It’s the weekend, which suggests it’s time for us to disclose this week’s winner and loser from the world of tech headlines.
This week’s greatest announcement undoubtedly got here from Sonos as the corporate launched two new audio system – the Sonos Period 300 and the Sonos Period 100.
In different information, Apple launched a yellow model of its iPhone 14, Microsoft Bing lastly hit 100 million customers due to its new AI capabilities and the Google Pixel Fold was reportedly noticed out in New York.
Nonetheless, our winner this week is YouTube and our loser is Spotify. Carry on studying to study why.
Winner: YouTube
Our winner this week is YouTube after the Google-owned video platform introduced it might be eliminating certainly one of its most annoying advert codecs.
The replace was shared by a YouTube group supervisor in an announcement on the platform’s help web page.
In response to the submit, beginning April 6 overlay advertisements – or advertisements that take up the underside part of the video participant – shall be no extra.
“Overlay advertisements are a legacy advert format that solely served on desktop and are disruptive for viewers”, YouTube admitted within the submit. “We anticipate to see restricted influence for many creators as engagement shifts to different advert codecs”.
After all, this doesn’t imply that advertisements are gone fully by any means. If you wish to stream movies with out skipping or sitting by advertisements in the beginning of many movies then you definately’ll must spend money on YouTube Premium.
Nonetheless, this replace continues to be optimistic for all customers of the free service who’re bored with advertisements taking over priceless display screen area throughout movies.
Loser: Spotify
This week’s loser is Spotify – however not for the rationale you may assume. Usually, we select our decide for the losers’ spot based mostly on one thing an organization did that week however, in Spotify’s case, it’s extra about what it didn’t do.
Spotify unveiled a lot of characteristic updates at its Stream On occasion this week, headlined by a brand new TikTok-esque music feed that invitations you to scroll by personalised observe suggestions, in addition to a podcast and exhibits feed, and an audiobook feed to supply the identical expertise as different codecs.
The music streaming large additionally introduced a DJ characteristic, Countdown pages for brand new releases and a Sensible Shuffle button so as to add advisable songs to your playlist, changing the very related Improve button.
Whereas that is all very attention-grabbing, we couldn‘t assist however really feel there was one main characteristic lacking from one more Spotify occasion: Spotify HiFi.
Spotify introduced that it was engaged on a hi-res tier for the music streaming platform all the best way again in 2021 however, as of 2023, there’s nonetheless been no phrase of a launch date. That’s regardless of rivals like Apple Music, Amazon Music HD and Tidal already providing hi-res audio help.
Hopefully, Spotify HiFi is on the horizon. Nonetheless, after CEO Daniel Ek admitted there was no set date for the launch again in 2022, we’re not feeling overly optimistic.