Slashdot Mirror
'NBC Nightly News' to Be Shown on Internet
Feltope writes "NBC News said Monday that it would begin making its "NBC Nightly News" broadcast available for free on the Internet starting next week.
Past broadcasts will also be archived at the http://www.nightlynews.msnbc.com/ Web site, the network said.
It's not necessarily news on demand, though. The newscast, aired at 6:30 p.m. on many NBC stations on the East Coast, won't be available on the Web until after 10 p.m. ET.
'Many of our viewers tell me they often miss the broadcast because they're not at home or tending to their busy lives and families," anchor Brian Williams said. "This new service reflects the fact that the pace of our lives has changed.'
"
This must be their lame attempt to encourage a younger audience to watch the evening news. Statistics show that the vast majority of people who watch the evening news are in their 50s or older.
They should change the format and get a much younger anchor if they really want to attract a different demographic. Old-fashioned news doesn't become new just because you can watch it on Internet.
Not exactly cutting edge, ;)
in Ireland have been streaming and archiving their news broadcasts and political programs for years now, surely shouldn't the US be ahead of countries like Ireland?
The quality of RTE's streams are not great but their watchable.
"WebTV: bringing the Internet into the shallow end of the gene pool since 1995" - Martin Bishop
I have often wished that more companies would do this, it would be more entertaining to watch the news on my PSP during my commute than to read papers. What format are they offering? How big are the files?
Website
I thought they cancelled "Nightly News". Seriously. Who has time to sit around for half an hour when you get the same information in thirty seconds on the Internet?
I think it is more about information when you want it. Being chained to a timeslot hurts distribution of content. This is the same reason DVDs of television shows are so popular. I want to watch it when I want.
Not that I'm interested in watching a news broadcast on the Internet, but it does hint that the current media conglomerants are finally starting to, however dimly, "get it"
Pessimists.net - as if life wasn't depressing enough.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The BBC even houses video & audio of news from years ago as part of its On This Day archive. The rest of the mass media sector has a LOT to do before they even get near the BBC.
I'm 29, and I think Brian Williams is a fantastic anchor. I also saw him as a guest on The Daily Show twice. The impression I got is that he's incredibly sharp and has a very quick wit. The first time, he went toe to toe with Jon Stewart and they were both hilarious. The second time was much more serious, and I was quite impressed with what Brian had been through covering Hurricane Katrina from inside the Super Dome and around New Orleans. Brian is no talking head. He could be replaced by a Gideon Yago type anchor, but the quality of the coverage would surely suffer. Making their newscasts available online is a good step to increasing their viewer base without pandering to meaningless Hollywood gossip, or other gimmicks.
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
Now, of these groups, which has the right to put it on the web? SheilaVision? KangaMoo would say not, after all, KangaRoo gave it the production money in exchange for exclusive distribution rights throughout the United States. Well, what about Rolf Harris? Maybe not. KangaRoo? ABC will be furious, here they are trying to serve the show to an entire country they were supposed to handle exclusively and KangaRoo's now competing with them. ABC? KangaRoo would be pissed at it, as would WASP. How dare ABC allow people in WASP's coverage area to receive an ABC show without receiving it via WASP!
In practice, all these groups have contracts with each other, and, at the very least, there's going to be some renegotiating in various locations before a show can be put on the web. Even if SheilaVision reads the fine print on the contract and finds it can distribute the show without permission, KangaRoo, ABC, and various other companies will have no further dealing with them.
I'd like to apologize to all the Australians reading the above who are going "Strewth! What the fuck was that?" as they read it. The problem is that "Australians Behaving Carefully" was the first thing that came to mind when I tried to come up with a backronym for ABC. I have no idea why I even tried to do that, and it's probably undermined the point I was trying to make.
2. Bandwidth. Yeah, BitTorrent "solves" that, but it doesn't really, because you proposed location specific ads. You'd probably have to build a media player to get this working that can use shared bandwidth BT style, you couldn't use off-the-shelf technologies.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Just an observation--maybe I'm being master of the obvious here...
I remember back in the 1970s when there were just 3-5 channels that we could get on TV. We were pretty much stuck with whatever came in best with our copper hangers and aluminum foil. NBC, CBS, and ABC all vied for the coveted ratings and they each had captive audiences that had to watch their advertising to see what happened next on their favorite show or movie of the week.
That was the OLD way. Today, we have a consumer base that is wanting to use pick and choose their programming a la carte. Not only that, but we want it more and more through our computers. Some are willing to pay for it instead of dealing with advertising.
We're going through a major shift in media and ABC, CBS, NBC, et. al. are starting to feel it as much as NYTimes and the other on-line newspapers. I really don't think they know exactly what to do so they just repackage instead of re-inventing the way they program and deal with revenue.
The aging advertising revenue model has been completely circumvented by the advent of TiVO and downloadable content. Advertisers pay big bucks for the exposure but now they don't feel they should pay as much if the consumers skip through the commercials or block them altogether.
So now we have an internet version of the same broadcast as NBC jumps on the bandwagon. The thing is, it's just re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The big broadcasters and newspapers are going to have to rethink the way they do business or they're going to have to learn to endure a shrinking marketshare.
AP and Reuters news blurbs read by an overpaid talking head is very 20th century. It will be interesting to see what happens in the next couple of years.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
HAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh, you almost had me there for a second. That's classic. TV/Movie/Music moguls would break into your house at night and forcibly inject advertising via a reverse spinal tap if they could get away with it.
I DVR BBC World News every night on my local PBS station. It is so much better than US cable news. Five minutes into a CNN Headline News block, you're likely to be listening to an in-studio musical guest or hearing about the latest sexual exploits of the famous. With BBC, it's concentrated, international news. Those people know how to use a half-hour!
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
But it's free. Great for people who don't get NBC on their TV (no cable/dsl service in the area, and poor rabbit ears reception).
The National Review Online once mentioned in their blog a "hemline index" of how serious the global situation was. When a serious situation develops, female anchors need to be seen as serious journalists, so their skirts would get longer and more professional. During a slow news cycle, they'd wear shorter skirts to boost ratings. Prior to 9/11, they were practically wearing micro-minis. Male anchors, of course, wear the same stuff no matter what. Unless they're military consultants, in which case every day is biz cas fri.
Look, network news hasn't, and probably can't, produce valuable content. They're simply not specialized enough to compete with the news channels. Back in The Day, they were on top because they were the ONLY option.
But as Hackstraw points out, TV as a medium is designed to deliver EVENTS, not news. Events are things you can write a topical article or blog entry on. News includes a much broader array of content, including trends and highlights of continuing situations. News magazines like the Economist can handle that much better, and are more properly covering news in its entirety. But any single medium is going to be lacking: the immediacy and emotional content of video and audio, the context and depth of text.
The web can deliver.. somewhat. Blogs handle the immediacy, and sites that deliver print news, combined with resources like wikipedia, can handle the context and depth. But there's still no good source for video and audio. Also, the web is still mostly in the business of repackaging other media and delivering them in a multi-modal sort of way.
Fox was a leader on the video front, and now it looks like NBC will be, too. But until there's an easy, pervasive way to get video onto the web from ordinary people, we'll still just be watching inferior TV.
The solution? More hard drive capacity, cheaper, lighter DV cameras, better DV formats, and faster bandwidth. In other words, let moore's law work for a few more years. In the meantime, celebrate. The Web as it stands is delivering the ultimate TV news killer: fast, in-depth, continuously updated TEXT. And we always knew that print journalism was better anyway, didn't we?
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer is outstanding. It's even formatted perfectly: he gives you the "news summary" for about 10 minutes. ... You just can't beat it.
/., google's Sci/Tech is usually out of date. Right now, the top story there is "Two new moons discovered around Pluto". Yup, yesterday's /. news. This is probably true for most technical topics, though, since google uses some news-ranking algorithm, and it takes time for a story's significance to bubble it up to the top of their list.
Sure I can. A common rule of thumb is that most people can read 5-6 times faster than they speak. So in 2 minutes with news.google.com, you can scan just as many summaries. Or in 10 minutes you can scan 5-6 times as many summaries.
Then you can click on the "all N related >>" links that goes with the interesting-looking stories, and look through the list for a number of sites that are likely to report the story from different points of view. This way, you get much more varied information on a story than what's presented by your TV news sources, no matter where in the world you live.
And you run across lots of stories that never appear on any of your local TV channels. Or when a story finally breaks because it can't be ignored any more, you think "Huh? I read about that months ago. Why is it news now?"
Of course, if you read
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.