TVPlayer Plus lets you stream 25 UK pay-TV channels for £5 per month

As much as we all love binge-watching TV box sets, sometimes you just wanna poke around and see if there’s anything interesting on live TV. Freeview offers a fair channel selection, but anything beyond that typically requires a lengthy (and often pricey) subscription with Sky, Virgin Media, BT or TalkTalk. TVPlayer wants to sit somewhere in between, and having long provided free streams of UK Freeview channels through its mobile apps and online, has today launched its own “Plus” subscription package. For £5 per month, TVPlayer Plus lets users access an additional 25 “premium” channels, including the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, Eurosport, Sony Entertainment Television and the Sony Movie Channel.

Also included in the package are a few channels aimed at little ones, such as Cartoon Network, and others for more specialised interests, like the History Channel, Good Food and Eden. Depending on your tastes, it might be a cheap, contract-free way to expand your entertainment options, with catch-up services available on select channels, too. TVPlayer also plans to launch more genre-focused channel packages in due course, should this initial sweeping selection not even tempt you to check out the free seven-day trial. For now, the Plus tier is only available online and through TVPlayer’s iOS app, but Android devices, Amazon’s Fire TV and Samsung Smart TVs will also support the low-cost subscription option soon enough.

Source: TVPlayer

WageSpot app wants you to see the salaries of everyone around

If you’re on the hunt for a job, chances are good that getting a decent raise is part of your plan. Or at the very least, it’s worth doing some research to figure out what others doing similar work are getting paid, so you can make sure you’re getting what you’re worth. There are a host of services for doing such research, particularly Glassdoor, but a new company called WageSpot thinks it can do an even better job of bringing its users smart salary data. The main focus for the WageSpot Android and iOS app that launches today is location-based salary data — not only can you see what other engineers are making, you’ll be able to see what ones in your city are making, and you can zoom in down to the individual level and literally see how much others near you are paid.

Slideshow-325493 WageSpot’s founders called it a “Zillow for salary data,” and that’s not a bad description. That’s because WageSpot’s main view is a map full of dots, each of which is an individual who entered their salary and job information. You’re encouraged to do the same when you sign up, because without a community of users sharing data, the service will be essentially useless. You can be as public or as private as you want — by default, you need to share your job title, salary and location, but you can also add a photo, name, age, gender and so forth. For the most part, though, you can participate in WageSpot while keeping truly personal information private.

Beyond the map view, you can slice and dice this information in a variety of ways, so the more info that people fill out in their profile, the more useful WageSpot can be. For example, you can search for everyone in your particular industry and sort it by age or gender, or by other measures like job satisfaction or years of experience. WageSpot definitely keeps the focus on location, though. There isn’t a traditional “search” view, but instead that wide set of filters that you can use to show only the most relevant results to you on the map.

There’s also a pretty detailed stats view in the app that lets you compare your pay against others across different industries at the country, state, city or specific zip code level. RIght now, since the app has only just launched, there isn’t much data to be found — WageSpot has been populated with publicly available information for things like government jobs or CEO salaries, and the company also added some less relevant info like salaries of professional athletes as a fun way to populate the maps. It doesn’t really add much useful info for the average person, but it’s kind of fun to browse around and see absurd $30 million salaries for starting pitchers in LA.

The catch for WageSpot is going to be populating its service with relevant data from users, something that gives Glassdoor and other competitive services a huge leg up. But after playing around with both the WageSpot and Glassdoor apps, it does seem that WageSpot is doing some things right here — its app is much, much simpler to use, and there’s something fun about browsing hyper-local data around you. In the same way it’s kind of fun to look at houses you could never afford near you on Zillow, it’s interesting to see what others near you are making. And the barrier to entry is low — while it does feel a bit weird sharing your salary publicly, anonymity should make it relatively painless.

Whether or not the combo of data that could help your job hunt and simple curiosity to see what others near you are making will be enough to draw people in remains to be seen. If you want to check it out yourself, WageSpot is out now for iOS and Android. The company is also launching a Kickstarter with a $10,000 goal to fund its access to the all-important Google Maps API, but the app will remain free for the foreseeable future.

Source: iTunes Store, Google Play

ICYMI: Crowdfunded rocket, swimming robotic bees and more

Today on In Case You Missed It: Harvard researchers taught a swarm of robotic bees to swim, propelling themselves through the water with their tiny little wings. A new Kickstarter project aims to crowdfund a rocket to the moon, if it can get funding up to one million dollars. And the German Autobahn 8 played host to a self-driving big rig truck as part of a test drive by automaker Daimler.

We hope you enjoy the video of the leafblower taking apart Post-It art inside an office nearly as much as you enjoy the pixelated renderings of the superheroes it is destroying.

If you come across any interesting videos, we’d love to see them. Just tweet us with the #ICYMI hashtag @engadget or @mskerryd.