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'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.'
"
Guess the addiction to the TV is slowly being replaced by addiction to the internet?
Why watch a whole news show when you can simply fire up the 'ol internets and check CNN?
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.
Using the Internet to watch a network newscast is like going to a newsstand and getting USA Today.
"This is the next logical step for 'Nightly' and NBC News," said Capus. "As the leader on the broadcast side, and with our partnership in the leading online news and information site, MSNBC.com, it couldn't be a better fit. We know that just as fast as technology is changing, people's lives are changing too, and they expect our newscasts to keep up with those changes. With this announcement we are doing just that."
It was the next logical step four years ago. It should have been done two years before that. We're supposed to just nod our heads and say, "oh, right, technology has finally caught up!" Blah. ASF movies were floating around in the 200MB range (2+ hours) on IRC in the late 1990s. Why couldn't news broadcasts be put out (~45 mins) in the same format for less than 100MB?
I don't care at all personally as I like to get my news in a readable format from multiple sources on multiple continents but I just don't see why it couldn't have been done 2 to 5 years ago.
Little too late IMHO.
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
Why the delay? Broadcast it, encode it, and make it available. I should be able to see the 6p broadcast news online at 7p. If I wanted to wait until 10p, I'd watch the 10p broadcast news...
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
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
If you strip out the commercials you can watch it in under 20 minutes too.
Hardly anybody is watching it for free over their air or cable TV. Why should this get anyone else to watch it? Their ratings keep sliding into a black hole for good reasons...
Good reasons eh? And what's better? 24 hour non-stop politicized news coverage? The polarized blogsphere?
Network news is dying a slow death for a number of reasons that may or may not be correctable -- but I don't see any reason to root for it's demise. You can't seriously tell me that we are better off for having CNN/Fox News/et. all. I'm starting to agree with Jon Stewart where those guys are concerned.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The german Tagesschau, the most popular daily newsshow offers this service for quite a while now. You can see the shows live or from the archive.
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?
"get a much younger anchor"
You know, the sad truth is that you are exactly right. Fox news has gone that route, and a significant portion of the email they receive on the "Fox and Friends" morning show has to do with whether or not the young anchorwoman is wearing a skirt. Now half of the anchors on CNN Headline news look like teenagers.
Aargh.
All I want is content, and I know there are still places to find it, but sometimes I feel that soon all we'll be able to get from the $media is Ken and Barbie spoon-feeding us pablum.
Using plain ol' text since 1968
Before I leave, I should mention that I have my doubts as to whether browser applications like Firefox and Konqueror will work out of the box.
After all, even for Google, which is seen to support open standards and Linux, had to be asked to provide support to Firefox and Konqueror when it came to Google Maps. For companies like Yahoo, their Launchcast service is not available for folks using Linux and Firefox or Konqueror. This is after more than 5 years of [Launchcast's availability. These are sad times indeed. I hope I am wrong.
I get all my news from the internet. If I'm looking for news, though, I'm not going to the networks' sites. If I wanted that, I'd just turn on the TV. I already have my sources for internet news, and I'm really not interested in this half-assed attempt to win me over. People still think they can slap their old way of doing things up on the internet, and it will be magically fresh and innovative. Not so much.
By "hardly anybody," do you mean NBC's 9,200,000 viewers ? Or the 24,000,000 combined that watch national evening news on the major networks?
Neither does this. This is the NBC National News. Generally, in most locales, you have 1/2 hour of local news starting before the national news. After the local news program, you have the National News for another 1/2 hour. That's what is being offered for download -- the national news.
BBC News has allowed you to watch the news and various events live or archived on their site for some time now. Unlike CNN (via shitty Real OnePass) it's free too.
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.
While I realize I am in the minority here, this is nice to hear for those of us without televisions at home. Watching the news is one thing I miss, even if I may disagree w/some of the politics... Sure, I can always read the news on the web, but the radio/TV form of media does let accomplish more at once (since you aren't chained to a desk).
...the networks still have distribution agreements with local affiliates.
The networks would LOVE to be able to distribute their content on their own; MSNBC is an example of doing just that, and eventually the day will come when the local stations have to pay for the network feed (some CBS stations already pay for network).
Television is changing, but I don't think it's been changing for the better. The internet doesn't add much to the change, just quickens the pace. The programming is still crap.
you are correct, sir. every time i somehow watch part of a news program i feel like killing myself. the only times i ever DO see it, are: 1) when i'm back home and my 'rents put it on, or 2) when there is something crazy going on (i.e. katrina) the reasons are simple. why would anyone want to watch idiots talk for a few seconds about things they have no knowledge about (except what's on their cue card) when they can read what specialists all over the internet have to say? news on tv makes money by scaring the "oprah crowd" -- that's what i call people who do or don't watch oprah, but seem to fall into that completely-sucked-into-their-tv group of people that plagues the states. news on the internet makes money by making real content available to the smaller audiences that care about it. don't get me wrong, there is loads of crap news online, but i can check /. or digg to get tech news here and i know i'm going to get tech news. i don't want some botox-laden cokehead speaking in perfect florida diction (even rolling her R's for the occasional spanish phrase) about ipods and using the wrong terminology.
-- lol pwned
Second, a web-page has the same built-in layout as a newspaper (ooooh! that looks interesting - click), not the serial presentation of TV; plus the ability to switch from text to film-clips, active graphics, sound, etc.
So why do I want to watch network news over the Internet?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Pretty much, since that leaves about 300,000,000 not watching any of them.
There are 3 major arguments:
Actually, your a bit behind the times.
http://www.nakednews.com/
liqbase
To use MSN Video, you need to install free software
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-- Boycott Shell
Canada's CTV News has made their complete daily broadcast available on the web for well over a year.
If it has advertising on it then it is not free, it is just the tv stations finally airing a broadcast in a different format.
I wish they did this with every tv show. They could even charge their advertisers more money for ads. Instead of saying "Hey we think the people who watch Smallville will like commercials about Axe Deoderant, we can make a potential viewer register, ask him what kind of advertising he would like and then direct advertise for him. Pay up more money"...this I wouldn't mind so then I could get commercials I want (like I really want to see tampon commercials).
I wish they would make it more direct, i mean four hours is a lot. I could understand half hour, at most.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Sweet! Now it's only a matter of time before they release the entire series on DVD. Me I can't wait to get Season One -- David Brinkley, John Chancellor, the best the absolute best.
Not to mention the epic storylines that year: Vietnam, Apollo 13, the Beatles breaking up (holy crap! who saw that coming?), the Kent State tie-in. Must-see classics, every ep. Frankly the shows gone down the past couple of years, but can you blame them? The set the bar too high, nobody can write like that anymore.
-- Watch the REAL Jon Katz.
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
All I want is content...
Unfortunately, I know of no news program on television that really displays such a thing. Sure, there may be some real news here or there, but overall, content is not the important thing here. I personally consider loading CNN's webpage as amusement. I look at it just to know what other people see and think is "news". The current big headline is about a flu pandemic. Ohhhh, scary. If yesterday wasn't halloween, a headline like this might be more effective.
Regarding the age of the anchor people, that is a tough one. Younger people do not consider the words of older people as really authoritative. This is a trend that has been going on for about 30 years plus or minus. My guess is that technology (gadgets) has everything to do with it.
Why should a younger person trust another when they can't even record a program on their VCR?
Thats an older example, but still relevant. I heard of a study from 12+ years ago, that said that the lower your education the more likely you are to be able to program your VCR. The highschool dropout was the most likely, and the PhD was the least likely.
Back to news. I believe that there is a difference between news and events. Events are simply things that happen, like me typing this on a keyboard. News is current information about events that is relevant to someone. By having that new information, someone can think about and/or do something different vs not having that information.
At least where I live, the local news almost always has the "random death and crime" segment. Where they go locally and across the nation and world talking about how somebody might have killed somebody, robbed them, died in a car pileup, or something similar.
Those my friends are purely events, not news. There is nothing anybody can do with that information. Especially when one considers that crime is at an all time low at this time in the US. In the grand picture, those events are even less significant than they could have been, but its still a favorite segment of the televised news.
I'm not sure how to end this rant, so I'll keep rambling. I also read during the 2004 election, that the people that were most informed about the election were people that got their news from places like the "Daily Show". Its a comedy/parody of news with a very sarcastic slant, but if people are getting more relevant news from a source that is not even news when compared to the real news -- to me that says volumes.
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...
Younger people do not consider the words of older people as really authoritative. This is a trend that has been going on for about 30 years plus or minus.
Yes it's called the "You got us into this fucking mess, why should I listen to you?" theory.
Maybe this is a bad example, but I gauge my understanding of current events, in one way, by my ability to get Daily Show jokes. I skim Google News at least a few times a day, clicking through to any stories of interest or import, and am an avid reader of The Economist. I also have been known to read CNN news on my cell phone. Am I missing something from not watching traditional TV news?
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
Stage 2) Use Bittorrent to distribute content
Stage 3) Profit!!
This way they can sell ads, and be flexible for all of us people with odd schedules.
Try Jim Lehrer's News Hour. It's usually a few lengthly segments with really good focus. These are also available online: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/video/ Jeff
Check out PBS's offerings. There are a number of programs that tend to be quite informative, and less infotainment. Granted, some aren't strictly news in the "Film at eleven" sense of the term, but then again, if you want any kind of depth you are pretty much going to have to wait a little while.
I also read during the 2004 election, that the people that were most informed about the election were people that got their news from places like the "Daily Show"
Better than that, The Daily Show won a Peabody award. Twice. I agree, that is pretty sad statement on contemporary journalism when a self-described "fake news show" wins over real news shows.
-Ted
-=-=- Quantum physics - the dreams stuff are made of.
Eh, another sign of the MS-NBC partnership, I suppose.
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.
It's not real news. NBC Nightly News is a newslike substitute in much the same way that textured vegetable protein is a meatlike substitute. Fox News on the other hand is like dog vomit and it's viewers are like the dog who eats it. CBS News went downhill after Walter Cronkite left. ABC News was only worth watching late at night with Ted Koppel. You could stare at him for hours wondering whether or not that was his real hair.
And CNN has the hottest infobabes. Who cares if whether its real news or not? I wish CNN would bring Rudi Bakhtiar back. At least they still have Robin Meade, Soledad O'Brien, Erica Hill, Sophie Choi, Susan Hendricks, and Arthel Neville, to name a few. CNN definitely got the better end of the deal when they traded Greta van Susteran for Paula Zahn.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"