iWorld
Rahul Sarangi quits MX Player to join Disney+Hotstar
KOLKATA: Senior media professional Rahul Sarangi has joined Disney+Hotstar as vice president- head of short form & new content initiatives.
Last year, when streaming service MX Player branched out into short-format video through MX TakaTak , it had appointed Sarangi as MX Player new business vice president and head.
Sarangi was earlier with TVF, one of the pioneers in the online content ecosystem of India, as global head-content and business.
He is an Emmy nominated content creator with nearly two decades of experience across digital and linear content as well as production & content operations (short and long formats across scripted, unscripted & live Sports), with a comprehensive understanding of media business across geographies. He is also an active angel investor.
In the early days of his career, Sarangi worked with MTV Asia as the senior supervising producer. He worked in India and Singapore in the content team and was also part of the MTV’s regional brand solutions team. Later, he was also a part of the launch team of Colors.
iWorld
WhatsApp may soon let users to pick who sees their status updates
The messaging giant is borrowing a page from Instagram’s playbook as it pushes to give users finer control over their social circles.
CALIFORNIA: WhatsApp is quietly working on a feature that could make its Status function considerably smarter and considerably more private.
According to reports from beta tracking platforms, the app is testing a tool called Status lists, which would allow users to create named groups such as close friends, family and colleagues, and control precisely which group sees each update. It is a meaningful step up from the platform’s current blunt instruments, which offer only three options: share with all contacts, exclude specific people, or manually select individuals each time.
The new feature draws an obvious comparison with Instagram’s Close Friends function, and the resemblance is unlikely to be accidental. Both platforms sit within Meta’s family, and the company has been nudging them toward a common logic of audience segmentation for some time.
The move also fits neatly into WhatsApp’s broader privacy push. The platform has been rolling out enhanced chat protections and is exploring the introduction of usernames, which would allow users to connect without exchanging phone numbers. Status lists extend that philosophy from messaging into broadcasting.
Meanwhile, Status itself has been evolving well beyond its origins as a simple photo-and-text slideshow. The feature now supports music stickers, collages, longer videos and interactive elements, pushing it closer to the social-media-style story format pioneered by Snapchat and refined by Instagram. In that context, finer audience controls are not merely a privacy feature. They are a precondition for people sharing more.
The feature remains in development and has not been confirmed for release. WhatsApp routinely tests tools that are later modified or quietly shelved. But the direction of travel is clear: the app wants Status to be a destination, not an afterthought. Letting users decide exactly who is in the audience is how it gets there.
