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TuneIn Live update comes to Android, offers category curated content discovery
There's nothing worse than seeing a handy new update hit your favorite app on the wrong OS. Luckily, time heals all wounds platform fragmentation. TuneIn's Android app has just been updated with TuneIn Live, a content discovery interface introduced on iOS back in February. What this really amounts to is an extra tab on the app's main screen, but what it offers is pretty neat: a customizable layout of eight tiles, each previewing live music representative of its respective category. Users can peek at what various stations are playing at a glance, casually flipping through their favorite genre's live offerings by swiping each tile individually. It's nothing we haven't already seen from the folks at TuneIn, but its nice to see the app updating consistently across platforms. Check out the adjacent Google Play link to snag the update for yourself.
TuneIn launches TuneIn Live, hopes to encourage radio station discovery through custom UI
With around 70,000 stations from around the world in its database, TuneIn is rightly one of the more popular radio apps out there. Unfortunately, it also means customers don't always have the easiest time finding what they want, something the Palo Alto firm plans to fix with a new update it's rolling out today. The key new feature is TuneIn Live, which aims to encourage content discovery through a customized interface. By culling eight favorite genres from about 100, users can build a custom tile layout that, when activated, hunts down a station playing the appropriate tune -- be it in Los Angeles, New York or even Iceland. On top of that, the company introduced integration with Google+ Sign-in so you can immediately place a reminder for scheduled audio events on your Google Calendar. Radio stations broadcasting live sporting events or special in-studio concerts can add "@tunein" to their tweets to prompt TuneIn's servers to add them to the roster. This move towards improved discovery also includes a recently launched Trending feature that lets listeners know the most popular audio content at any given time. TuneIn marketing director Ryan Polivka and director of product Kristin George told us that the refocus toward discovery will get users addicted to new stations they would never have heard of before. "What's best about radio [instead of algorithms like Pandora] is that there's a human on the other end hand-picking those songs," Polivka said. "Hopefully this will bring a bigger fanbase to those stations, no matter where they are in the world." The new TuneIn features should be available on the iPad app and TuneIn.com today, while other platforms will get them later in the year. For more information about the update, check out the press release and a full gallery of TuneIn Live screenshots after the break.
