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20 Jun 2025

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Trilliant unveils analytics platform to cut utility losses
Trilliant launches cloud-independent Analytics as a Service to help utilities cut energy losses by enhancing data analysis, forecasting and decision-making.

pdfFiller review: A versatile PDF editor for individuals and businesses
At a glanceExpert's Rating Pros Intuitive web-based interface Robust security options Lots of business-ready capabilities Cons Business features won’t be needed by some users Requires annual commitment to get best value Our Verdict pdfFiller is an impressive PDF editor and document management solution with plenty to offer individuals and businesses. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today pdfFiller is a browser-based document management tool aimed at both individual and enterprise users. The end-to-end PDF solution allows you to do everything from editing to securing to sharing and storing your PDF files from its simple web interface. The app is designed like a desktop editor with a toolbar above the document pane and thumbnails down the left side that make it easy to manage multipage documents. Working with PDFs is impressively straightforward. Adding elements like text boxes, shapes, sticky notes, and even the date is as simple as clicking the appropriate icon and dragging that item to the page. Other tasks such as adding images and signatures require a few more steps, but typically employ a wizard to streamline the execution. Read on to learn more, then see our roundup of the best PDF editors for comparison. Editing and annotation To open a PDF, you can drag-and-drop the file directly onto pdfFiller’s home page. Alternately, you can upload files from your hard drive or from Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box, a URL, or pdfFiller’s own online document library. You can also import a PDF from email by sending the file yourself or requesting it from a third party. You can simply drag elements like text boxes, shapes, and the date to your PDF. Michael Ansaldo/Foundry The editor enables you to work with PDFs much as you would with a Word document, allowing you to add, delete, and copy/paste text, change font style, size, and color; and so on. It also offers a standard set of markup tools. You can highlight, erase, or redact text; add sticky notes and comments; and scribble marginalia. A new “AI Replace” tool leverages ChatGPT to search across the PDF and automatically replace your target words or phrases while retaining original fonts, layout, and formatting. This makes batch updates — like changing company names, dates, or terms across a multi-page PDF — fast, accurate, and formatting-safe. Form hosting PDFs are often used to distribute contracts, questionnaires, and other types of forms. pdfFiller allows you to create, host, and edit these as easily as Word-style documents. You can also collect payments through PDF forms by linking a payment gateway. Document library One of pdfFiller’s most impressive features is its document library. If you can’t create the document you need from scratch, you can likely find it in this trove of government, legal, and business forms, any of which can be downloaded and customized to your needs. You can also save any document you create as a template for reuse. You can create PDFs from a library of government forms in pdfFiller’s document library. MIchael Ansaldo/Foundry One of pdfFiller’s most impressive features is its document library. Sharing Once your PDF is edited, you can securely share it with teammates through a link. You can also send it via email, text, fax, or USPS, or have it notarized directly from your pdfFiller account. Encryption and security pdfFiller offers robust encryption and security features for users that frequently handle sensitive data. Documents can be locked in an encrypted folder and require two-factor authentication for access. The editor offers dedicated HIPAA compliance settings to ensure patient healthcare information is protected according to standards outlined by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. It also helps keep track of your account activity with an Audit Trail feature that shows which forms you’ve opened and shared, what time you logged into and out of your pdfFiller account, and other user activity. How much is pdfFiller? The Basic plan is best suited to individuals. It provides standard PDF editing and annotation features, cloud storage for PDF files, and customer support within a day for $20 month-to-month or $8 a month with an annual commitment. The Plus plan adds the ability to create reusable templates; merge, rearrange, or add pages; and add basic fillable fields, plus support within an hour for $30 month-to-month or $12 a month with an annual commitment. The Premium plan includes all the features of the Basic and Plus plans and adds e-signature workflows, access to the U.S. Legal Forms Library, and other business-ready features, plus instant chat support. There’s a 30-day free trial period, which should plenty of time to determine which plan is right for you. Is pdfFiller worth it? pdfFiller is an incredibly versatile PDF editor with an uncommonly deep set of features. Not all of them will suit everyone, but fortunately, pdfFiller offers three subscription tiers that logically tailor features to different users. It’s a particularly good option for businesses, but anyone can benefit from pdfFiller’s comprehensive skill set. Editor’s note: Because online services are often iterative, gaining new features and performance improvements over time, this review is subject to change in order to accurately reflect the current state of the service. Any changes to text or our final review verdict will be noted at the top of this article.

It’s not just Prime Video: Max shows 50% more ads now
When HBO Max launched its ad-supported plan in 2021, it promised no more than four minutes of ads per hour. Now, it’s quietly backtracked. A support page for Max’s Basic with Ads plan says to expect six minutes of ads per hour, a 50 percent jump. According to the Wayback Machine, that same page listed four minutes of ads per hour as recently as February 2025. And despite its original promise not to show ads during HBO programming, Max has been breaking up HBO shows with commercials as well. An episode of The Last of Us, for instance, had three ad breaks, plus a batch of ads before the video started. (The service is changing its name back to HBO Max next month.) Max isn’t alone in stuffing more ads into its videos. Last week, AdWeek reported that Amazon had roughly doubled the length of commercial breaks on Prime Video, and third-party data has shown rising ad loads on Disney+, Hulu, Discovery+, Peacock, and Netflix. But none have broken their promises as explicitly as Max, which once touted “a commitment to the lowest commercial ad load in the streaming industry.” Now it has one of the highest among its subscription-based peers. A representative for Warner Bros. Discovery did not respond to requests for comment. The Max support page on February 16 (via archive.org), showing four minutes of ads per hour.Jared Newman / Foundry The same Max support page as of June 18, showing six minutes of ads per hour.Jared Newman / Foundry A string of broken promises Lots of ad-supported streamers start off preaching a “less is more” philosophy toward commercials. Going back to 2008, Hulu’s then-CEO Jason Kilar told the New York Times that showing fewer commercials would make them more memorable, benefiting viewers and advertisers alike. At the time, the streamer only showed a single ad per commercial break. “The notion that less is more is absolutely playing out on Hulu,” Kilar said at the time. Since then, streamers have discovered that more is in fact more. By 2010, Hulu was packing more ads into its commercial breaks and was under pressure from advertisers to stretch them out further. As of 2023, Hulu was showing more than seven minutes of ads per hour, more than any other major service according to MediaRadar data provided to Insider. Hulu’s approach has since become a blueprint for other streamers to follow. Disney, for instance, promised its own light touch when it launched an ad-supported Disney+ plan in 2022, with the Wall Street Journal reporting an average of four minutes per hour. Less than a year later, Disney+ had already pushed past that number to 5.3 minutes per hour according to MediaRadar. As for Amazon, it brought ads to Prime Video in 2023 with a stated goal of having “meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers.” The company told advertisers that it would show between two and 3.5 minutes of ads per hour, the Wall Street Journal reported. According to AdWeek, it’s now showing between four and six minutes of ads per hour instead. In fairness, programmers pack much longer commercial breaks into traditional TV channels, with ad breaks of 15 to 18 minutes per hour according to Wurl. (Infamously, they’ve even sped up syndicated shows like Friends and Seinfeld to make room for more ads.) Free, ad-supported services also have more ads per hour—around nine minutes, per Wurl—than subscription-based ones. But as the traditional TV audience dwindles, you can expect streamers to compensate by squeezing in longer commercial breaks. Much like the cost of each streaming service, the number of ads you see is only going up. HBO originals weren’t supposed to have ad breaks, but The Last of Us does.Jared Newman / Foundry What you can do about it There are no easy workarounds to the increasing number of ads on streaming services, but home theater PC users can take advantage of extensions like MultiSkipper to fast forward through them. A service called PlayOn can also record shows from streaming services, so you can watch the recordings and skip the commercials, though this has its own ongoing costs and hardware requirements. Otherwise, viewers should consider short-term, ad-free subscriptions as an alternative to year-round, ad-supported ones. Paying for a few months of ad-free HBO Max every year might make more sense than keeping a Basic with Ads plan on-hand at all times, especially as commercial breaks lengthen. And the next time a streaming service boldly proclaims a “less is more” approach to advertising, don’t believe it. This story always ends the same way. Sign up for Jared’s Cord Cutter Weekly newsletter for more streaming TV advice.