Guitar Hero
In April 2015, Activision announced a new entry in the series, titled "Guitar Hero Live". The title was developed by Activision's internal studio FreeStyleGames, who previously had worked on the "DJ Hero" spinoff titles. FreeStyleGames were given free rein to reboot the "Guitar Hero" series for next-generation consoles. One of their first innovations was to drop the standard five-button guitar controller, ultimately designing a six-button guitar controller, with two rows of three buttons each, allowing them to mimic actual guitar fingering. "Guitar Hero Live" was released with both a career and an online mode. The career mode used full-motion video taken from the perspective of a lead guitarist underneath the note highway, to create an immersive experience to the player. The online mode, called "GHTV", discarded the previous downloadable content approach and used a music video channel approach to stream playable songs to players, adding new songs to the catalog on a weekly basis. The game was released in October 2015.
Guitar Hero
Prior to the release of "Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock", Activision worked with the iTunes Store to provide more than 1300 tracks of "Guitar Hero"-related music across more than 20 compilations, including most of the tracks from the games in the series, called ""Guitar Hero Essentials"". These compilations, such as ""Killer Guitar Solos"" and ""Guitar Anthems of the '80s"", include songs related to but not contained within the "Guitar Hero" series. Dusty Welch of RedOctane stated, "Where there’s music, there’s "Guitar Hero", and with iTunes, we are able to provide fans with a central location for downloading their favorite rock anthems." Following the merger of Activision and Blizzard, the new company announced plans to create an alternative to iTunes based on the "Guitar Hero" brand that would allow for downloading songs and their associated note tracks for the "Guitar Hero" games.