Video: Cheddar Reinvents Live News for Post-Cable Era
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Read the complete transcript of this clip:
Melissa Rosenthal: So, we're living in a post-cable era. What does that mean? By all measures, it's a cataclysm. Young people are not watching TV. There are options out there that are $24-40 a month with YouTube TV and Hulu, and it just doesn't make sense for young people to be watching television. They're not spending $190 a month for 300 channels, of which there are three that they're actually watching.
And what does that mean? That means things are shifting in a major way. And when it comes to the subset of TV, and we're looking at business news, the competitors are old and stuffy.
And even a deeper look into that, the incumbent networks are reaching old, retired people. We took a look at that, and our big bet was that young people would want to be educated and informed about what's happening in the business world and in technology and media, and the conventional wisdom is that they wouldn't, there was just no interest there.
But when we took a look at the numbers, these people are eventually going to die, and they're not reaching new people, and we thought that there was just a huge opportunity to reprogram and reboot business news for a younger demographic. We've reinvented business news and news for the modern audience across three channels.
So Cheddar proper, which is our business news network, we reach 25- to 35-year-olds in a way where we're talking to them about what's changing in the financial markets, how to make different purchasing decisions, the entrepreneurs who are the disruptors of today and tomorrow, and we're talking to them in a way where we're educating and informing them, but not talking down to them. And that was sort of our big bet.
And then we looked at the ecosystem and we thought, you know, why can't CNN be disrupted? It shouldn't be scary to tune into the news every single day and watch just the horrors and atrocities that are going on. News can be uplifting. It can educate and inform you in a way that isn't terrifying.
And there's no need to cover Barbara Bush's funeral for seven hours. We just felt like there was a better way to do it.
So we wanted to program a news channel in which there was a wheel-tight format of live, trending, headline news, health, weather, and then moose on the loose. Everyone likes a moose on the loose, or a baby penguin and a puffin having a baby. This is local news with a national news sentiment.
We believe that all of this could be programmed to reboot the news format. So when you tune in for 15 minutes, you're going to get everything that you need to know about what's going on in the world, and then you can move on with your day. You don't need to watch this for five hours.
And that was kind of the difference in methodology between a CNN and a Cheddar News. Cheddar News, we're okay with you tuning in and out. CNN, they need to keep you captured for five or six hours. But we just felt like that wasn't the future of the way that young people are going to be wanting to consume news.
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