Plex Adding Watchup News Feature Into Main App Following Acquisition

Plex has news, and it is great for cord-cutters out there. The media server company is finally bringing news video streaming to its platform, all thanks to its latest acquisition. The move comes a few months after the company introduced Plex DVR.

On Tuesday, Plex announced its acquisition of Watchup on its official blog. “It gives us great pleasure to announce that we’ve acquired the streaming news service.” The company explained that it chose to acquire Watchup due to its “super talented engineering group” and its “advanced machine learning” system that generates local, national and international news content from more than 150 publishers.

Plex did not disclose details of the acquisition, but it did mention that all of Watchup’s employees will be joining its team. Watchup, which started as an iPad application in 2012, only has nine employees, while Plex has over 90 people on its team. Though Watchup is only a small company, it boasts of numerous partnerships with broadcast sources, including CNN, Bloomberg, Washington Post, Fox News, PBS and WSJ, among many others.

Plex CEO Keith Valory revealed to TechCrunch that it is also looking at other ways to better address cord-cutters’ needs. “There are a number of other content categories we’re looking at. The key decision criteria for us on that is to what extent do we think it helps round out a cord cutter’s needs?” Valory said. “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.”

As part of the acquisition, Plex is adding Watchup’s news video features to its main app through an update that will roll out in the second quarter of this year. In the months that Watchup will still not be part of Plex’s app, the former will continue to be available to its users. It will only be closed down once its service has been fully added to the main Plex app, as per Android Authority.

The announcement of Plex’s newest acquisition comes a few months after it introduced Plex DVR, a feature that allows customers to record free digital broadcast channels content and watch it on any supported device.