Plex will offer news media soon through a Watchup acquisition as they look to expand their product throughout the new year. According to Plex’ official announcement about the buyout, they’re looking forward to having the team at Watchup join the ranks of Plex as they credit Watchup for having a “super talented engineering group” that has experience with machine learning. Plex hasn’t disclosed any detailed terms of the acquisition other than the fact that the engineering team was part of the deal, but they do make it fairly obvious that they plan to incorporate Watchup’s technology into their own service going forward while highlighting Watchup’s passion for news and comparing it to their own passion for media.
Watchup currently has partnerships with a wide array of news publishers and outlets, and it grabs news from all over including local and national news media as well as international coverage. The service also personalizes the news you see and dumps it into your feed to make accessing it a simple process that’s tailored to the news that you’re actually interested in seeing. All the news is video-based, so it fits perfectly into what Plex offers as a platform to its large community of users, as what you’ll likely be using Plex for is to stream video.
Watchup, which added Chromecast support last Spring, should end up offering uses the same experience they’re currently getting as Plex doesn’t mention any details about making changes to the service, and even the way that users stream their content to the big screen shouldn’t change as Plex also offers Chromecast support. Plex calls the acquisition a “next step” for their company as they want people to have the ability to access all of the media they care about in one place, whether that’s news, TV, movies, music, or photos. With Watchup’s experience in machine learning it’s possible that Plex already has plans for how to incorporate some of that technology into the Plex service, and while accessing news videos from Watchup through Plex is a certainty, it’s also possible that users could be in for a much smarter Plex, too. At this time Plex hasn’t stated when any changes with either service might occur or when they’ll start letting uses access news videos.