If past predicts future, we can count on the streamers to produce more scoops than an ice cream factory, but also to reshape the way news is covered, especially political news.
The newly opened gates are also likely to attract new overtly political news operations akin to Fox News Channel and One America News. There will also be more competition now that streamers aren’t bound by limited TV licenses or costly negotiations with Comcast or Charter for placement on the cable dial. “Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.” “We just have more inventory,” says CBS News Co-President Neeraj Khemlani, going on to crow about CBS’ political coverage expertise and breaking the Virginia Thomas text story. Some outlets will still chase the largest possible audience, as the broadcasters always have, but the streamers could potentially serve niche news interests - producing video news as varied as a pre-Internet newsstand. “The majority of our audience is under the age of 45,” says Janelle Rodriguez, the NBC News executive in charge of streaming, counter to the idea that news is a gray and wrinkled program choice. Long-gestating cultural trends and maturing technology have converged to streaming’s advantage, shifting TV news’ future away from the airwaves and cable, where it has lived for decades.
Their overwhelming preference was for entertainment, but the news networks sensed both momentum and a technological advantage in serving the streaming audience. Last year, for the first time, viewers spent more time streaming programming than they did watching broadcast TV, marking a shift in viewer preference. The news networks aren’t chasing a chimera. News underdogs like Cheddar, Al Jazeera, Bloomberg, Newsmax, Newsy and others have likewise planted their flags in the streaming frontier - and given the medium’s relatively low barriers to entry, new players can be expected to join the fray. CBS News, which has an aggressive local streaming news component to its strategy, says it will beam 45,000 hours of local weather and news in 2022. NBC News Now produces 10 hours of programming a day and boasts that viewers stream 31 million hours of content a month. Fox has attracted about 1.5 million subscribers for its Fox Nation streaming app. And some have been rewarded already for their investment. The news divisions hired hundreds of staffers and invested hundreds of millions of dollars in streaming news operations. Streaming executives interviewed for this story avoid over-hyping the medium but see it as TV news’ future. But CNN+’s failure obscures the enthusiasm the other major news networks - NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox - have for the streaming medium.