The Black Friday streaming deals bonanza is over. But holiday streaming deals continue in December, and some of the December deals are better than the one I signed up for in November. Buyer’s remorse is eternal, but this time it’s also reversible.

The best December streaming deals are ad-free. It’s not an eye-poppingly low number, but you can get a 4K-streaming, ad-free bundle of HBO Max, Disney+, and Hulu for $33. That’s more than 40 percent off—or $23 less than list price. But most important: no ads.

In fact, I plan to upgrade to the no-ad bundle. Because it turns out I don’t like ads. No ads means no regret when the climactic scene in an old Homeland episode is abducted by a discount car insurance company, instead of whoever else was supposed to do the abducting. This said, the ad-supported HBO/Disney bundle is also on a 40 percent off deal. And so are a number of other bundles—so many bundles, including an Apple TV/Peacock bundle that’ll let you stream NFC playoff games and the Super Bowl for barely more than the price of Apple TV on its own.

Here’s a quick guide to the best streaming deals and streaming bundles in December 2025. Note that we’re not including every TV streaming offer on the planet, just the ones that are actually good deals at the moment.

Regular Price Without Bundle: $56/month

Every Grindr user is unique. Italian men love feet. South Koreans prefer open relationships. The highest percentage of self-proclaimed “daddies” call the US home and Switzerland is overrun with twinks. Delivered by annual trend report Grindr Unwrapped, those critical insights offer the type of information that will help usher the company into its “AI-first” era where it’s “the everything app for the gay guy,” CEO George Arison tells WIRED.

Grindr was the first to leverage geo-location tech when it burst onto the scene in 2009. Arison arrived at the company in 2022 from the world of automotive ecommerce. With him at the helm, the company has undergone “a bit of a refounding,” he says, including a major overhaul of staff—85 percent of current 160 US employees were hired in the last three years—and bigger investments in product.

All of his moves, he says, have been about building trust with users. Grindr may indeed be the most popular gay dating and hookup app in the world, but its popularity has only made it a target of controversy, including a 2024 lawsuit that alleged users’ HIV status and testing information was shared with third-party vendors and, in July, criticism for blocking users who posted the phrase “no Zionists” in their profile. Skepticism over Arison’s conservative politics probably hasn’t helped either.

Even so, Arison tells me he is laser focused on the task ahead. One that almost didn’t happen. Controlling stakeholders Raymond Zage and James Lu submitted an offer to take the company private in October. The bid—a buyout that valued the company at $3 billion—came to an anticlimactic end in November when they failed to come up with the money. The acquisition could have potentially derailed Arison’s priorities, but for now, that’s all behind him.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

JASON PARHAM: Grindr is now positioning itself as more than a place for hookups. It wants to be a social everything app—why?

GEORGE ARISON: We didn’t really have a mission before 2023. But it was always more than a hookup app because it was being used for so many different things, but no one had said, OK, this is what we want to be. This year is when we really went after the gayborhood vision. Now we are actually building features that intentionally support all these different use cases in which people are engaged in on the app.

OpenAI has quietly reversed a major change to how hundreds of millions of people use ChatGPT.

On a low-profile blog that tracks product changes, the company said that it rolled back ChatGPT’s model router—an automated system that sends complicated user questions to more advanced “reasoning” models—for users on its Free and $5-a-month Go tiers. Instead, those users will now default to GPT-5.2 Instant, the fastest and cheapest-to-serve version of OpenAI’s new model series. Free and Go users will still be able to access reasoning models, but they will have to select them manually.

The model router launched just four months ago as part of OpenAI’s push to unify the user experience with the debut of GPT-5. The feature analyzes user questions before choosing whether ChatGPT answers them with a fast-responding, cheap-to-serve AI model or a slower, more expensive reasoning AI model. Ideally, the router is supposed to direct users to OpenAI’s smartest AI models exactly when they need them. Previously, users accessed advanced systems through a confusing “model picker” menu; a feature that CEO Sam Altman said the company hates “as much as you do.”

In practice, the router seemed to send many more free users to OpenAI’s advanced reasoning models, which are more expensive for OpenAI to serve. Shortly after its launch, Altman said the router increased usage of reasoning models among free users from less than 1 percent to 7 percent. It was a costly bet aimed at improving ChatGPT’s answers, but the model router was not as widely embraced as OpenAI expected.

One source familiar with the matter tells WIRED that the router negatively affected the company’s daily active users metric. While reasoning models are widely seen as the frontier of AI performance, they can spend minutes working through complex questions at significantly higher computational cost. Most consumers don’t want to wait, even if it means getting a better answer.

Fast-responding AI models continue to dominate in general consumer chatbots, according to Chris Clark, the chief operating officer of AI inference provider OpenRouter. On these platforms, he says, the speed and tone of responses tend to be paramount.

“If somebody types something, and then you have to show thinking dots for 20 seconds, it’s just not very engaging,” says Clark. “For general AI chatbots, you’re competing with Google [Search]. Google has always focused on making Search as fast as possible; they were never like, ‘Gosh, we should get a better answer, but do it slower.’”