CNBC.com Product

By Alyssa Gutjahr and Steve Hsu

The CNBC Channel on Roku now offers live TV, enabling users to tune into CNBC’s Business Day programming live, such as “Mad Money with Jim Cramer,” “Squawk Alley,” and “Closing Bell,” as well as our Primetime programing including “Shark Tank,” “Jay Leno’s Garage,” and “Secret Lives of the Super Rich.” Simply sign in with your cable, satellite, or telco TV provider to enjoy.

The CNBC Roku Channel joins CNBC’s suite of products with live TV, including Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Android TV, as well as Desktop and Mobile Apps.

BEHIND THE SCENES

In addition to live TV on Roku, CNBC implemented Roku SceneGraph to enhance the way our channel is built, and Roku’s Advertising Framework to improve the ad experience on our channel. For more information, go to Roku’s developer blog.

By Alyssa Gutjahr and Steve Hsu

The CNBC app for Android TV is here! We are excited to announce the launch of the app on the Google Play Store, optimized for Android TV devices including the NVIDIA SHIELD, Mi Box, Sharp AQUOS TV and Sony BRAVIA TV. Launching on Android TV is another way to reach CNBC users across living room devices with exciting new capabilities including in-app search and Google Assistant voice search functionality.

Google Assistant voice search makes content easier to find than ever before, allowing users to simply speak into their remote to search CNBC programs, anchors/reporters, primetime talent, topics and people of interest.

SAME GREAT CONTENT, NEW PLATFORM

For the first time on Android TV, users can watch live CNBC TV and binge full episodes of original shows including The Profit, American Greed, Jay Leno’s Garage and Billion Dollar Buyer with a pay-tv subscription. Authenticated pay-tv users can also catch up on key Business Day programming on demand, including Mad Money, Squawk Alley and Fast Money.

In addition to full episodes and live TV, the new Android TV app features hand-picked finance, market, lifestyle, and primetime clips that are updated multiple times per day to ensure users stay informed and entertained.

HOW IT WAS BUILT

The app is built to support Android M, N and O operating systems and shares a Play Store listing with CNBC’s Android mobile phone application.

The single Play Store listing will automatically prompt users who have the CNBC app on their Android phone to download the CNBC app when onboarding their new Android TV device.

By Alyssa Gutjahr and Steve Hsu

We are excited to announce the launch of CNBC's updated Apple TV App.

The new App is designed with an improved look and feel, enabling more intuitive browsing of the CNBC video library. Users are now able to browse related videos while watching full-screen playback, and can quickly jump from clip to clip. 

In addition to a plethora of editorially curated shortform clips and beautifully redesigned UI, we've also added some new features:

- Apple's Single Sign On (SSO) – Allows users to easily watch full episodes of select CNBC original primetime shows, including the new season of “Secret Lives of the Super Rich,” and Business Day programming, such as “Mad Money with Jim Cramer."

- Top Shelf – When users add the CNBC App to the top row of their Apple TV home screen, they have instant access to the top business and financial news via the Top Shelf feature, which deep links directly to the selected content.

- Continuous Playback – Enables users to watch editorially curated videos back to back.

- Instant On – Users are immersed in full-screen video when the App loads.

When thinking about how to build the App, we decided to use a native tvOS application, which provides more control over how the application looks and works. It also gives us the flexibility to include other cool features in the future.

CNBC’s new Apple TV App allows us to better serve our Apple TV customers with improved design, performance, and stability.

By Vijay Koneru

From record-breaking growth on CNBC.com to creating content for emerging platforms such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home, we are incredibly excited about the future of CNBC Digital. But in order to continue this growth, we need an infrastructure platform that is scalable, agile and secure.

HYBRID APPROACH

Previously, we relied on our on-premise data centers for all of our needs including our web application and database that powers CNBC.com. This required us to continuously procure hardware and build platform capacity for peak loads. In order to scale for our growth and deal with spikes in traffic, we decided to move to the cloud and chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) because it offered a broad range of services and management tools that suited our needs.

We decided to use a hybrid data center approach, leveraging the best of public cloud and on-premise data centers. The public cloud acts as a primary platform for the customer-facing applications and our on-premise data centers are used for our enterprise applications. This hybrid approach gives us the required scale and agility along with the added disaster recovery capability.

GUIDING PRINCIPLES

Migrating to the cloud from on-premise data centers is a complex process, especially when it involves business-critical applications, which do not allow for them to experience any downtime. There were multiple guiding principles for the migration:

1) The platform re-engineering team would take on the workload, ensuring the product engineering team was not affected so that our regular development work on our website and apps wasn’t slowed down.

2) We would undertake a phased approach, moving our website and most of our critical customer-facing applications to the cloud. Over the next few months, we plan to move the rest of our applications to the cloud.

3) Where possible, we would take advantage of the platform-as-service offerings like load balancers, database etc. For example, we chose AWS’s Aurora SQL database and Elastic Load Balancing (ELB). In other cases we decided to use AWS’s infrastructure-as-service such as Network File System (NFS). For elastic capacity we used Amazon’s EC2.

4) The implementation was done with best practices like immutable infrastructure and infrastructure as code to ensure reliable and repeatable process. This was especially important since we had decided to go with a hybrid on-premise data center and cloud posture and we wanted to have a uniform deployment process across all our environments.

HOW WE DID IT

Our investment in test automation over the last few years helped us when the time came to ensure a seamless and successful migration. We can now build, manage, provision, scale up and scale down infrastructure quickly with code as opposed to a long process of procuring, racking and wiring hardware.

This migration was handled entirely by internal CNBC team members. The operations group was trained and received AWS certification, the enterprise architecture team evaluated all the services and designed the architecture, and the infrastructure group ensured connectivity between our data centers and AWS.

By Steve Hsu

This week, we’re excited to announce users now have access to CNBC’s unparalleled content on Amazon Fire TV.

For the first time ever on Amazon Fire TV, users can watch select full episodes of CNBC’s original primetime shows, including the new season of “Secret Lives of the Super Rich” and hit shows like “The Profit” and “Jay Leno’s Garage.” This major release also gives users access to some of CNBC’s Business Day programming, such as “Mad Money with Jim Cramer,” “Squawk Alley” and “Closing Bell.” Simply sign in with your cable or satellite provider and enjoy your favorite shows on-demand.

By Srinivas Maroju, Wendy Artis, and Alex Dao

We are proud to announce the adoption of HTTPS on CNBC.com. Our users can now expect a more secure, trustworthy experience when reading news or watching videos on our site.

With the standard HTTP protocol, malicious parties could more easily view – or even modify – the content you see in your browser. Using secure sockets layer (SSL) technology (the “S” in HTTPS), HTTPS connections encrypt your web traffic and data – including personal information like user IDs and passwords – to help prevent tampering and interception by malicious parties.

Technology companies, most notably Google, have made major moves to encourage publishers to make the transition to HTTPS. This is all part of a concerted industry effort to deliver a safer web. A very visible part of this effort is to indicate to Chrome browser users when a site's traffic is secure (graphic below).

TEAMWORK

A complete HTTPS site migration requires tight coordination, collaboration and communication with stakeholders both inside and outside the organization because everything, including vendors whose software runs on our pages, our advertising tech stack, and all our clients ads, needed to be switched to HTTPS for it to work. As a result, our program management team worked closely to make sure multiple teams within CNBC, NBCUniversal and our partners worked to make this happen.

IMPLEMENTATION

Rolling out HTTPS is a huge effort, with numerous changes to the site and its underlying infrastructure. Given the scope of the program, we chose to adopt a phased approach to mitigate issues and deliver a seamless experience to our users, all the while preserving our Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

1. Server-Side Updates

The first step in our migration was to purchase and install SSL certificates on our CDN and load balancers, a key step for publishers that distribute content globally. We used SSL Offloading to our CDN and load balancers to decrease the processing burden on our servers to encrypt/decrypt our site content.

2. Code Changes

Wherever possible, it was essential for engineering teams – especially external vendors injecting code from their own servers – to use a protocol agnostic format when constructing URLs. This strategy gave us the ability to roll out code changes in multiple phases, building up to the final HTTPS release without having to deal with interdependent components during the transition.

3. Third Party Updates

The biggest challenge was ensuring all our content was loaded via HTTPS, which means working with a whole network of third party providers that cover products like advertising, analytics, and other content hosted on our site, guaranteeing all the references are downloaded via HTTPS.  

4. Mixed Content Errors/Testing

Building automated testing scripts and tools to crawl our sites and report mixed content errors accelerated the migration process and gave us the ability to quickly find non-HTTPS URLs (some buried in long-forgotten pages). Close collaboration with our vendors was required to roll out these fixes as a part of the bug fix release cycle.

5. SEO Updates

Though HTTPS promises significant SEO gains, we are cognizant that we could experience an initial negative impact to our organic search traffic and have geared up to minimize the damage. We’ve worked closely with a great SEO team to apply industry best practices; among them:

- Correcting HTTPS canonical tags - 301 redirects - Updates to robots.txt - Sitemap updates - Updates to RSS feeds - Google News Publisher updates - Structured Data updates

SPECIAL THANKS

By Gopi Shanmugam and Kelly Gyenes

We recently launched the CNBC skill on Amazon Alexa to help you multitask and keep up with business and financial news, as well as market data. Alexa is Amazon's voice service that is available on Amazon devices, including Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, Amazon Tap, and Amazon Fire TV.  With the CNBC skill, Alexa is now able to give you the latest financial news, quotes, and market information.

SAY, "ALEXA, ENABLE CNBC"

Accessing the CNBC skill is easy; if you haven’t already, simply say "Alexa, enable CNBC skill," and you're all set. Once enabled, you can say "Alexa, open CNBC," and start a conversation with CNBC.

HOW WE BUILT IT

The CNBC skill for Amazon Alexa is built using the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) and AWS Lambda. The Alexa Skills Kit includes a collection of cloud-based self-service APIs that process user requests by listening, understanding, resolving, and mapping the service call to a configured endpoint.

We use Node.js to build the AWS Lambda function for CNBC, which handles the business logic, including talking to the relevant feeds and massaging the data. Then it produces a JSON response acceptable by the ASK to process and provide responses to the user via Alexa.

DEFINING & CREATING THE VUI

We designed the voice user interface (VUI) by mapping out the conversations a user could have with the CNBC skill. For example, users can say things like "Alexa, ask CNBC for the latest news" to hear the headlines, "Alexa, ask CNBC, how is Amazon doing?" to get the stock price info for Amazon, and "Alexa, ask CNBC, how are the markets looking?" to check on the DOW, NASDAQ, and S&P 500.

Anticipating what the user will say is a challenging part of creating a successful Alexa skill. After Alexa handles the natural language processing to understand the user's input, if it has confidently matched one of our intents, slot values, or sample utterances, then the request is routed to the AWS Lambda function for a response. We wrote innumerable utterances to help users invoke specific functionality and mapped the utterances to a Module/Intent to provide the right response.

"ALEXA, ASK CNBC, WHAT IS AMAZON TRADING AT?"

To provide quotes, we populate slot values containing details like company names, symbols, indexes, and futures in the Alexa Skills Kit, ensuring we do not exceed the current 600,000 character limitation for slot values. For responses, we tap into our broader market data infrastructure that supports our digital products and television displays of real-time market information to share quote details. For us to leverage these services, we created a converter on the Lambda function to handle the situations where the speech-to-text input from the user does not produce a match in our quote search, such as when the input contains "and" for a company that includes "&" in the official name. This helps increase the likelihood of a match, so we can provide the user with fast, accurate market insights.

In the Alexa app, data is also presented to the user, which requires more special formatting, as the output is different compared to the voice experience.

"ALEXA, ASK CNBC FOR THE LATEST NEWS"

For sharing the top news and U.S. market updates, we followed VUI design best practices by offering additional prompts and controls to the user, such as the opportunity to hear more, go to the next story, or return to the previous story. To achieve this, we break the stories into chunks shorter than the ASK 8,000 character limit in the response and track the user's navigation of stories using the ASK session objects. This improves the user experience and keeps the user engaged in the conversation. Throughout our skill, we utilize speech synthesis markup language (SSML) in key areas so Alexa can read our content better and phrase responses properly, which significantly improves the flow of the exchange.

"SORRY, WHAT DID YOU SAY?"

It's important to continue the conversation with the user to be able to fulfill their requests, so we invested energy into handling situations where the user is not understood or needs to provide more information, as well as enabling options around repeating information or offering help. For example, the help intent, which is a required feature for Alexa skills, provides the user with details around what the skill can do and ideas of what users can say to interact. The coaching and guidance to the user can help improve the overall conversation quality and the value the skill can add to the Alexa experience while user's learn what they can do with this technology as the technology advances.

ADD CNBC TO YOUR FLASH BRIEFING

Beyond the CNBC skill, it's now possible to add CNBC to your Flash Briefing. We're bringing you market and business news updates from CNBC Radio and On-Air Stocks Editor Bob Pisani. After adding CNBC, you can say “Alexa, what’s my Flash Briefing?” or “Alexa, what’s in the news?” to hear the latest. You can make sure you never miss an update by moving it to the top of your Flash Briefing playlist under Settings in the Alexa mobile app.

By Gopi Shanmugam and Kelly Gyenes

CNBC brings you the most up-to-date business and stock news, market insights and CNBC television schedules with @CNBC, a Conversation Action for the Google Assistant, which is available on Google Home devices.

FIND IT BY SAYING "OK GOOGLE, TALK TO CNBC"

To engage with @CNBC, you simply need to say "Ok Google, I want to talk to CNBC" and the conversation will start. Or you can initiate the conversation and make a request by saying things like:

"Ok Google, let me talk to CNBC about the markets."

"Ok Google, I want to talk to CNBC about the latest news."

"Ok Google, ask CNBC to tell me when “The Profit” is on next."

Once in a conversation, you continue asking questions, such as "what’s CNBC’s take on the markets?", "what’s the latest business news?", "what’s going on with <insert your stock pick>?", and "when is <insert your favorite show> on CNBC?"

HOW WE BUILT IT

As a launch partner for Actions on Google for the Google Assistant, we partnered closely with Google to bring to market the CNBC Conversation Action, which is built using API.AI and the Google Cloud Platform.

API.AI is a natural language understanding platform that provides developers and business users tools to develop a natural language processing system with artificial intelligence and speech-to-text translation with custom functionality. The platform comes with optional pre-built services called domains to accelerate building conversational interfaces. Once an Action on Google is available in market, API.AI offers additional features that help developers understand the user's usage of the Action and presents opportunities to train the Action to improve the user experience.

The CNBC Conversation Action backend service and endpoints are built using the Google Cloud Function Infrastructure and developed using Node.js, which handles the business logic, including talking to the relevant feeds, massaging the data, and producing a JSON response acceptable by API.AI to process and provide a response to the user via Google Assistant.

DEFINING & CREATING THE VUI

When designing @CNBC, we carefully thought about the best practices of VUI design and the conversation flow between the user, the Google Assistant voice, and the @CNBC voice. For example, we took great care to ensure that we acknowledged the user's request as part of our response, so the user would have confidence in what they were going to hear.

For every use case, API.AI requires the population of queries, which are the phrases a user may say to invoke a request. This helps match the user's input with an intent, so we can fulfill their request. When anticipating the questions a user may ask, we identified the types of queries best suited for this voice platform and optimized responses for clarity and usefulness.

"OK GOOGLE, LET ME TALK TO CNBC ABOUT THE MARKETS"

CNBC's On Air Stocks Editor Bob Pisani and the CNBC Radio team deliver market and business news updates as audio content throughout the day, which we offer using speech synthesis markup language (SSML). After the market updates, we ask users if they would like a real-time check of the markets to get the very latest, which we deliver text-to-speech.

"OK GOOGLE, CAN I TALK TO CNBC ABOUT GOOGLE?"

Many users like to keep up with what's going on with certain companies, so when they ask for news about a stock or company, we convert the user's spoken request into text using API.AI and then use that info to fetch the latest news about the company, along with a current stock quote. These dynamic updates are also shared back to the user via a text-to-speech output.

We employ cooperative principles to help clarify a user's request to try to help reach the desired response. For example, if a user asks for news about a stock, but it is unclear which stock, the @CNBC clarifies by asking, "Which stock or company are you interested in?" This advances the conversation, while handling a situation that could produce an error loop otherwise.

"OK GOOGLE, ASK CNBC TO TELL ME WHEN ‘JAY LENO'S GARAGE’ IS ON NEXT"

Whenever users want to find out what's on TV or when their favorite show is on, @CNBC can help. We look up programming information against show schedule feeds and can search by date, day, and time or by show name. Presenting schedule information can be difficult and we discovered how important it is to relay the information back in a construct similar to the user's query.

We also learned natural language processing and training our Action is important; for example, when we saw that certain test users asked about CNBC's popular program "The Profit" and the text input we received was "The Prophet". Each Action will have its own set of vocabulary challenges and similar sounding words, which is where extensive testing with different voices and accents can help illuminate scenarios for handling.

"OK GOOGLE, WHAT'S THE NEWS?"

Beyond the CNBC Conversation Action, CNBC offers several news options that can be included in the playlist response for when you say, "Ok Google, what's the news?" Add CNBC for market and business news updates from CNBC Radio and On-Air Stocks Editor Bob Pisani. Additionally, CNBC’s “Fast Money” and “Nightly Business Report” podcasts are available for your Narrated News playlist. These all can be selected as preferred news sources in the Google Home mobile app.

By Jeff Berk

CNBC strives to continually extend our content to new audiences across multiple platforms. We are excited to announce the launch of the CNBC app on the Amazon Appstore.

NEW PLATFORM, SAME GREAT CONTENT

The app is optimized for Kindle Fire devices, and offers all the content and functionality available in the CNBC Android app. That includes 24-hour global business news and financial coverage. You can also access live TV and full episodes of your favorite CNBC shows by logging in with your cable or satellite provider. And of course, track the stocks you’re interested in by creating Watchlists, or dive deeper into the data with advanced interactive charting features.

DOWNLOAD NOW

By Alex Dao and Roshan Varghese

CNBC works hard to ensure that our users have access to the content they need, wherever they need it. With mobile traffic now accounting for roughly 50% of CNBC's total traffic, it has become a strategic priority to provide a fast loading, less frustrating user experience to this expanding user base.

“Improving performance for all our pages is a top priority. As we see our traffic from mobile devices increasing, it’s become paramount we provide the fastest experience we can for those users,” said Viktor Cea, Director of Content and Design. The AMP format offers an enhanced experience for users, with its promise of near-instant page load times.

  SOLUTION

The CNBC team took a multi-phased rollout approach to deploying AMP across our text articles, releasing a minimum viable product (MVP) in late-June of 2016. 

We were able to quickly ramp up the project since the AMP format leverages many existing web standards, allowing CNBC to implement our standard analytics tools to measure usage. The phased rollout also afforded us the opportunity to optimize our AMP code markup with the help of the AMP validation tools.

Within a few months of the initial launch, our AMP traffic crossed into the double digits as a percentage of our mobile web traffic, which meant it was time to monetize and re-circulate this new traffic stream. We followed up the MVP release by implementing ads via the standardized <amp-ad> tag. We were also able to work with a third party vendor to rapidly deploy lightweight, AMP-specific code for internal content re-circulation for our users.   

RESULTS

AMP’s promise of increased page performance has proved true. We are now seeing average AMP page load times of 1.23 seconds. Since implementing AMP, CNBC has seen a 22% increase in mobile search users who returned to CNBC.com within 7 days.

By Alex Dao, Roshan Varghese, Tahir Mehmood, and Aaron Stephanus

We are pleased to announce the release of the new CNBC homepage! This follows an extended 3-month beta test where we worked closely with our customer care team to create an ongoing user feedback loop to inform our product design decisions.

Responsive and optimized for desktop and tablet devices, the homepage brings a clean, modern design aesthetic while providing vastly improved page load performance.

The market overview is now front and center along the top of the page, with bold color coding to make it clear at a glance how the markets are doing that day. We introduced larger text headlines and photos to draw your attention to the latest breaking news and to help reduce eye strain. 

And the new tablet breakpoints now give our iPad users a touch friendly experience, whether viewed in portrait or landscape mode.

Site Performance Enhancements

While the front end design is the most visible change, we are particularly proud of the work we have done to improve the speed in which the entire site loads. Particular emphasis was placed on improving load time and start render time.

In order to optimize page performance, we re-engineered the way various components are loaded and executed in the browser to reduce the amount of code being processed, leading to better performance. The new pages are much lighter and load faster primarily because of the lazy loading approach to page content. All non-essential components are now loaded on-demand and processed based on user interaction, and only on an as-needed basis.

After reviewing several third party solutions for lazy loading, the decision was made to develop an in-house solution. This approach did not require us to refactor any of our existing JavaScript to adapt patterns like AMD with RequireJS, or WebPack. The lazy loading is driven by configuration. Module identifiers are defined by a shared JSON configuration file, and map to their dependencies. These dependencies further map to a physical JavaScript file in our file system. These module IDs are included in our HTML templates along with database-provided initialization data, an application event indicating when to load the module, and – optionally – a DOM selector string which identifies an element for which to attach said event. All dependency requests are de-duplicated, and synchronization of those dependencies with their dependents is managed through a system of JavaScript promises, resolution, and/or rejection. This approach is also employed for loading third party JavaScript where appropriate.

The server-side app for CNBC.com is built on the Zend framework, which adds additional overhead with each call – such as database connections – whether or not it was needed. This was something we wanted to avoid in our minifier app. We decided to use the very lightweight, but high performance, “Phalcon” MVC framework to improve the performance of the server-side code. Phalcon comes as a C-extension, which makes it fast while maintaining very low overhead. The minifier app is hosted on a server that also hosts the static content, allowing us to avoid those network calls to improve the app latency. We also utilize a separate server to provide static content like JavaScript files, so we sought to keep our minifier app on the same server in order to reduce network calls and improve app latency.

CNBC.com desktop pages are loading 30% faster, and mobile pages are loading 60% faster. This means that our users will be able to begin viewing our content sooner.

By Kelly Gyenes and Nichole Francisco

We strive to make our content easily accessible by continuing to expand the number of ways users can watch CNBC.  This week, we're excited to announce users can watch full episodes on the new and improved CNBC Channel on the Roku streaming platform via TV Everywhere.

For the first time ever on Roku, CNBC users have access to select full episodes of the network’s original prime time content, including the all-new “Cleveland Hustles” and hit shows like “The Profit” and “West Texas Investors Club.”  This major update also gives users access to some of CNBC’s key Business Day programming, such as “Mad Money with Jim Cramer,” “Squawk Alley” and “Closing Bell.”  Simply sign in with your cable, satellite, or telco TV provider and enjoy your favorite shows on-demand.

The new CNBC channel features Top Videos, that are hand-picked by our editors providing users with the most relevant content, as well as Make It videos that offer inspiring success stories and invaluable insight into the world of entrepreneurship. This content, along with CNBC news clips and digital originals, are available to all Roku users.

Catch up, binge, whatever you choose, the new CNBC Channel on Roku is here to let you watch TV your way.

By Ari Tiktin

This week, we launched the CNBC channel on Apple News using Apple News Format (ANF), the custom JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) document format for Apple News app content.

This was a fun and challenging project as it required technical changes to extract content elements from our CMS, map, and syndicate them to Apple’s ANF components. We took an MVP approach to this project by offering a subset of CNBC original content and will monitor consumption and feedback to learn what additional changes we should make. There are four news sections: Latest, Investing, Technology and Make It.

By Alex Dao and Roshan Varghese

We recently released a preview of a new homepage design, building on the responsive header and footer components released late last year. The new page, which our team has been working very hard on, delivers a clean, modern and consistent page format across desktop, tablet and mobile devices.

The markets overview module is now front and center, so users can stay up-to-date on the latest market developments and trends. A larger feature story image highlights breaking news, while larger text helps readers quickly scan stories as they scroll or swipe down the page.  

We are currently offering the new homepage design as an “opt-in” experience as we continue building it out, giving users the option to switch over to the new design or keep the current experience. We invite users to check out the new design and share feedback to help us continue our goal of building the best page for our customers.

From the Engineering Team

This redesign is the next step towards a more refined experience on CNBC.com. We pay close attention to the home page’s overall user experience by taking every step possible to improve page performance. With around 40% improvement in document complete time and around 50% improvement in start render time, the page is available to users quicker than ever.

By Jeff Berk

Introducing the new, improved and fully redesigned CNBC App for Android. It’s our biggest Android app update yet and we’re excited to hear what you think.

REDESIGNED & RESPONSIVE

Leveraging Android’s material design principles, our designers worked hard to take the breadth of content and features that our customers love and reimagine them in an experience tailored specifically for the Android audience. 

The new navigation menu allows you to access the data, news and videos you want with fewer taps, and switching between subsections is easier than ever. News articles now feature rich charts and graphics to supplement the text and quote pages offer more data than ever in a cleaner interface. Plus, you get deeper analysis on the securities you’re interested in with our new interactive charts. 

You can still access all your favorite CNBC shows and sign in to your cable or satellite provider to watch CNBC live from the app. This upgrade is designed for devices of all sizes, from small phones to large tablets.

IMPROVED WATCHLISTS

All your Watchlists will automatically be carried over when you upgrade to the new version. Colors and fonts have been improved for readability and the new tablet layout allows for even more data, including Range graphics and Returns for multiple timeframes. It’s easier to manage your Watchlists too – just tap and hold to reorder or rename.

By Raina Mehta and Matt Shade

Last week we rolled out a brand new landing page for our premium subscription product, CNBC PRO.  This new page is an upgrade to our existing section front template and highlights the complete PRO offering to  both  casual browsers and PRO subscribers. In order to deliver our content to our users on all platforms, we have made this page responsive.  This page renders quickly and adjusts itself based on the device being used without removing  valuable content.  We have also included a prominent link for subscriber to manage their newsletter preferences more easily.

Casual browsers can browse headlines of the latest PRO analysis and video segments as well as a look at the other different categories that fall under the CNBC PRO umbrella.  These franchises include PRO Talks, PRO Uncut,  Kensho Stats, and more PRO analysis.  With the new page, we have also streamlined the subscription process for those who may want to purchase directly from this page.

CNBC PRO subscribers will enjoy access to a larger live streaming experience and continue to get the latest CNBC PRO news at CNBC.com/pro. The new page organizes and exposes more layers of CNBC PRO content in small, easily consumable bites and this has made it easy for users to discover more PRO content from the same screen.

Also included in this release is a new video chaptering feature for PRO videos. In our PRO Talks series, top investors reveal their winning strategies during in-depth, unfiltered interviews. PRO Uncut features extended interviews and bonus segments, exclusively for PRO —plus the best CNBC interviews, on demand, in their entirety commercial free. Select PRO videos will display a menu of chapters so that subscribers can jump directly to the segment they want to watch.

By Alex Dao and Roshan Varghese

We’re excited to announce support for Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project, bringing a fast, mobile-optimized reading experience to our digital audience.

Now, when you search news topics on your mobile device, Google will surface relevant CNBC news stories to the top of your search results page; and those stories will load almost instantly. They say time is money, and we’re thrilled at the time savings and improved user experience AMP provides.

This is another step towards our mission of delivering the latest business and financial news to all our users, regardless of how they choose to consume content.

From the Engineering Team

The CNBC engineering team puts in a huge effort ensuring the applications we build perform well, giving the user a great experience. CNBC’s support for Google AMP pages are no different. Using Google’s specifications, our team built the entire article experience from the ground up to provide customers with a faster experience.

These AMP version pages are the fastest we have ever built and, on average, load in less than one second to allow for less waiting and more reading!