There’s good reason for TV stations to be focused on free ad-supported television (FAST) channels and other digital platforms — they have become a rapidly growing business.

“In the aggregate, FAST channels have generated $7.3 billion this year and that’s projected to grow to $34 billion in 2027 amidst a rising tide of consumer usage and a rising tide of monetization that’s complementary to local,” said Greg Morrow, GM of ViewNexa by BitCentral.

“The numbers for FAST for news content are off the charts,” said Rick Young, SVP, head of global products, LTN. “The numbers show that half the FAST channels out there are news and half of the viewing time [on those channels] is news. That’s massive. And the more real-time, the more live the content is on those channels, the more demographics that you want will find them, whether they are male or younger.”

While CBS started implementing FAST and digital streaming in 2014, it’s only been within the last three-to-five years that most local station groups have gotten their live-streaming operations off the ground with services such as Fox’s LiveNow, Gray’s Local News Live and CBS’ local news apps. The relative newness of these services means that they are still in experimental and iterative phases.

“We look at the minute-by-minute concurrence when we’re evaluating the success of the streams,” said Sahand Sepehrina, SVP, streaming, CBS News & Stations. “We see that the local audience comes in about one to one half hours earlier than the national audience. Because of that, we have invested heavily in mornings. Now we have nearly 100 hours of live newscasts that are streaming exclusively in the mornings. We’ve seen that drive new audiences so as we’re starting to look at other day parts, we’re getting a lot smarter about what content we invest in.”

Viewers tend to turn to live streaming news when big events are happening. The longer the events go on, the more viewers tune in and stick around, stations are finding.

“We have found that live events really start to pick up an audience after the first hour. When we invested in live events that ran an hour to two hours, the ROI wasn’t nearly as strong as live events that were much longer,” Sepehrina said.

Gray launched its Local News Live product out of Omaha, Neb., in 2020 and then moved it to Washington, D.C. The group quickly realized that it needed to be live and streaming as much as possible and that there’s an appetite for local news coverage, even for people who don’t live in that market.

“We always want to be live. Our research and traffic have shown that engagement was so high when we were live that we really never want to go dark,” said Mike Braun, SVP, digital media, Gray Television.

In addition, viewers are more interested in watching stories from other markets than Gray expected: “It’s not only where you are, it’s where you’ve been and where you are going,” Braun said.

Three live-streaming strategies that BitCentral’s Morrow has found to be successful for local stations are first, to put up weather and traffic cameras that viewers return to often.

Second, stations are seeing success programming “hyperlocal” sports, such as high school, junior college and local second-tier professional leagues.

“The most successful thing we’ve seen on that front is working with the state associations on state championships, which are concentrated tournaments that take place over a period of days in sports like hockey and football,” Morrow said. “These get huge amounts of traffic and there are sponsorship opportunities. We are talking live content with huge tune-in times. People tune in all day long to watch, and it draws audiences outside of the local community.”

Third is programming a host-driven, vlogging style of content, like viewers find on TikTok or YouTube Shorts, which is something the Fox Television Stations have done both on their local-news streams and on their streaming news service, LiveNow. LiveNow has digital journalists, or DJs, who create their own content on the fly, although they are supported by producers.

“They choose the shots, they talk about the content as it’s happening, they are just constantly just managing everything,” said Jeff Zellmer, SVP, digital operations, Fox Television Stations. “They have to have that passion, they have to have that stamina, but they also feel really empowered.”

Allowing talent to stay in constant touch with the audience creates a relationship that keeps viewers coming back.

“This is about having a dialogue with the audience about local issues,” Morrow said. “We saw when a station added that component to their local broadcast, they saw lift, engagement and recurring tune-in.”

That tune-in extends past the typical local news audience of older adults to younger millennial and Gen-Z consumers.

“What we are finding in the digital or FAST world is that the audience is younger and more male-skewing than we might have imagined,” said LTN’s Young.

Another advantage of live streaming is that journalists can spend as much or as little time as they want on certain topics.

“There’s the freedom to talk for 10 minutes if there’s a reason to do that. Journalists are eager to talk about things they didn’t cover in a one-minute package,” Zellmer said. “We are watching the data constantly. We absolutely pay attention to the viewer. We wouldn’t be doing what we are doing if we didn’t see that it was growing over time.”

Fox is not only watching the data closely — it’s allowing viewers to watch closely as well. LiveNow includes a graphic in the left corner that tracks how many people are watching at any given time. “It gives the DJ immediate feedback of whether people are interested in what he or she is doing,” Zellmer said.

It’s all leading to a time in the not-too-distant future, where TV stations’ linear and digital offerings are all just one part of a larger content offering and aren’t considered to be distinct products, Young said.

“It’s no longer a world of traditional versus digital,” he added. “The audience is everywhere. The numbers are equal in terms of engagement and new opportunities on old and new platforms. It’s a ‘yes and’ strategy for everybody now going forward.”

Read more coverage of NewsTECHForum 2023 here.

Watch this session and all the NewsTECHForum 2023 videos here.

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A panel of top streaming executives at major station groups will address these and other crucial questions in a session, Reassessing the Streaming News Content Strategy, at TVNewsCheck’s NewsTECHForum conference on Dec. 12 at the New York Hilton. They’ll discuss how data and technology are facilitating decision making and how deep audiences’ appetites for experimentation run when watching news content on streaming.

Speakers are Mike Braun, SVP, digital media, Gray Television; Greg Morrow, GM of ViewNexa, Bitcentral; Sahand Sepehrnia, SVP, streaming, CBS News & Stations; Rick Young, SVP, head of global products, LTN; and Jeff Zellmer, SVP digital operations, Fox Television Stations. Michael Depp, chief content officer, NewsCheckMedia and editor, TVNewsCheck, will moderate the discussion.

“The sands of news content on streaming are shifting extremely quickly, and what’s behind that is years of data now available since news organizations first launched their streaming channels,” Depp said. “This panel will dive into the data and the insights it has illuminated on consumer behavior when watching streaming news content, including on emerging FAST channels.

“We couldn’t have a deeper bench of experts to crack open this subject,” he said, “and the stakes couldn’t be higher in terms of acquiring the next generation of viewers to keep local news operations alive and thriving.”

NewsTECHForum, now in its 10^th year, is co-located with the Sports Video Group Summit. The conference’s theme for 2023 is Adapting to a Culture of Continuous Crisis.

Featured sessions are:

• Keynote: Democracy, Technology, TV Journalism and the 2024 Election
• Building the Architecture of More Collaborative Content Creation
• Harvesting the Archive for New Content and Opportunities
• Adapting to a Culture of Continuous Crisis
• Agility in News Production
• Chasing AI: Threatening or Enhancing the News?

Register here.

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The jump in numbers earlier this year is largely attributed to COVID-related stay-at-home orders and Black Lives Matter protests, broadcasters said during TVNewsCheck’sTV2025 conference Wednesday in a panel on optimizing multiplatform audiences. The source mix for reaching new viewers is shifting, and keeping those viewers coming back for more requires a variety of approaches, including differentiated content, improved user experiences and loyalty programs, panelists said.

While March, April and May were three of Allen Media Broadcasting/Heartland Media’s highest months on record, they also show a 60% increase in viewer numbers over 2019, said Lisa Bishop, the company’s chief digital officer.

“We saw just over 250% growth in OTT consumption” with Roku leading the lion’s share and a 56% increase in Alexa use, Bishop said. With the strategic use of signup widgets, “newsletter subscriptions ballooned,” although numbers have started to flatten out.

Adam Ostrow, Tegna’s chief digital officer, said Tegna’s traffic is up 79% year to date over 2019 and that growth has been sustained. The source of traffic, he said, has shifted from about 60% coming from social media to about a third each from social media, search engines and direct from Tegna sites and apps.

Tony Katsur, Nexstar Media Group’s SVP, digital strategy, corporate development and operations, said its numbers are up about 72% for 3Q 2020 over 3Q 2019, although audience numbers have been spiking since the prelude to COVID, with additional surges during the Black Lives Matter protests and hurricanes.

At Gray Television, OTT numbers have continued gaining share month over month, said Mike Braun, SVP digital media. While some of that comes down to larger national news, he said, local weather situations drive numbers. “Viewers are finding us on those platforms, and they’re sticking around,” he said.

Getting found is half the battle. Bishop said Allen/Heartland didn’t focus initially on discoverability when it first launched OTT apps in late 2016 and early 2017.

“There was a ton of self discovery going on,” she said. “Our Roku consumption was growing with little to no promotion.”

Viewers were searching for the app or brand specifically, she said. “We are not out on any other distribution platform. That was the only way they could find us, to search for our brand.” Viewers searched because “we were sticking true to what we are. We are local, local news, local weather, local sports. We were delivering something you could only get in a local format.”

Braun said Gray has found it’s important to deliver content differently across different platforms. More than half of Gray’s markets feature an OTT desk that is streaming live news, allowing for simultaneous OTT and linear feeds.

“We’re trying to figure out what type of content is being consumed and … where does audience like to receive it,” Braun said. “We’re starting to find the common denominator that the content does matter on each platform.”

Seeking a way to bring more video “outside what we consider traditional news” to viewers, Gray has invested in Syncbak’s VUit, which is “live, local and free” to the audience, Braun said.

VUit provides a secondary stream of video without taking away from the linear channel, he added. “The audience stays on average more than 20 minutes at a time. We’re excited about where it’s going.”

While content is critical, Katsur said, “it all starts and ends with the user experience.” To that end, Nexstar has redesigned all of its assets to promote low latency and ease of navigation.

Beyond that, Nexstar employs data scientists and a modeling team to help inform the broadcaster about the type of content the communities are looking for, he said.

Tegna’s effort to drive and convert a new audience revolves around loyalty products. Over the last couple of years, Tegna has invested in product technology, including a proprietary content management system that can be used to create custom user experiences, Ostrow said.

One of those is a loyalty newsletter. In the past, automated newsletters had gone out, but now they are curated with “personality,” Ostrow said. “We’ve gone from zero subscribers a couple of years ago to a couple hundred thousand subscribers now.”

Digital executives from Tegna, Gray, Nexstar and Allen Media said they’re holding on to some of their surging COVID and protest audiences by ramping up their digital user experiences, cultivating loyalty programs and offering up plenty…
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Verify, Ostrow added, has been key for grassroots engagement and audience building since Tegna initiated the program in 2016. In short, Verify seeks to combat the problem of misinformation online. Viewers send in stories they’re seeing on social media and ask whether these are true or false, and reporters check into the veracity of the story.

Now, Verify is available through Snapchat Discover, covering topics like the presidential debates, COVID and social justice. The majority of the audience Tegna is reaching through Snapchat Discover is under 24.

“The demographic on there is really different than what we’re reaching on other platforms,” Ostrow said. It’s building “long-term loyalty and affinity for what we’re doing.”

Read more TV2025 coverage here.

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Mike Braun

Mike Braun, SVP of digital media at Gray Television; Frank Friedman, VP consumer engagement, local media, The E.W. Scripps Co.; and Adam Ostrow, chief digital officer at Tegna will join TVNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp for Optimizing Multiplatform Audiences: Turn an Audience Bump into a Long-Term Trend on Oct. 21 at 2 p.m. ET.

“The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic ushered viewers en masse to local TV, including elusive younger audiences,” said TVNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp. “Mike, Frank and Adam will explain how they’ve been working to retain those audiences on numerous platforms and widen local TV’s demographics and reach.”

Frank Friedman

Other TV2025 panels will include Leadership in a Time of Accelerated Change; NextGen TV: Ready for Primetime?; Optimizing Spot TV in a Challenging Economy; Remote Workflows and the Future of TV Station Operations; IP & the Cloud: A Roadmap for Future Revenue Opportunities; and Bolstering the Local and Regional Content Pipeline. Radha Subramanyam, chief research and analytics officer, CBS Corporation and president, CBS Vision, will be the keynote interview.

TVNewsCheck will also present its Station Group of the Year Award to NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations in a ceremony that will include an interview with the group’s president, Valari Staab, on Oct. 21 at 3 p.m. ET.

Adam Ostrow

Attendees will participate in live, daily, two-and-a-half-hour sessions on Zoom Webinar, where they can pose questions to speakers, participate in live audience polling and wrap up the day with half-hour, open-mic Roundtables on key issues. They can also participate in conversations on the TV2025 Chat Channel on NAB Show New York’s virtual conference platform, where attendees can also attend sessions presented by NAB and visit a virtual exhibition.

Register for TV2025: Monetizing the Future here.

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