Plex News gets Xbox One support, major Android update inbound

Plex, the popular home entertainment software, just added Plex News to its Xbox One app. With it, Xbox One owners who use Plex will have easy access to news content from a variety of providers like Reuters, Associated Press, and more. In addition, Plex recently announced an upcoming update for its Android app, one that will add local video casting to Chromecast and more.

Plex News is not itself a new service, though it has only been available for a relatively short period of time. The service works in partnership with various news agencies from around the world, offering personalized feeds based on the viewer's location, preferred categories, sources, and more.

More than 190 news providers are offered in Plex News, among them being local channels that cover about 80-percent of US markets. Plex News has already been launched for devices like Fire TV, Apple TV, Roku, Android TV, NVIDIA Shield, the Web, and both major mobile platforms.

Plex News aside, the company says it is also gearing up to update its Android app to version 6.15. Once that arrives, users will be able to fling local videos stored on the device to a Chromecast and other Plex players. Thanks to Plex for Android's on-the-fly transcoding ability, this feature will even work for videos and audio that aren't supported by the software.

The Chromecast experience overall was improved this week via the launch of a new Plex app built from the ground up for casting content. The new app brings better support for Chromecast built-in devices, a new design, improved slideshow/aspect ratio/display resolutions support, the ability to resize subtitles using the Plex web app, and better HEVC support for NVIDIA Shield.