We all use our smartphones and tablets to get the latest news and weather these days, but there’s very little curation out there. In a lot of cases, news aggregation apps simply leave it up to the user to decide what they should be reading and what they enjoy hearing about. The problem with that however, is that a lot of people don’t know what they should be reading, choosing your own sources is great and all, but this causes a culture of users never looking further than their favorite sources. Apps like Yahoo’s News Digest try to get around this and present users with 10 or so news stories every morning and every evening. Now, there’s Watchup, a video version of that same idea; that users want to be presented with facts from around the world, rather than getting caught up in where they want to hear those facts from.
Watchup’s founders recently spoke to the LA Times and said that “What Netflix and iTunes have done for entertainment is what we want to do for the news industry.” By this, Adriano Farano, CEO and Co-Founder, means he wants to focus on the streaming element of content. Many of us now have fast broadband at home or 4G on the move, so the need to steer clear from video on mobile is no more. Watchup is a great way of getting up to speed in the morning or the evening – the choice is yours – and over time, the app will get a picture of what you like watching with simple thumbs up and thumbs down icons. You vote for news videos you enjoyed watching and for those you didn’t, over time your daily digest will change.
Wachup has deals with networks all over the world to provide little clips in a sort of daily report, including Fox News, Sky News, Bloomberg, PBS NewsHour and the Wall Street Journal. In the UK, I noticed that BBC News was also present, and you can read the accompanying news articles when watching a video. Local news is growing as well, with Tribune Media’s TV stations like KTLA in Los Angeles, WGN in Chicago and WPIX in New York coming to the app. Watchup is essentially a video version of Yahoo’s News Digest, and while it’s just getting off the ground right now, this is definitely an app to watch and you can download it from the Play Store here.
