Media ChatGPT Plugins

Media ChatGPT Plugins were a broad umbrella grouping of third-party tools inside the ChatGPT plugin store that surfaced content from press outlets, broadcast brands, comic syndicates, and cross-format recommendation services between March 2023 and April 2024. They are deprecated: OpenAI disabled new plugin installs and conversations on March 19, 2024 and shut down existing plugin conversations on April 9, 2024, so none of the plugins described here can be reinstalled or used.^[1][2] The category sat above the narrower News and Digital Media groupings, and most directories used the media tag interchangeably with publisher, journalism, or content discovery.

This article serves as a historical reference. The plugins listed here are no longer reachable, and there is no way to reinstall them. Their capabilities moved along a clear successor chain: Custom GPTs with Actions in the GPT Store (2023 to 2024), ChatGPT connectors (2025), the Model Context Protocol that OpenAI adopted on March 26, 2025, and finally apps in ChatGPT and the Apps SDK launched on October 6, 2025.^[2][14][15] Some developers later re-released equivalent tools as Custom GPTs, and several major publishers folded their plugin work into licensing agreements with OpenAI.

What did the Media plugin category cover?

Third-party directories during the 2023 plugin era assigned their own labels because OpenAI never published a fixed taxonomy. The same plugin frequently appeared under News, Aggregator, Entertainment, Search, Audio, or a country tag. The Media tag tended to absorb publisher plugins from named press brands such as Welt or BILD, cross-format discovery plugins that recommended TV, film, books, podcasts, and comics in one query, and aggregator plugins that pulled together coverage across many beats. For a focused list of pure news aggregators see News ChatGPT Plugins. For streaming and content-transformation tools see Digital Media ChatGPT Plugins. The Media category is the union of both, with extra weight on plugins tied to traditional press, broadcast, or comic publishers.

When did ChatGPT media plugins launch and shut down?

OpenAI announced ChatGPT Plugins on March 23, 2023, with twelve external partners (Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, Kayak, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, Wolfram, and Zapier) plus first-party plugins for browsing and a code interpreter. None of the launch slate was a dedicated media tool. Browsing covered some of the same ground by letting the large language model follow links to current articles, but it could not deliver structured publisher feeds, country filters, or cross-format recommendation queries.^[1][3]

The broad rollout to ChatGPT Plus subscribers began on May 12, 2023.^[4] Independent media plugins appeared within days. Likewise, the Bellevue, Washington startup backed by Bill Gates's private office, announced its cross-format entertainment recommendation plugin on May 16, 2023.^[5][6] Comic Finder was indexed in directories from around May 28, 2023.^[8] Welt NewsVerse, the first plugin from a German news brand, joined on June 26, 2023.^[9][10] BILD News followed on July 7, 2023, and MixerBox News on July 21, 2023.^[11][12] By August 2023 the catalogue had passed 800 entries across more than sixty unofficial categories.^[7]

November 6, 2023 marked the announcement of Custom GPTs at the first OpenAI DevDay. The plugin program effectively stopped accepting new submissions soon afterwards. The GPT Store opened on January 10, 2024. New plugin installs and conversations were disabled on March 19, 2024, and existing plugin conversations stopped working on April 9, 2024.^[2] The successor stack kept evolving after the shutdown: OpenAI adopted the Model Context Protocol on March 26, 2025, and launched apps in ChatGPT and the Apps SDK on October 6, 2025.^[14][15]

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What did media plugins do?

Media plugins used the standard plugin architecture: a manifest file at /.well-known/ai-plugin.json plus an OpenAPI specification documenting the endpoints. ChatGPT consumed both at install time and used the manifest description to decide when to call the plugin. A request would trigger an HTTPS call, the plugin would respond with JSON, and ChatGPT would summarise the contents back in the chat. Authentication options included no auth, service-level keys, user-level keys, and OAuth.^[3]

Typical patterns: querying a publisher's content management system by topic, keyword, or section; surfacing top headlines across politics, business, sports, lifestyle, technology, and entertainment; recommending titles across television, film, books, podcasts, audiobooks, and comics from a description such as "a thriller with a strong female lead"; searching syndicated webcomic libraries by scenario; filtering articles by paywall status; and returning attribution metadata such as title, byline, publication date, and a link back to the source.

Users could install up to three plugins at once and had to select GPT-4 as the model for plugin support. That limit shaped reading patterns and reinforced the wider role of prompt engineering, since plugin descriptions, parameter names, and filter values had to be invoked through natural language rather than a graphical menu.

What were the notable media plugins?

The table below lists plugins for which behaviour and launch information can be cross-referenced through at least two independent sources. Tools that could not be verified are omitted to keep this article a reliable historical record. All are deprecated and unreachable as of the April 2024 shutdown.

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Likewise

Likewise launched on May 16, 2023. The Bellevue, Washington startup, backed by the private office of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, framed it as the first ChatGPT plugin from the entertainment industry.^[5][6] The plugin returned recommendations across television, film, books, podcasts, and audiobooks based on natural-language descriptions. A user could ask for "a thriller with a strong female lead on Netflix or Hulu" or "books similar to Sapiens" and receive personalised suggestions drawn from hundreds of millions of user data points and around six million registered users. Results came with streaming availability, community ratings, trailers, and links back to the source platform. Chief executive Ian Morris called it "an entertainment industry first that uses state of the art AI to make it easier than ever to find your next favorite TV show, movie, book, or podcast in a way never before possible," positioning Likewise as a single entry point for media discovery rather than a service tied to one format.^[6] Likewise itself moved beyond the plugin format: in October 2023 it launched a standalone AI recommendation chatbot called Pix, an early example of a media plugin developer building a dedicated product once the plugin channel proved limited.

MixerBox OnePlayer and MixerBox News

MixerBox, a Taipei-based developer, became the largest single contributor to the ChatGPT Plugin Store during the summer of 2023, eventually publishing more than ten plugins.^[12] OnePlayer was its flagship media plugin: a streaming front end across music, podcasts, and video. Users could request playlists by genre (pop, hip hop, K-pop, rock, country, J-pop, jazz) or by mood (workout, chill, focus, sleep, party), search podcasts by topic, and play results inside the MixerBox web player.

MixerBox News joined on July 21, 2023 as a broadcast-style aggregator. Where many news plugins focused on a single publisher or beat, MixerBox News spanned business, finance, politics, society, entertainment, sports, lifestyle, technology, local, world, and military stories, presenting each result with a publication date and a link back to the source.^[12] The breadth of beats made it a regular installation for general media readers and a frequent companion to OnePlayer.

Welt NewsVerse and BILD News

Welt NewsVerse, launched on June 26, 2023, was the first ChatGPT plugin from a German media brand and from a major European publisher.^[9][10] Built by Axel Springer for its national newspaper Welt, it exposed welt.de teasers across politics, business, entertainment, and breaking-news beats, with filtering between premium and free articles. Michael Reiner, head of Welt Digital, framed the launch as a way to bring quality journalism into conversational interfaces rather than ceding reader attention to summarising tools that did not credit publishers.

BILD News, also from Axel Springer, joined on July 7, 2023, anchoring the publisher's mass-market tabloid in the same store.^[11] BILD News allowed topic and keyword search of bild.de articles, full-text reading via URL retrieval, and a save-for-later function. Both plugins were forerunners to a broader business arrangement: on December 13, 2023, the publisher and OpenAI announced a global content partnership covering Welt, BILD, Politico, and Business Insider, with summaries surfaced inside ChatGPT replies along with attribution and clickable links. Both plugins remained in the store until the April 2024 shutdown.

Comic Finder and AI News Roundup

Comic Finder, an independent plugin hosted at comicfinder.fly.dev, was indexed in directories from around May 28, 2023.^[8] It bridged ChatGPT to two long-running webcomic libraries, XKCD and Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC), letting users describe a scenario in plain language and receive a matching strip with a link and thumbnail. It demonstrated how the same description-to-content pattern used by news and entertainment plugins worked equally well for syndicated print media.

AI News Roundup, cataloged from June 20, 2023, advertised itself as "Get today's AI news headlines as a clickable link roundup." Its single endpoint took no arguments and returned the day's stories as a list of titles linked back to source publications. The plugin sat at the intersection of trade-press media coverage and the wider news category, and was a common installation for engineers and analysts following the pace of model releases through 2023.

How did people use media plugins?

Media plugins were rarely used in isolation. Three workflows recur in tutorials from 2023. In the publisher-first workflow, a user installed Welt NewsVerse or BILD News and asked ChatGPT to surface and summarise the day's headlines on a beat. In the cross-format discovery workflow, a user paired Likewise with a streaming-aware tool, described a mood or scenario in plain language, and used the recommendations to plan media consumption across formats. In the omni-news workflow, a user installed MixerBox News alongside a topic-tagged plugin such as AI News Roundup, then asked ChatGPT to brief them on cross-beat coverage before generating a personal digest with attribution. These chains illustrated the early appeal of plugins as a tool-use layer for a large language model.

How do Media, News, and Digital Media plugins relate?

The Media category overlapped heavily with two narrower groupings. News ChatGPT Plugins collected hard-news aggregators and single-publisher feeds. Digital Media ChatGPT Plugins collected streaming services, video and audio transformation tools, photo filters, and short-form video generators. Several plugins appeared under all three labels, depending on the directory.

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Treating News, Digital Media, and Media as distinct categories is a retrospective convenience; during the live plugin era, readers usually discovered media plugins by browsing the alphabetical store and trying recommendations from third-party reviewers.

Why were ChatGPT plugins deprecated, and what replaced them?

OpenAI gave several reasons for sunsetting plugins in favour of GPTs and Actions.^[2][13] Discovery was the central problem: the plugin store presented a flat catalogue with light category labels. Plugins were also single-purpose, exposing only API endpoints, while a GPT bundles custom instructions, knowledge files, and Actions in one package. Conversation friction hurt adoption further: activating plugins required choosing the GPT-4 model, opening a plugin picker, and toggling individual plugins, with only three active plugins per chat. OpenAI announced at DevDay that GPT creators would eventually be eligible for revenue sharing through the GPT Store; the plugin program offered no such incentive.

The direct partnership track also undermined publisher plugins. The Axel Springer deal of December 13, 2023 covered the same Welt and BILD content surfaced by NewsVerse and BILD News, but did so inside ChatGPT's main interface with attribution, links, and full editorial control on the publisher side. OpenAI signed similar deals through 2024 with the Financial Times, Le Monde, Prisa Media, News Corp, and others.

Use cases moved to four kinds of successor. Custom GPTs absorbed the bulk of media-plugin functionality; many developers ported their plugins to GPTs with limited code changes because Actions still uses an OpenAPI specification, and tools such as NewsPilot, BizToc, and several MixerBox plugins reappeared as GPTs in early 2024. The GPT Store opened on January 10, 2024 and surfaced media-oriented GPTs in its featured tiles. Direct publisher deals replaced single-publisher plugins. Native browsing and citation, and later ChatGPT Search, absorbed the topic-search role of plugins like AI News Roundup.

The connective tissue that plugins pioneered, letting a large language model call an external API described by an OpenAPI specification, did not disappear; it was standardized. OpenAI shipped ChatGPT connectors so that ChatGPT could securely link to external data sources and remote servers for use in chat and deep research.^[17] On March 26, 2025, OpenAI announced it would adopt the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open integration standard Anthropic introduced in November 2024, across its products. Sam Altman wrote, "People love MCP and we are excited to add support across our products," with support arriving first in the Agents SDK and the Responses API and ChatGPT desktop app following.^[14] On October 6, 2025, at DevDay, OpenAI launched apps in ChatGPT and the Apps SDK, a framework built on MCP that lets developers run interactive apps directly inside a ChatGPT conversation, with launch partners including Booking.com, Expedia, Spotify, Figma, Coursera, Zillow, and Canva.^[15][16] Where a 2023 media plugin could only return JSON for ChatGPT to summarise, an Apps SDK app renders its own interface inside the chat, closing the loop that plugins opened in March 2023.

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See also

• ChatGPT Plugins
• ChatGPT Plugin Categories
• Media
• News ChatGPT Plugins
• Digital Media ChatGPT Plugins
• List of ChatGPT Plugins
• Custom GPTs
• GPT Store
• Apps SDK
• Model Context Protocol
• ChatGPT
• OpenAI
• GPT-4
• Large Language Model
• Prompt Engineering

References

1. OpenAI. "ChatGPT plugins." March 23, 2023. https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-plugins/ ↩
2. OpenAI Developer Community. "Plugin Store and New Chats With Plugins Closed March 19 2024." https://community.openai.com/t/plugin-store-and-new-chats-with-plugins-closed-march-19-2024/689877 ↩
3. TechCrunch. "OpenAI connects ChatGPT to the internet." March 23, 2023. https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/23/openai-connects-chatgpt-to-the-internet/ ↩
4. Search Engine Journal. "OpenAI Introduces Plugin Support For ChatGPT." 2023. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/openai-introduces-plugin-support-for-chatgpt/483053/ ↩
5. GeekWire. "Likewise launches ChatGPT plugin to use AI to recommend TV shows, movies, books and more." May 16, 2023. https://www.geekwire.com/2023/likewise-launches-chatgpt-plugin-to-use-ai-to-recommend-tv-shows-movies-books-and-more/ ↩
6. Business Wire. "Likewise Launches ChatGPT Plugin: A Revolutionary Tool for Personalized Entertainment Recommendations." May 16, 2023. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230516005868/en/ ↩
7. Prunckun, O. "A List Of All Approved ChatGPT Plugins As Of 14 May 2023." Medium. https://orren.medium.com/a-list-of-all-approved-chatgpt-plugins-as-of-14-may-2023-4c60afbfdcfc ↩
8. GitHub. "chatgpt-plugin-store/manifests/comicfinder.fly.dev.json." sisbell. https://github.com/sisbell/chatgpt-plugin-store/blob/main/manifests/comicfinder.fly.dev.json ↩
9. Persoenlich.com. "Axel Springer: Welt lanciert News-Plugin fur Chat GPT." June 26, 2023. https://www.persoenlich.com/digital/welt-lanciert-news-plugin-fur-chat-gpt ↩
10. plugin.surf. "Welt NewsVerse ChatGPT plugin." 2023. https://plugin.surf/plugin/welt-newsverse ↩
11. plugin.surf. "BILD News ChatGPT plugin." 2023. https://plugin.surf/plugin/bild-news ↩
12. MixerBox. "Navigating the News with AI: MixerBox News Plugin for ChatGPT." July 21, 2023. https://www.mixerbox.com/blog/news ↩
13. OpenAI. "Introducing GPTs." November 6, 2023. https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpts/ ↩
14. TechCrunch. "OpenAI adopts rival Anthropic's standard for connecting AI models to data." March 26, 2025. https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/26/openai-adopts-rival-anthropics-standard-for-connecting-ai-models-to-data/ ↩
15. OpenAI. "Introducing apps in ChatGPT and the new Apps SDK." October 6, 2025. https://openai.com/index/introducing-apps-in-chatgpt/ ↩
16. TechCrunch. "OpenAI launches apps inside of ChatGPT." October 6, 2025. https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/06/openai-launches-apps-inside-of-chatgpt/ ↩
17. OpenAI. "MCP and Connectors." OpenAI API documentation. https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/tools-connectors-mcp ↩