How To Hit The Target With Streaming & FAST News

With streaming TV still in its infancy, there’s plenty of room for innovation on news publishers’ digital platforms. TVNewsCheck’s NewsTECHForum attendees in New York on Tuesday were privy to a number of examples from industry insiders.

Last year, the Fox streaming news channel LiveNow leveraged user data to add a viewer tally to its broadcast. The rolling figure was a small but critical update, part of LiveNow’s endless efforts to improve its relatively new product, first iterated 10 years ago.

“It obviously is valuable for us to know how many people are watching at any given time,” said Emily Stone, Fox VP of digital content and LiveNow. “For our team, it allows us to make better content decisions. When you see that number go up, you know that people are really interested, and we’re not going to take that content away from them.”

Conversely, if the number goes down, producers will take that as a signal to change things up on the air and find some more compelling content.

Stone also observed that the ticker has an impact on viewers, too.

“When you’re in that live viewing experience … you’re really interested in how many people you’re watching with, and it creates a sense of community,” she said. “That’s a really big deal for LiveNow.”

With streaming TV still in its infancy, there’s plenty of room for innovation on news publishers’ digital platforms. TVNewsCheck’s NewsTechForum attendees in New York on Tuesday were privy to a series of such examples from industry insiders during the panel discussion “Streaming and FAST News 3.0.”

Go Live Or Go Home

Panel moderator Adam Wiener, founder of the streaming and digital media consultancy Continuous Media, called live news “the Holy Grail” for publishers — particularly those serving local markets — and distribution platforms. Delivering live news presents tremendous challenges, but should they be overcome, viewers are almost guaranteed to tune in.

“They literally want to watch things as they happen,” said Stone, referring to news consumers. “Being live for 19 hours a day is a pretty big task. It’s really exciting for our team; our LiveNow team really gets into it. But it does mean constantly trying to find something that people actually are interested in watching or that is really relevant to them. So it is challenging, I’m not going to tell you that it’s not, but it’s also really exciting and fun for them because it’s so different than anything else that’s out there.”

In response to this demand, media technology companies like LTN Global, are answering the call.

“Live is the lifeblood of everything for local news and national news organizations,” said Rick Young, LTN SVP and head of global products. “The last several years at LTN has been all about adding capabilities to manage live in this sort of collapsing world [and] you need technology that manages live to be collapsed down into simple workflows that can be used.”

He said LTN has focused its energy on improving the speed of content delivery and user experiences. The company’s goal is to build products that are “easy to use by morning news folks when there’s nobody technical in the building,” Young said. The company has also developed a global network that is now enabled for “rich capabilities,” he added, “whether it’s graphics, transformations like transcoding and sort of the nuts and bolts stuff, but also the ability to manage lots of different signals in lots of different ways and route them to whatever platform.”

Young added that LTN is connected across FAST platforms, virtual MVPDs, traditional MVPDs, D2 channels and ATSC 3.0 delivery as well.

TVU Networks is another company pitching in with a mindful approach to developing its tech. Socrates Lozano, TVU VP of solutions and global head of partnerships, said: “A lot of times the technology needs to dictate what the content people need to do, but I believe now it’s shifting, and what we’re seeing now is the content strategy should really dictate what the technology strategy ends up being [and] what we end up deploying within a newsroom around the country.”

One example he provided is the need for story versioning, which optimizes story reach across channels. While advantageous, this can be a tremendous time suck and also beat down a reporter who’s reworked a story several times for channel customization.

“One of the things that we’re trying to do is build tools that are fun, that assist the content creators, so that we can help them create different versions of the story so that they’re focused on contextualizing it for their viewers,” said Lozano.

“It also speeds it up,” Wiener noted.

How Live Streaming News Gets Made

In March 2023, Gray shifted its streaming news operations from Omaha, Neb., to the company’s Washington, D.C., bureau, which is also home to the company’s national investigative unit. According to Lisa Allen, VP and GM of Washington operations for Gray, the move was “a huge boost” for the company’s streaming news aggregator Local News Live.

“It just made sense for all the national brands, be it streaming or broadcast, to be together under one roof,” she said. “Local News Live works with all of Gray’s 113 markets to produce content throughout the week, whether it’s breaking news; a dynamic, powerful investigative story; or just a really good story from a market that has national appeal … We’re just another entity that they interact with to give us content.”

Because Gray’s apps, whether they’re news- or CTV-related, are made in-house, Allen said Local News Live producers can track news as it happens across the company’s stations. The unit has integrated itself into Gray’s newsrooms, and outgoing email communiques about goings on have become part of regular workflows. Local News Live staffers also comb Gray market content, “the old-fashioned way,” Allen said, and the effort runs the other way, too, with local teams pitching the nationals.

“There’s also a program that the Gray technology team has built where we can search all the rundowns in the company for whatever we want,” Allen also revealed. “So that’s another benefit, another tool that we use, and we just make sure that the story has national appeal, and our producers and our editorial team is in charge of converting that story to the national brand of Local News Live.”

It’s one thing to create the news, but it’s another to ensure it’s being consumed. Wiener acknowledged the vital role a user-friendly channel guide can play and asked Angie Grande, senior director of streaming news channels at NBCUniversal Local, about what her organization has done to enhance its related user experience. She said the group has established Slack channels between all of their platforms to help in this regard.

“When news is breaking,” she said, “and we’re going to go up live on one of our 15 channels, we can alert them, and they can help merchandise us, which a lot of us know means they put us in more prominent positions on their guide, so that people can click in and immediately find us,” Grande explained. “Some platforms have the ability to make quick moves, some are still looking for the technology to evolve themselves, to be able to be a little quicker.”

Another strategy Grande’s group proudly employs is tied to significant live events on the calendar.

“We go to the platforms and we pitch them and say: ‘Hey, you know this city is going to have this event, or for election night, all these stations are going to be doing this during these hours,” Grande said. “We then work with our brand directors at all the stations and have special channel tiles made that we then send to the platforms and they can switch all of our generic station channel tiles to a special look that can help consumers know exactly what they’re going to get when they click in, and we’ve seen a lot of success with that.”

What’s In Store From AI?

Among the most vital and sought after news that publishers offer consumers is everything weather. As Justin Tuggle, director of sales and strategic solutions at The Weather Company put it, “News is informational, weather is personal.”

That’s a major reason why The Weather Company has leveraged AI to “help create more weather content than is humanly possible,” Tuggle said, “specifically for CTV.” When a publisher creates more weather content, they can create a “hyper-local experience,” Tuggle said, and a “personalized experience.”

He envisions FAST channels devoted to weather news connected to specific interests, such as golfing, so their enthusiasts get forecasts that directly impact their activity choices. Tuggle also said The Weather Company is working on a feature that replaces slate with weather, creating a better viewing experience, with another benefit.

“I come from the station side, from the sales side, and what we always had was our weather sponsorships were always sold out,” said Tuggle. “Everyone’s looking for more weather inventory that their sales teams can go sell, and so if you’re creating more weather content to sell, there’s more revenue opportunities.”

AI-generated slate weather forecasts sound close, but there’s another potential use for the technology people are always curious about. Stone said she’s frequently asked, “When are you going to have an AI host on your channel?”

The answer?

“We’ve already had one,” she said.

LiveNow presented a broadcast with an AI anchor about a year and a half ago during overnight hours across a weekend. The anchor’s name was “Liv,” and Stone described her as “a great employee, but she was temporary.”

LiveNow hasn’t brought Liv back, Stone said, because “the immediacy of this channel and the constant change in content” requires its producers to “have something that generates itself immediately and can do live.”

Stone added, “At least when we tried it, the technology just was not ready for us to do that — yet.”

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly attributed a quote about building tools to aid content creators to Angie Grande, senior director of streaming news channels at NBCUniversal Local. It was said by Socrates Lozano, TVU VP of solutions and global head of partnerships.