Google India has announced two significant developments to augment their ongoing efforts to support the Indian language news ecosystem and expand the Indian language web more broadly. Google News will now be expanding to include two additional Indian languages: Gujarati and Punjabi. These new languages will be available in the coming weeks, bringing the total number of languages to ten in India. The languages earlier available on Google News included Bengali, English, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu.
The GNI Indian Languages Program, announced earlier this year, has received over 600 applications from news publishers across India. Of these, 300+ publishers have been selected to participate in the program, which will provide them with support to modernize their digital ecosystem and improve the user experience across web, mobile and app.
The program delivery will be in nine languages, including English, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Malayalam, Gujarati, and Marathi, making it Google’s most diverse technology program for news publishers.
Sanjay Gupta, Country Manager and Vice President, Google India, said, “The addition of supported languages on Google News is one way in which we want to keep driving the expansion of the Indian language internet, so that more and more users are able to harness the power of information. News publishers are core to this effort and we remain committed to partnering with the news ecosystem.”
Russia may beat India in race to moon’s south pole
Russia will launch its first lunar landing spacecraft in 47 years on Friday in a race with India to the south pole of the moon. The launch will take place nearly four weeks after India sent up its Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander, due to touch down at the pole on August 23.
Russian space agency Roscosmos said its Luna-25 spacecraft would take five days to fly to the moon and then spend five to seven days in lunar orbit before descending on one of three possible landing sites near the pole — a timetable that implies it could match or narrowly beat its Indian rival to the moon’s surface.
YouTube’s enhanced 1080p option now available for Premium users
Google-owned YouTube’s enhanced 1080p option is now available for all Premium subscribers on desktop globally.
Spokesperson Paul Pennington confirmed this information to The Verge.
According to the company, the enhanced bitrate version of 1080p HD video quality makes things “look extra crisp and clear, especially for videos with lots of detail and motion.”
Pennington confirmed that the enhanced 1080p for Premium subscribers is also rolling out on YouTube on living room-focused devices such as Chromecasts and video game consoles.
However, this feature is not available on Android yet, Pennington claimed.
The non-enhanced 1080p option is still available for non-Premium users.
In April this year, the company first launched the enhanced bitrate version of 1080p HD video quality on iOS.