Media ChatGPT Plugins
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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. 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. The plugins beta operated by OpenAI ran from March 23, 2023 until April 9, 2024, when the framework was sunset in favor of Custom GPTs and the GPT Store.[1][2]
This article serves as a historical reference. The plugins listed here are no longer reachable. Some developers later released equivalent tools as Custom GPTs, and several major publishers folded their plugin work into licensing agreements with OpenAI.
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.
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]
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| March 23, 2023 | ChatGPT Plugins announced; no media partners in launch slate |
| May 12, 2023 | Plugins rolled out broadly to ChatGPT Plus |
| May 16, 2023 | Likewise plugin announced as an entertainment industry first |
| May 28, 2023 | Comic Finder indexed in plugin directories |
| June 26, 2023 | Welt NewsVerse becomes the first plugin from a German news brand |
| July 7, 2023 | BILD News added by Axel Springer |
| July 21, 2023 | MixerBox News joins the store |
| August 2023 | Public roundups list around 800 plugins across more than sixty categories |
| November 6, 2023 | OpenAI DevDay announces Custom GPTs |
| December 13, 2023 | OpenAI and Axel Springer announce a global content partnership |
| January 10, 2024 | GPT Store opens |
| March 19, 2024 | New plugin installs and conversations disabled |
| April 9, 2024 | Existing plugin conversations stopped working |
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.
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.
| Plugin | Function | Developer | Verified period |
|---|---|---|---|
| Likewise | Cross-format recommendations for TV, films, books, and podcasts | Likewise (Bellevue, Washington) | Announced May 16, 2023 |
| MixerBox OnePlayer | Music, podcast, and video streaming front end | MixerBox (Taiwan) | Listed from June 2023 |
| MixerBox News | Broadcast-style aggregator across business, sports, lifestyle, and world beats | MixerBox | Joined July 21, 2023 |
| Welt NewsVerse | Welt.de teasers filterable by section and premium status | Axel Springer / Welt | Joined June 26, 2023 |
| BILD News | Topic and keyword search of bild.de articles, with full-text reading and save-for-later | Axel Springer / BILD | Joined July 7, 2023 |
| Comic Finder | Description-based comic search across XKCD and SMBC syndicates | Independent (comicfinder.fly.dev) | Cataloged from May 28, 2023 |
| AI News Roundup | Daily clickable roundup of artificial-intelligence trade-press headlines | Independent | Cataloged from June 20, 2023 |
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 positioned Likewise as a single entry point for media discovery rather than a service tied to one format.
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. The breadth of beats made it a regular installation for general media readers and a frequent companion to OnePlayer.
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, 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.
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.
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.
| Plugin | Media role | News role | Digital media role |
|---|---|---|---|
| Likewise | Cross-format discovery | not applicable | Entertainment recommendations |
| MixerBox OnePlayer | Cross-format streaming hub | not applicable | Music, podcast, video streaming |
| MixerBox News | Broadcast-style aggregator | Cross-beat news | not applicable |
| Welt NewsVerse | German publisher feed | Single-publisher news | not applicable |
| BILD News | German tabloid feed | Single-publisher news | not applicable |
| Comic Finder | Syndicated print media | not applicable | not applicable |
| AI News Roundup | Trade-press coverage | Topic-tagged news | not applicable |
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.
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. In 2024 and 2025 the wider industry shifted toward the Model Context Protocol, with many plugin patterns reappearing as MCP servers.
See also: ChatGPT Plugins, ChatGPT Plugin Categories and Media