Hubbl will cost $99 not including subscriptions, while hardware is being marketed without mention of Foxtel in apparent distancing move Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast Last year Foxtel claimed the government was trying to control your TV with laws designed to protect free-to-air broadcasters from being crowded out by streamers. Now Murdoch’s pay TV arm is selling a set top box which it claims it will make watching live, free and streaming TV much simpler and easier. Sign up for Guardian Australia ..read more

Future-proofed Apple smart TV upgrade has widest selection of streaming apps but is super pricey The second-generation Apple TV 4K gets a faster processor and future-proofed specs, but is really all about its new iPod-inspired Siri remote. And it all comes at a price. Costing £169, the Apple media-streaming box is very much at the top of the market despite being £10 cheaper than its predecessor, with direct competitors priced between £50 and £130. But the Apple TV 4K offers something most others cannot: full integration with all of the iPhone-maker’s services including Siri, iTunes, TV+, Music ..read more

Be afraid … Apple TV+ is serving up creepy dolls, creepier nannys and all sorts of supernatural shenanigans thanks to M Night Shyamalan Apple TV+’s new show Servant centres on Dorothy and Sean, a wealthy couple with exhaustingly successful lives: she is a local newscaster with family money, he is a chef to the rich and famous. They dwell in a sumptuous if slightly gothic Manhattan townhouse with their new baby whom they have named, because we live in a morally derelict age with no sense of decorum or shame any more, Jericho. OR DO THEY? For this is a supernatural thriller, created by Tony Bas ..read more

As the streaming giants vie for viewers, the cost of shows spirals ever upwards. We explore the industry’s biggest spenders Modern Toss on expensive TV showsThe “most expensive TV show ever” is back – but as Netflix grandly unfurls season three of its uber-opulent monarchy saga The Crown, the landscape is different to the one in existence even two years ago, when the show launched. Then, it was proof that Netflix was destroying long-held notions of what TV could cost. Now, the fictionalised Liz II is just one soldier in a billion-dollar streaming war: shows as expensive as The Crown are ten a ..read more

The star-studded, $15m-an-episode series is a scramble of bad dialogue and thinly sketched characters yet its handling of sexual politics is grimly transfixing It takes until over halfway through the second episode of Apple TV+’s The Morning Show – after Jennifer Aniston’s genuinely impressive return to TV as an exposure-steeled morning news anchor, after the reveal of her co-star Reese Witherspoon’s bad brunette wig, after 90 minutes of taking in what an alleged $15m an episode can buy in set design — for me to knee-jerk pause the show. I needed extra time to ponder a line delivered by Chip ..read more

Witherspoon and Aniston are sharing a screen for the first time since Friends. They talk disturbing cover-ups and their decades-long fight against sexual harassment “What a wonderful sweater!” gasps Reese Witherspoon, pointing at my old green jumper. “Wait, I’m sorry, look at those cool shoes,” adds Jennifer Aniston, with a comedy emphasis that verges on Chandler Bing-esque, and all eyes turn to my muddy, five-year-old trainers. This is not an echo chamber of women talking about #MeToo. It’s actually a very gender-balanced conversation ..read more

A splashy new series imagines what would have happened if Russia had won the space race with decent, if rarely compelling, results Months of hype for Apple TV+ and the many A-list names attached has dramatically dissipated this week as reviews have revealed a ragtag bunch of half-formed shows that have replaced big ideas with big production values. It might therefore be faint praise to label glossy space race drama For All Mankind as the best of the bunch but it’s adequately entertaining and the first three episodes hint at the show it might become, something far better than it currently is ..read more

From mainstays Netflix and Stan to newcomers Disney+ and Apple+, here’s the rundown for all your bingeing needs With the imminent arrival in Australia of Apple TV+ (1 November) and Disney+ (19 November), we survey the landscape and ask: if each platform were a guest at a house party, what kind of person would they be ..read more

A half-baked comedy series rewrites the life of the American poet as a defiant feminist who ignores chores and delivers clunky dialogue Emily Dickinson doesn’t seem like the historical figure most ripe for a feminist revision. The American poet, whose work was published almost entirely after her death, lived a pious life in a stable, publicly invested New England family, wrote mostly in private, and was a recluse for most of her adult life. Dickinson, one of four shows in the freshman class of originals for the Apple TV+ streaming service, launching 1 November, assumedly saw promise in the nam ..read more

US companies clamour for British stars including Phoebe Waller-Bridge and David Attenborough If you’d been outside the luxurious Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles in the early hours of Monday 23 September, you’d have seen Phoebe Waller-Bridge reclining in a chair, cigarette in one hand and cocktail in the other, surrounded by her many Emmy awards, enjoying her position in the vanguard of an increasingly dominant British television industry. The following day the British television industry lost control of the star they had created. Amazon Video announced they had signed an exclusive three ..read more