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Last year, the Fox streaming news channel LiveNow leveraged user data to add a viewer tally to its broadcast. The rolling figure was a small but critical update, part of LiveNow’s endless efforts to improve its relatively new product, first iterated 10 years ago.
“It obviously is valuable for us to know how many people are watching at any given time,” said Emily Stone, Fox VP of digital content and LiveNow. “For our team, it allows us to make better content decisions. When you see that number go up, you know that people are really interested, and we’re not going to take that content away from them.”
Conversely, if the number goes down, producers will take that as a signal to change things up on the air and find some more compelling content.
Stone also observed that the ticker has an impact on viewers, too.
“When you’re in that live viewing experience … you’re really interested in how many people you’re watching with, and it creates a sense of community,” she said. “That’s a really big deal for LiveNow.”
With streaming TV still in its infancy, there’s plenty of room for innovation on news publishers’ digital platforms. TVNewsCheck’s NewsTechForum attendees in New York on Tuesday were privy to a series of such examples from industry insiders during the panel discussion “Streaming and FAST News 3.0.”
Go Live Or Go Home
Panel moderator Adam Wiener, founder of the streaming and digital media consultancy Continuous Media, called live news “the Holy Grail” for publishers — particularly those serving