Podcast app Pocket Casts relaunched Wednesday with an overhauled app and a mission to make podcasts less awful to discover. It’s a coming-out party for the podcast app taken over by a group of public radio giants earlier this year.  In recent months, podcasting as a format has seemed like a bubble that may have …

Pandora wants take the recommendations it pioneered for music and apply them to podcasts too.  Streaming music company Pandora is rolling out a new podcast recommendation system, powered by an engine it dubbed the Podcast Genome Project. Similar to Pandora‘s Music Genome Project, which has underpinned the service’s music recommendations for more than a decade, the new podcast system catalogs shows and their episodes …

 YouTube updated its support for virtual reality Tuesday, adding the Oculus Go headset to its list of supported viewers and adding new ways to create or enhance VR uploaded to Google’s massive video site.  At first, Google’s virtual reality ambitions were a joke: It unveiled its first VR headset — an ultracheap do-it-yourself kit made of cardboard un-ironically called Cardboard — two months after Facebook dropped $3 …

Nintendo Switch added YouTube‘s app Thursday, giving the gaming device the ability to function a little like a streaming box for your TV or like a handheld 360-degree-video viewer.  YouTube, which has 1.9 billion monthly users, became the most popular source of online video in the world largely due to its popularity on mobile phones, but its videos are increasingly being …

In an about-face, Netflix said it would put three Oscar-bait films in cinemas for an exclusive period. For years, the company has insisted that its movies stream online the same day they screen in theaters, but that’s now changing. Roma, a black-and-white drama by Alfonso Cuarón that’s being hailed at film festivals as a masterpiece, will have the longest period …

Spotify wasn’t spectacularly unprofitable in the third quarter. And it has a big Chinese streaming service to thank for that.  The world’s biggest subscription streaming music service by members, Spotify routinely reports wide losses in the hundreds of millions of euros, primarily because royalties eat up the majority of its revenue. But its latest three-month period was the exception, thanks …

Apple‘s newest iPad Pros unlock more capabilities for the apps on the tablets, the company touted at its “There’s more in the making” event Tuesday in Brooklyn, New York, as it introduced new iPads and Macs. Among the apps discussed:  Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood is coming to the iPad for the first time, with flashy visuals such as sunlight piercing through a window and atmospheric …

Netflix’s workplace culture, at its worst, can be “ruthless, demoralizing and transparent to the point of dysfunctional,” according to a Thursday report by The Wall Street Journal.  It’s a surprising look inside the media giant. Unlike other tech companies, such as Amazon, that’ve been the subject of bruising exposés about workplace culture, Netflix has long been celebrated in Silicon Valley …

NBC is the latest media giant launching a digital news network.  The company, owned by Comcast, said Wednesday that it quietly launched the concept, called NBC News Signal, earlier this month with a weekly evening news program on Thursdays. Its goal is to make Signal a round-the-clock destination for original news programming in mid-2019.  NBC follows rival TV giants CBS, …

Remember the last time you felt terrified during a horror movie? Take that moment, and all the suspense leading up to it, and imagine it individually calibrated for you. It’s a terror plot morphing in real time, adjusting the story to your level of attention to lull you into a comfort zone before unleashing a personally timed jumpscare. Or maybe …