Using Apple TV as its platform, ABC News announced Tuesday that as of 10 a.m. Tuesday it has launched a 24/7 live streaming news network. With 8 million Apple TV users and America as a whole turning like a slow-moving but unstoppable battleship towards streaming television, this is a brilliant move on the part of ABC News that could pay off huge dividends in the very near-future.
Cable news networks CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News already have a presence of some kind through various streaming platforms like Roku or their own apps, but those only replicate the experience of being online with features like access to video clips.
According to the press release, ABC News isn’t perfectly replicting a cable news network through Apple TV. The foundation already in place, though, sounds close enough that should the experiment work, that would be a fairly easy switch to flip:
As of 10amET this morning, ABC News is officially available on Apple TV.
The network’s Apple TV app offers a slew of features, including video on demand from signature shows like “Good Morning America” and “World News,” multiple livestreams of real-time news events, breaking news and in-depth topical content, original reports from ABC news talent special for Apple TV, local content from ABC News affiliates around the country, and more. The product is available to anyone who owns an Apple TV, with no registration required.
Lost Remote was on hand for a demo of the new product yesterday, which at launch, offers everything from coverage of the current chaos in Iraq, World Cup competition, a “This Week in History” series leveraging ABC’s 50-year-old archives, and multiple livestreams of news events happening domestically and globally.
Broadening ABC News into the Streaming culture — where they will be the only player — is a lot smarter than attempting to launch yet another cable news network. That field is already crowded, and mostly with losers. Al Jazeera America (AJA) is invisible; CNN is dying the slow painful death that corupt network deserves; MSNBC is only managing to look like something other than warmed-over death thanks to CNN and AJA.
Fox News, one of the most popular channels in the entire cable universe, is the only robust cable news network still standing.
Bottom line: this move by ABC News means that the existential threat to cable television just got a whole lot bigger.
Cable and satellite customers aware of the miracle of Streaming, or even a current member of the club through Netflix or Amazon are, I’m convinced, hanging on to their ungodly expensive bundled television packages for four reasons: they like cable and don’t care about the cost; sports; news; other live programming like Jimmy Fallon and “American Idol.”
To get people to cut the cord and move into a world of much-cheaper Streaming (a real blessing in Obama’s failed economy), those last three hurdles have to be overcome by a Netflix, Amazon, or Apple TV.
Monday, Netflix announced a move into Late Night by signing Chelsea Handler.
Today, you can get news live streamed by the not-as-horrible-as-CNN ABC News. And not just on your television, but on any device with access to Apple TV.
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