With the UFC moving from ESPN+ to Paramount Plus for the new year, I had cancelled my Hulu, Disney, and ESPN+ bundle effective towards the end of next month after the completion of 2025 UFC events. And they had raised the price to $19.99 per month recently which is too high. Since I paid this through Hulu which we’ve had for over a decade, they offered me 6 months of Hulu for $2.99 per month which I kept, but they said it will be $11.99 per month after, which is too high and will get cancelled. Consequently, Paramount Plus had a black Friday deal for two months at $2.99, then $11.99 or you can sign up for a year and get it effectively for $10 per month later. There is actually some good programming on Paramount Plus, so it will give us some new options along with all of the UFC events in 2026, which is great as they’re paying $1.1 billion per year and there are no more pay-per-view events, with everything on Paramount Plus. Actually a good deal for UFC fans, and better than Formula 1 which did a deal with Apple TV, no thank you (I’ll live with YouTube recaps).
But the bad thing is Paramount Plus is a mess, as it wouldn’t work with my Pi-Hole DNS servers. I had a lot of blocklists added, blocking over a million domains, and would have to temporally unblock everything to watch videos with the Roku application. So I had killed all the extra blocklists and went down to the default one installed with a new Pi-Hole install, and it still wouldn’t work. So I whitelisted the blocked sites it wanted from the log screen until it was working on the computer. Then added back all the green checked blocklists back into my Pi-Hole DNS servers. So what I added might be of use for someone else trying out Paramount Plus with Pi-Hole DNS servers.
(\.|^)static\.adsafeprotected\.com$
(\.|^)tpc\.googlesyndication\.com$
(\.|^)merequartz\.com$
(\.|^)bam\.nr-data\.net$
(\.|^)aax\.amazon-adsystem\.com$
(\.|^)sdk\.iad-03\.braze\.com$
(\.|^)cdn\.cookielaw\.org$
(\.|^)pagead2\.googlesyndication\.com$
(\.|^)pubads\.g\.doubleclick\.net$
(\.|^)tags\.tiqcdn\.com$
(\.|^)geolocation\.onetrust\.com$Previously, I’ve never had an issue with anything, but Paramount Plus seems to have a funky design and stops functioning if it can’t reach some of those sites. This was working now on the computer, but we’ll have to test the Roku tonight, but it should be the same sites. It’s interesting these were included in the default blocklist with only about 88,000 domains, https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/hosts. And if you’re not running Pi-Hole/Unbound DNS servers on your home network, I highly recommend it, as it will filter ad, telemetry and malware sites for all the devices on your home network, especially useful for smartphones and tablets. And this keeps big tech and ISP DNS servers from logging all the sites you visit as well as protecting against a DNS injection attack. And a couple screenshots of the Firebog site that has all the available lists you can add to your Pi-Hole DNS servers.
