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Plex Acquires Watchup to Bring Curated News Videos Into Streaming Media App

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Streaming media application Plex today announced its acquisition of Watchup, a free app that offers viewers a collection of local, national, and world news videos from 160 trusted news sources that they can further personalize by liking and disliking each news story (via TechCrunch).

Watchup originally began as an iPad app back in 2012, and since launched apps on iOS, Apple Watch, Apple TV, Android, and Wii U. Similar to Apple News but with a focus on video, users can pick which category of news they're most interested in, as well as specify the organizations they want to see news from, and the app presents a curated list after the settings are specified.

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Specific terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Plex said that the Watchup news feature will be added into the Plex app as its own section sometime in the second quarter of 2017. Investors in Watchup include news veterans and former executives of The Wall Street Journal, and all are now strategic investors in Plex.

According to Plex CEO Keith Valory, the personalization features of Watchup will be integrated into a variety of content categories within Plex moving forward, with the plan to focus on the kind of curated content the company believes that cord cutters need.
"There are a number of other content categories we're looking at," he noted. "The key decision criteria for us on that is to what extent do we think it helps round out a cord cutter's needs?"

"It could be things like kids' content, documentaries and podcasts - those are the things that haven't been done well in the top 15 apps, and we think there's an opportunity where we can solve that," said Valory.
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Plex began as a media server and personal library for content like TV shows, movies, and music, but recently began expanding into areas that focused on supporting users who lack traditional cable subscription packages. Last year, for example, the company launched a DVR feature that can record shows on free digital broadcast channels for those subscribed to Plex Pass.

The acquisition of Watchup is another step towards becoming a true cord-cutting companion, according to Valory, who also said more acquisitions and partnerships could be coming down the line. Plex Pass can be subscribed to for $4.99 per month, $39.99 per year, or $119.99 (currently a limited time offer) for a lifetime subscription. Users can download Plex on the iOS App Store for free [Direct Link].

Article Link: Plex Acquires Watchup to Bring Curated News Videos Into Streaming Media App
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2017/01/31/plex-acquires-watchup/
Prefer Kodi to Plex. Not that Plex is bad just like Kodi more. Curated news isn't something I'd be interested to use in either though.
 
I don't use Plex (have tried it though... and found it very nice) and am concerned about the content aggregation that is currently happening. Great apps - like Watchup - are being taken from general availability and integrated into other apps. People like to complain about Apple being a closed ecosystem but by migrating content into what is essentially a sub-ecosystem we consumers will be left with multiple "monopoly's" to deal with... many of whom want - or will want - significant monthly fees. I don't see this as anything but a negative.
 
freediverx said:
Agreed. The new Apple TV would be almost worthless to me without Plex. I refuse to purchase DRM-encumbered movies, and Apple's "Home Sharing" features are infuriatingly bad. if not for Plex, I would have immediately returned my ATV4.
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you ever try beamer?
 
I've been using Plex since 2008 and it has continued to impress me. So glad I got a lifetime membership when they were like... $40 I think.
 
freediverx said:
Agreed. The new Apple TV would be almost worthless to me without Plex. I refuse to purchase DRM-encumbered movies, and Apple's "Home Sharing" features are infuriatingly bad. if not for Plex, I would have immediately returned my ATV4.
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Not giving a rat's patootie about Apple's contacts with the movie studios, I have no compunction about stripping the DRM away from iTMS purchases.

Plex is a great front end, and I also bought ATV4s for it. Its big problem is media discovery. Their tag management is terrible. You can filter movies by any single genre you've tagged, but you can't combine them. If you're in the mood for a "dark" "crime" "comedy" you're out of luck. You'll have to pick one and scroll through the hits. This becomes important with large media libraries. The Plex devs have been laser focused on platform expansion (and now content expansion) but they've ignored our pleas to improve the use of tags/metadata for media discovery.
 
Wait, the scrappy one man band that forked XBMC to make a better media centre for Mac than Front Row ten years ago is now acquiring other companies? Congrats Elan!
 
shareef777 said:
I love Plex. It's the sole reason I bought 3 AppleTVs (4th gen).
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Yep, same here, I have been using plex since 2008, it's the main reason I bought a mac for the first time (back when it was mac only), I have now been a ninja for almost 2 years too. The team is great to work with, and always looking to making things better for users. For those of you who are plex pass subscribers, thank you, and those who aren't you really should throw these devs some $ for all that they do.
 
Kajje said:
Same, and the sole reason I bought the Nvidia Shield as media server.
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So did I, but generally found it unreliable to host the couple thousand videos I have. Could be because it mounts it via a NAS and for some reason the shield only mounts the NAS share as readonly.
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jmcgeejr said:
Yep, same here, I have been using plex since 2008, it's the main reason I bought a mac for the first time (back when it was mac only), I have now been a ninja for almost 2 years too. The team is great to work with, and always looking to making things better for users. For those of you who are plex pass subscribers, thank you, and those who aren't you really should throw these devs some $ for all that they do.
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Yep, Life time subscriber. Well worth the money. I also happily paid for each of my kids' iCloud accounts to unlock Plex on their iOS devices.
 
shareef777 said:
So did I, but generally found it unreliable to host the couple thousand videos I have. Could be because it mounts it via a NAS and for some reason the shield only mounts the NAS share as readonly.
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Same again! I've ditched the NAS and moved to a more simple setup - a USB housing with 2 x 8TB. It hosts 1000+ movies and tens of thousands of TV episodes to about 10 rooms. Added also a fast USB3 128GB USB stick to the other USB port which has been registered through the Shield settings interface to be used as internal storage.
Works like a charm.
 
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