Plex Acquires News Streaming Service Watchup

Streaming media app Plex is getting newsy.

The company has acquired the news streaming service Watchup for an undisclosed sum. Plex called the acquisition an "important milestone" in its "mission to become the way people discover, enjoy, and share all of their media on all of their devices."

For the uninitiated, Plex organizes all your media content — movies, TV shows, music, and photo collections — and streams it to your devices. Watchup, meanwhile, aggregates more than 150 news sources like CBS, CNN, and Vox, letting users build their own newscasts with local, national, and international content based on their interests.

"As a former journalist turned Knight journalism fellow at Stanford University, I started Watchup to bring the power of video journalism to over-the-top streaming devices so citizens can become better informed," Watchup Founder and CEO Adriano Farano said in a statement. "By joining Plex, we are accelerating the pace of this transition in partnership with many of the most trusted news organizations."

Plex said the acquisition will help it build out a "robust content ecosystem," so users will be able to access news content from one place, on any device, whenever they want.

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"People have to navigate a ridiculous number of interfaces and apps to get to their favorite content," Plex CEO Keith Valory said in a statement. "Our mission at Plex has always been to provide our users with one simple and personalized window into all of their media, accessible from any device. Adding a trusted and reliable news experience into Plex, so that people can choose and organize the news they care about along with the other content they care about, is a natural next step for us."

PCMag reviewed Plex in 2015 and gave it an excellent rating. We found that unlike most media servers, Plex is actually user-friendly and lets you easily stream content to several devices on your home network without having to overcome significant technical hurdles.