Nieman Foundation at Harvard
If you’re glued to Twitter 24 hours a day, 7 days a week anyway, Bloomberg will soon be there for you at all hours of the day, every day of the week.
Twitter and Bloomberg have partnered to create a 24-hour streaming news service, currently unnamed and launching sometime in the fall, according to The Wall Street Journal. More details will be announced today during Monday’s NewFronts, an Interactive Advertising Bureau-organized extravaganza where digital media companies pitch themselves to advertisers. (Bloomberg is up at 3 p.m.)
Bloomberg launching 24hr Twitter-only news channel – fascinating, kind of inexplicable, but I'm here for it https://t.co/DNQ18B85vn
— Tom Gara (@tomgara) May 1, 2017
Bloomberg, which already has 24-hour programming on plenty of other platforms from YouTube to Roku, will be producing original material for Twitter exclusively, and will also apparently incorporate video taken by Twitter users. From the Journal:
The channel, which has yet to be named and is expected to begin operating this fall, won’t simply rebroadcast footage from Bloomberg’s existing television operation, but will be made up of live news reporting from the news outlet’s bureaus around the world, as well as a curated and verified mix of video posted on Twitter by the social-media platform’s users.
@SRuhle @Bloomberg @YouTube @Twitter apparently this will be a completely different channel — not just biz news — broader focus
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) May 1, 2017
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, though the streaming service will be ad-supported. (I asked a spokesperson to clarify and was told to wait for the 3 p.m. presentations.)
In its first quarter earnings last week, Twitter reported some much-needed good news for the company on that front, saying that its “total ad engagement grew 139 percent year-on-year in the first quarter” (while the average cost per engagement “fell 63 percent year-on-year”). It also claimed to have reached more than 45 million unique viewers for more than 800 hours of live video through its various content partnerships, such as with the NFL for its Thursday night games (though that meaty partnership has since been snatched up by Amazon).
If this goes well for them, how long until Bloomberg buys Twitter? https://t.co/qfqwIVLpU0
— Zach Kahn (@zkahn) May 1, 2017
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