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Comment by chmars | Hacker News Reader

Ah, Apple News. Americans might want to know that it is still not widely available in the rest of the world – probably another failed Apple project.

I had some hope that Apple News could help RSS but that was apparently never Apple's intention.

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It's actually a sleeper hit [1][2]. The Guaridan seems to be the anomaly.

>Publishers are also paying increasing attention to Apple News, which added push notifications as part of a redesign last year and now delivers significant traffic thanks to the fact that it comes pre-installed on hundreds of millions of devices.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2017/4/16/15314210/instant-articles-...

[2] http://digiday.com/media/duopolys-shadow-apple-news-finding-...

> It's actually a sleeper hit [1][2].

That's not the impression I get from reading both articles. Some publishers like Mic seem to be still in a honeymoon phase with Apple News, but there's a lot of criticism similar to Instant Articles. "Being committed to" and "spending a lot of time" doesn't equal to a financial success for publishers.

I follow Media Twitter pretty closely. Apple News has become a significant driver of traffic for a lot of publications. This contrasts to when it launched when no one thought it would amount to anything.

Here's a few more stories

http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/11/after-a-slow-start-apple-ne...

http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/03/australias-public-broadcast...

https://digiday.com/media/apple-news-the-telegraph/

You're not missing much. I subscribe to a couple dozen different topics, but all I get is News, Entertainment, Cars, Sports, and Electronics, most of which are dominated by one source. I subscribe to my local mid-sized city news, and it's completely dominated by suburban high school sports scores. If I 'dislike' the sports scores, all of my local news goes away. There also doesn't seem to be a way to tell Apple why you're disliking something. I liked the story, I just don't like the clickbait headline. Show me the same story, but not from Buzzfeed.

I have smaller topics like Ruby, Arduino, security, AI, etc subscribed but I've never seen anything from those subjects in my feed. If I scroll down far enough it starts going back days, rather than showing more subjects.

I read it once or twice a day to keep up on big news, but I've given up any pretenses that it can be personalized in any way. It's a big-media news aggregator, that's it.

The most frustrating thing about apple news is the region locking of content :-/

Why would Americans care Apppe News isn't widely available elsewhere in the world?

With Apple's budget, what on earth convinced them to not take the risk of launching in 20 countries at once? Google and Facebook really are the champion of multinational media endeavours.

Still waiting for youtube red here... And no date in sight. I don't even care about their "specials" - just opportunity to support favorite video creators (apart from patreon) without adv would be enough.

It baffles me that they didn't launch that internationally - it's not like they need to buy some special licences, they already show all the same content everywhere. And all the specials are being produced after the launch, so they can demand whatever licenses they choose. And there's very clearly demand. They have google music available in a lot of countries, and that seems a lot harder to pull off.

Wasn't there some brouhaha about music when YouTube red was launching? Something about "independents" (think Adele, not highschool bands) complaining. Add to that e.g. music on YouTube in Germany. I would guess they would launch at the same time were it not for licensing.

I completely forgot about Red's existence. One of the problems with not launching internationally on day one.

I guess the difficulty is not technical but, again copyright related. There's no sane "available by default" policy applied worldwide. Or their predicted profits are negligible for small non-english speaking countries so why bother. (there's hope that it'll appear as google music in some distant future)

FWIW it's still not in the UK either.

What's even more strange to me is their geographical limitations for existing customers:

"[...] If you leave these countries, you won’t be able to save videos offline, videos won’t play in the background, and you will see ads. " [0]

[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6307365?hl=en

That's just BS.

Why is it strange? It has been common practice for decades now, you couldn't even buy games in Japan and play it on US console 10-20 years ago.

That's because you do not own the content, you are licensing the content and the content have geographical restrictions set in place by the content providers.

Until everyone sign an agreement to get rid of geographical restrictons, nothing we can do.

It's strange because in my mind I'm paying for youtube service of getting me videos (either with money or by wasting time on ads)

And with this I would continue to pay for service AND also receive ads.

I kinda understand perverted logic of licensing content and region locking due to price discrimination, but just in my mental model Youtube is more of a service provider than content seller.

Edit: Either way, I'm paying for not seeing ads - so why would they still show them to me, after taking my money? It's their problem how they deal with second side (content creators & right owners, etc.) And right now it just seems like punishing paying customer (hey, adblocking is free :)

Maybe if the video actually played on the links in Apple News.

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