Related Articles
Jason Cipriani/CNET
On Tuesday, Snapchat announced a new service called Discover. The service brings daily video content from various content provides such as CNN, Vice News and ESPN. The content is refreshed every 24 hours with new stories, videos and photos for you to view. Think of Discover as a place within Snapchat (of all apps) you can go to catch up on the latest news, listen to the hottest music or receive cooking lessons from professional chefs.
After updating to the latest version of Snapchat on your iOS or Android device, you’ll have access to Discover.
To access the new feature, swipe to the left from the main screen where you’d normally go to view Stories posted by your friends. In top-right corner is a new, circular button that launches the Discovery screen. I’ve had mixed results with swiping to the left again from the Stories screen, with some instances resulting in Discover being opened while others resulted in nothing happening at all.
Screenshot by Jason Cipriani/CNET
Currently a grid of 12 content providers is displayed on the main Discover screen. Tapping on any of the icons will launch the respective channel.
Each channel offers up a different mix of text articles and videos. When you first launch a channel, you’re greeted with a familiar Snapchat-like message; it’s short in nature, giving you just a glimpse of what the story is about. You can swipe up on any given preview to either read the article, or watch the accompanying video.
From what I can tell, videos range in length from just under a minute to over 15 minutes depending on the source and content covered.
At any time you can swipe down on a video (or article) to go back to the list of content from a channel, with another swipe taking you back to the main Discover screen.
