r/theaccessbox

DOJ is going for MLB cause of their streaming mess…

Definitely if you are a baseball fan you know that you aren’t able to watch yourfavorite team play if you’re in the teams designated location even if they are away due to the MLB blackout policy or you need Apple TV+ for Friday games, Peacock for Sunday mornings, and a Regional Sports Network (RSN) for everything else.

Well the DOJ has launched an investigation into MLB’s streaming deals for anti-competitive tactics. It thinks MLB is making it unnecessarily hard and expensive for us to watch games. They are looking into :

1. The blackout trap - You pay for MLB.tv, but you can’t watch your local team because the league wants to force you to pay for a cable package or a specific regional app.

2. The league sells exclusive rights to everyone. One week the game is on YouTube, the next it’s on Amazon, then it’s back on a local channel. To see every game, you basically need five different subscriptions.

3. Since MLB has a special legal exemption (the Sports Broadcasting Act), they’ve been able to get away with these weird deals for decades. The DOJ is checking if those rules still apply in the world of Netflix and Hulu.

You can now go into your profile settings and set your daily time limit for YouTube Shorts to exactly 0 minutes to all users on iOS and Android.

Once activated, it entirely hides the dedicated Shorts tab and removes the short vertical videos from your home screen feed.

If you try to access a Short, you just get a static message saying the feed is paused for the day.

YouTube has been testing this with parental controls for supervised accounts, but have released it to everyone. This is great cause I hardly used it and their recommendation algo was really bad.

During their Q1 2026 earnings call this week, Netflix executives confirmed that by the end of this month, the mobile app is getting a complete overhaul centered around a new vertical video discovery feed. I don’t think that is what people wanted.

The UI bloat is about to get significantly worse. You will literally be doom-scrolling short, algorithmically generated clips from movies and TV shows, complete with video podcasts and integrated sports highlights. It seems every single app on our devices is desperate to trap us.