As big spenders such as Amazon and Spotify fill our ears with more commercial, celebrity-driven fare, can grassroots, diverse shows survive?Miranda Sawyer picks 20 indie podcast gemsThe British Podcast Awards were different this year. Held in a south L…
Sky News Australia banned from YouTube for seven days over Covid misinformation
Digital giant issues strike after channel posted videos denying the existence of Covid and encouraging people to use discredited medicationFollow our Covid live blog for the latest updatesVaccine rollout tracker; get our free news app; get our morning …
I’ve been watching Nigel Farage on GB News so you don’t have to. Consider yourself lucky | Catherine Bennett
The struggling channel is more talked about than watched. The solution: a show from the ex-Ukip leaderNigel Farage may not be the best-loved emergency service, but as demonstrated by his recent work for GB News, the struggling, consciously patriotic ne…
Pop maestro Simon Cowell finally bows to the public’s resounding ‘no’ vote | Rebecca Nicholson
The X Factor won’t be returning to our screens. It had long outstayed its welcomeLike a knackered old cruise singer who has finally decided that this cover of Make You Feel My Love will be, must be, their last, The X Factor has slunk offstage for good….
This Week in Apps: Instagram restricts teens’ accounts, Elon Musk criticizes App Store fees, Google Play’s new policies
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone. […]
Chunkz: ‘I paved the way for myself as a YouTuber’
The social media phenomenon on honouring his Somali heritage, balancing fame and faith, and spending lockdown with his YouTube Beta Squad“It was the scariest day of my life,” says Amin Mohamed, AKA Chunkz, of the day in 2016 that he told his parents he…
BBC’s Alex Scott ‘proud’ of working class accent after peer’s elocution jibe
Lord Digby Jones accuses Alex Scott of spoiling Olympics coverage by dropping her ‘g’sThe BBC presenter Alex Scott has said she is proud of her accent after she was criticised by a former minister who said she “needs elocution lessons” and “spoils” Oly…
Amazon’s Fire TV Cube now supports Zoom calls on your TV
Late last year, Amazon launched support for two-way calling that worked with its Fire TV Cube devices. The feature allowed consumers to make and receive calls from their connected TV to any other Alexa device with a screen. Today, the company is expanding this system to enable support for two-way calling with Zoom. Starting today, […]
Spotify’s Clubhouse rival, Greenroom, tops 140K installs on iOS, 100K on Android
Spotify’s recently launched live audio app and Clubhouse rival, Spotify Greenroom, has a long road ahead of it if it wants to take on top social audio platforms like Clubhouse, Airtime, Spoon and others, not to mention those from top social networks, like Twitter and Facebook. To date, the new Greenroom app has only been […]
Facebook reports fastest quarterly growth in five years
Social media company beats forecasts and hits $29bn revenueNetwork condemned for allowing vaccine misinformationFacebook saw its fastest growth this quarter since 2016, the company revealed in its earnings report on Wednesday, despite regulatory concer…