What you need to know
- The Microsoft News app for Windows 10 received a major update this week.
- There's a new Video Hub, along with the option to pin topic Live Tiles to your Start menu.
- Coming soon, you'll be able to use a compact view to see headlines at a glance.
Microsoft News isn't one of those apps that gets big updates often, but when it does, it does it with a bang. This week, the app received a major update on Windows 10 that brings some helpful new features, whether you want to cruise through some video content or better keep up with specific topics.
The first major addition is a new "Video Hub," accessible from the sidebar menu. The Video Hub serves up news clips from a variety of networks, autoplaying through them by default. Below the main feed, you'll see a lengthy list of videos from news networks on other topics that you can easily add to your queue.
You can also quickly browse video content for specific topics, share videos, and reorder videos in your queue. As a bonus, Microsoft News can pop video out in a mini-player using picture-in-picture, so you can watch along while you get other work done.
Perhaps the coolest addition, however, is the ability to pin specific topics to the Start menu as a Live Tile. Microsoft News already had a Live Tile, but it would simply scroll through the top headlines regardless of topic. With topic tiles, you can now navigate to a specific topic you care about and create a tile that only shows headlines from that topic.
Microsoft also touched on the new weather widget available in the "My News" section of the Microsoft News app. Going forward, the company says it plans to add a new "compact stories" view to News, which shrinks things down to let you take in headlines at a glance. The feature is currently in beta testing, though there's no word on when it will be released.
These updates, with the exception of compact stories, are available now with the latest version of Microsoft News in the Microsoft Store.
The Microsoft News app serves up all of the latest headlines from around the world.
