Former police officer Aaron Dean is accused of shooting Atatiana Jefferson at her home in Fort Worth, Texas, in 2019
Streaming news has established itself as a formidable competitor for traditional broadcast news. Its benefits include timely delivery, ubiquity, customization, and archive capabilities. These benefits have helped attract both niche and mass audiences.
Streaming also sets the stage for new overtly political news operations. The Fox News Channel and MSNBC are two examples.
Newsy, Cheddar, and Bloomberg have also planted their flags in the streaming frontier. These newcomers are also promoting cable-quality news. They would like to share in the $3 billion profit that Fox, CNN, and MSNBC are expected to make by 2020.
CBS News has also entered the news streaming business. The network plans to beam 45,000 hours of local news to its subscribers by 2022. This follows the retirement of long-serving chief Kevin Schmoll.
A CBS news analyst recently predicted that viewers could spend more time watching streaming programs than they would on traditional broadcast. If they did, it would be the equivalent of siloing results that cable TV achieved.
It’s not surprising that news networks were eager to enter the streaming game. They had sensed the momentum in their audience. In fact, the major news networks invested hundreds of millions of dollars in streaming operations.
One of the major streaming networks, NBC News Now, has already produced 31 million hours of programming a month. Its audience skews towards younger audiences. Its programming is more focused on stories, and its episodes are twice as long as regular nightly news programs.
