $17. Peacock also raised prices in July 2024 and August 2023. NBCUniversal launched the service in 2020.

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Petlibro accused of β€œgaslighting” users over smart pet feeder outage

17 August 2026 at 19:43

Petlibro founder and CEO York Wu provided more information about an outage that left users unable to control their smart pet feeders through the companion app and, in some reported cases, left them with hungry pets.

Petlibro, a company owned by Shenzhen, China-headquartered firm Shenzhen Libro Technology Co., first acknowledged the outage on Tuesday at 5 am PT. At 7 pm PT on Wednesday, Petlibro said the outage was resolved. Notably, some people online reported different information at the time, and some claimed to still have problems as of August 13.

In a blog post on Saturday that included an apology and acknowledgement of the β€œfrustration and concern” the outage caused, Wu confirmed that problems with Petlibro’s cloud server caused the outage:

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Β© Petlibro

Pet owners say smart pet feeder outage led to furry ones going unfed

13 August 2026 at 18:53

Smart pet-feeder company Petlibro suffered an outage on Tuesday, giving users a harsh reminder of the risks of relying on smart devices.

Petlibro makes pet feeders that connect to Wi-Fi and, for setup with Petlibro’s mobile companion app, Bluetooth. Users can set the feeders to automatically dispense food at scheduled times, which is handy for pet care when the owner is out of the home.

In a statement to The Verge, Petlibro CEO York Wu said this week’s outage was β€œrelated to how the Petlibro app communicates with devices through its online servers.”

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Β© Petlibro

Twitch content has trained Amazon AI for years, but users can opt out now

12 August 2026 at 22:00

Twitch now lets users opt out of Amazon's use of content from their channels to train Amazon's "generative AI content models." The change, announced today, comes more than two years after a company executive confirmed that Amazon was using Twitch content for AI training.

In an updated support page, Twitch confirms that users must opt out if they don’t want their β€œstreams, VODs, clips, stream chats, and pictures and text on your channel [to] be used in future training of a model developed by Amazon whose purpose is to generate or synthesize text, audio, images, or video.”

To opt out, users must go to the proper settings at www.twitch.tv/settings/security.

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