A little more than a year ago, WRAL, the Raleigh, N.C., NBC affiliate owned by the Capitol Broadcasting Co., jumped on the streaming bandwagon and launched WRAL News+, a channel available through various digital platforms. But unlike a number of other TV news groups, leaders at WRAL were not content with simply tossing productions built for their linear channel onto the station’s digital offering.
“We went out and hired a group of people,” says Joel Davis, WRAL VP-GM, including anchors and an EP focused solely on WRAL News+ content. “We do weather every 10 minutes, updates at the top and bottom of the hour with the anchors, and then have some of the best-of content scattered in between there,” Davis continues, “but it’s a standalone news product.”
Davis and his colleagues believed it would take three years for WRAL News+ to break even. It took three weeks.
“It saw such usage on streaming, and then we eventually started to think, ‘Well, geez, how would this play on linear?’” Davis says.
Around the same time as the WRAL News+ launch, Capitol had purchased low-power WNGT-CD in the market. Without any other immediate use for it, the WRAL decision makers figured they might as well beam the streaming content from WRAL News+ to TVs tuning into it.