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Candi Ruman
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It would certainly be a welcome development for people who represent on-air news talent. The traditional TV networks that pay their clients handsomely are losing audience and revenue. Some agents fear significant downsizing and cost-cutting after the 2024 presidential election in November and nothing would lift their spirits more than having a new, deep-pocketed bidder enter the playing field.
The company has internally discussed the opportunities in news, just as it has for many formats on traditional TV that attract audiences. But when asked about any plans along those lines, a Netflix representative cited a recent interview with Netflix Chief Executive Ted Sarandos in which he said the platform has no plans to pursue breaking news.
One reason is that news is not quite like sports. League media rights fees have escalated in recent years, because live game telecasts are the most reliable way to attract large audiences for appointment viewing. The buyers of those rights have some degree of certainty of what they are getting when they sign the deal. Not so with news.
News is not only unpredictable but expensive to produce and perishable after it goes on the air. Breaking coverage is not exclusive to a single outlet. Live feeds of events are now ubiquitous in the streaming and social media era.
Cable news remains highly profitable, but cord-cutting is slowly depriving them of the subscriber fees that have sustained the businesses for decades. Younger consumers are bypassing traditional TV and not developing the habit of news viewing (although many network news programs are repeated on their favorite platform, YouTube).
They also built stature for their parent companies. Affiliate stations still depend on the national broadcast networks for news to supplement their own local coverage. News provides a brand identity for networks, right down to the logo painted on production trucks that show up for live shoots on a neighborhood corner.
Netflix would be better off licensing programs produced by an existing news organization that already has a news-gathering infrastructure in place, several TV executives said. (Netflix carried original shows from CNN before Warner Bros. Discovery moved them over to its streaming service Max, which now offers a streaming feed of the channel.)
This week, several major TV networks gave their annual elaborate pitches to advertisers in venues across New York City, and never has the showcase been more focused on digital. Usually, streaming and digital media news is mostly confined to the NewFronts, but this year Amazon and Netflix joined the weeklong events with legacy networks like NBCUniversal, Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery, all of which devoted significant stage time to their streaming services.
Netflix also used the upfronts to announce an in-house ad tech platform and that its advertising tier has doubled in size since the start of 2024, reaching 40 million monthly active users. Netflix President of Advertising Amy Reinhard said that 40% of all signups now come from its ads plan.
And on Tuesday, Comcast, parent company of NBCUniversal, announced its own bundle called StreamSaver, which includes Peacock, Netflix, and Apple TV+, and will debut this month at a "deep discount" compared with buying all those subscriptions separately. These announcements come after the February news of the upcoming sports bundle launched by Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox. The idea could be to make it more difficult for viewers to drop subscriptions on a monthly basis by giving them more options for content they want to watch. It also extends the marketing reach of the individual services.
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