March 13, 2018
Bloomberg Media hosted the panel, “Building the Post-Cable Television Network” at SXSW Interactive this afternoon, to address themes around the transformation of the TV and video news industry and how platforms like Twitter are working with media companies as viewership habits continue to change.
Speaking to a room of 300 people, panelists M. Scott Havens, Global Head of Digital, Bloomberg Media; Kay Madati, Global Head of Content Partnerships, Twitter; Christy Tanner, SVP and General Manager, CBS News Digital; and Chris Batty, Founder and President of VMG, discussed topics that are top-of-mind at their organizations including cord-cutting implications, how measurement will change for news channels, the future of the 30-second ad spot and how the industry needs to prepare as consumers continue to drop cable TV.
Key highlights from the panel below.
Havens on whether Facebook should pay publishers:
“Yes, whether it’s a carriage fee or royalty or tax, I don’t care what it is. The money made on Google and Facebook in particular is around premium content, not on shared video views on these platforms or anything like that. If we want to fundamentally protect journalism and encourage innovation, I think the economic pie would be better served split differently…Should the NYT, WSJ, Bloomberg, CBS be compensated for the value they bring to these platforms? 100%.”
Havens on TicToc by Bloomberg:
“We saw an opportunity a year ago through our partnership with Twitter to create something new and different. With the rise of fake news, bots and hyper-partisanship that has shaken the world a bit, we felt there was an opportunity to bring trust, objectivity and credibility to the platform. We see Twitter as the largest real time news network. TicToc, which is about about 2 months old, is built as a native customized news experience for Twitter and for how you use Twitter, broken up into quick bites. It’s live news — not all the time, but when you need it. It should be there when something is happening in the world and we are staffing up to support it so that it’s truly 24/7 with teams in London, Hong Kong, and New York to start. It’s off to a good start with 7 launch sponsors and 155K followers as of today. It’s just the beginning for the product. It’s both a great business opportunity and a mission driven opporutnity for the next generation of consumers.”
Havens on what content is working on TicToc:
“We’ve also found that people love breaking news and breaking live events. We’ve done State of the Union, Space X launches etc, and we can see really high concurrency. As we spin up the global infrastructure to do it around the clock and as Twitter’s product evolves, we’d like to do 5-6 live events at the same time in places like China, Europe and South America.”
Kay on Twitter’s partnership with Bloomberg:
“It’s timely. The timeless of the content that is happening around the world and when you have that, it’s like a fire – we’ve seen massive consumption. 750,000 daily viewers and 1M daily views – it’s working. TicToc marries Bloomberg’s content and expertise with Twitter’s speed.”
Havens on platform and publisher relationships:
“The publisher and platform relationship can work when talking about it and investing in it together. Most don’t work particularly well, but this works well. It requires effort and openness to work together and to tackle these things otherwise it becomes an experiment and not scalable.”
