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It’s the weekend. So it’s time to reveal this week’s winners and losers from the world of tech headlines.
The biggest announcement of the week was definitely from Sonos, with the company launching two new speakers, the Sonos Era 300 and Sonos Era 100.
In other news, Apple has launched a yellow version of the iPhone 14, Microsoft Bing has finally reached 100 million users thanks to new AI features, and Google Pixel Fold is reportedly spotted in New York.
However, the winner this week is YouTube and the loser is Spotify. Read on to learn why.
Winner: YouTube
This week’s winner is Google-owned video platform YouTube, which has announced that it is getting rid of one of the most intrusive ad formats.
This update was shared by the YouTube community manager in an announcement on the platform’s support page.
According to the post, overlay ads (ads that occupy the bottom section of the video player) will be phased out after April 6th.
“Overlay ads are a traditional ad format that only serves desktops and are confusing to viewers,” YouTube acknowledged in its post. “We expect the impact for most creators to be limited as engagement shifts to other ad formats.”
Of course, this by no means means that ads are completely gone. If you want to stream videos without skipping or sitting through ads at the beginning of many videos, you should invest in YouTube Premium.
However, the update is still positive for all users of the free service who are tired of ads taking up valuable screen space during videos.
Loser: Spotify
This week’s loser is Spotify, but not for the reasons you might think. Usually we pick a loser spot based on what the company did that week, but in Spotify’s case, we focus on what it didn’t do.
Spotify announced a number of feature updates at this week’s Stream On event. On that headline is his new TikTok-esque music feed, podcast and show feed, and audiobook feed that invites you to scroll through personalized track recommendations, giving you the same experience as any other format.
The music-streaming giant also announced a DJ feature, a countdown page for new releases, and a smart shuffle button for adding recommended songs to your playlist.
This is all very interesting, but I couldn’t help but feel that another Spotify event was missing one major feature. It’s Spotify HiFi.
Spotify has announced that it was working on the high-res tier of its music streaming platform in 2021, but as of 2023, no release date has yet been announced. This is despite competitors like Apple Music, Amazon Music HD, and Tidal already offering support for Hi-Res audio.
Hopefully Spotify HiFi is around the corner. But after CEO Daniel Ek admitted that he doesn’t have a 2022 launch date set, we’re not feeling overly optimistic.
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