Welcome to Multicast News
Original journalism and analysis, with new approaches to storytelling on the convergence of broadcasting, pay television, streaming and similar video platforms.
I will admit something right off the bat: I have never been particularly good at introducing myself or my ideas to others.
That might come across as a surprise — after all, I make my living from assembling the right combinations of words to inform others, and some of my best work involves taking complicated issues and explaining them in a way that helps people understand what is going on without patronizing them.
And, yet, here I am — ready to launch a new product, and trying to figure out the best way to get a few points across: What this is, and why I’m doing it.
In moments like this, my default is to just be extremely direct, which has delivered mixed results in the past. But, since part of this new product is a new approach to storytelling and analysis, let’s give it a shot.
This is Multicast News. A new storytelling platform that focuses on the convergence of many different types of video — from the influence of traditional broadcasting, to the evolution of pay television and the prominence of streaming.
Okay, but don’t you already have a publication like this? Those familiar with my past work likely arrived at Multicast News from The Desk, a digital publication that has covered the media industry for more than a decade — and, over time, has built a reputation of delivering objective, facts-first journalism on the various business and policy matters that intersect across radio, television, broadcasting, satellite, print, social media, connected TV, digital audio, the Internet, advertising, measurement, Big Data and government.
That is a lot.
Multicast News takes some of the foundational elements of The Desk — an approach to facts-first journalism — and builds on it across a few specific categories that involve how consumers interact with video today, and how they’re likely to interact with it tomorrow. And it does so through certain perspectives:
Video stakeholders are battling in the attention economy. There are no platform “wars.” The battle is for wallets, which are inextricably linked to eyeballs and eardrums.
Everyone influences everyone. Television broadcasters want to be like streaming platforms, and are pushing for NextGen TV to be a “thing,” because it gives them connected TV abilities (primarily through advertising) that can help give them a competitive advantage. Likewise, streaming video services are franchising the best practices of traditional broadcasting by incorporating more live events — namely, sports — into their products as they build out their fledgling advertising platforms.
There are no winners or losers. Products and platforms that exist today are rooted in the ideas, goods and services of the past — and, to truly understand where things are headed, it is helpful to know what came before.
To build on that last point — figuring out how to leverage the best ideas of the past to build out the products and services of the future is a really delicate dance. Some companies quickly build out a formula, and they stubbornly stick with it — they miss the signs that things are changing around them, and their complacency leads to future problems. At the same time, some companies move a little too fast and break a few too many things as they experiment with different approaches, some of which don’t pan out.
Journalists who cover the media industry tend to write off the complacent and the overly-eager as “failures” (think Seeso, CNN Plus, Dumont, Quibi or The Tube). And they tend to categorize the biggest companies with proven balance sheets or audience data as “winners” (think YouTube, Netflix, Disney Plus). The reason? Picking winners and condemning losers is the easier story to write, and it’s easier for readers to understand.
But it isn’t the better story.
DuMont couldn’t make it as a fourth network. But Fox did. The lesson between Fox and DuMont is that it wasn’t just enough to be present, you had to be different. Fox arrived at a time when the main three networks were too similar, and unwilling to break from formats that had proven themselves — sitcoms and cop dramas. Fox pushed the needle the other way, with edgy sitcoms and dramas, the likes of which no one had seen before. And the company was the first to write a huge check for live sports — something that is commonplace today.
The Tube was one of the first genre-based digital broadcast networks, offering 24-hour access to contemporary music videos. It came at a time when people were interested in music videos — but they weren’t watching them on traditional TV. Instead, they were moving over to a still-budding platform called YouTube. The Tube didn’t last very long, but the idea of building a digital broadcast network around the idea of a genre still lives on today — Weigel’s MeTV is one of the top five digital networks today, with its line-up of retro sitcoms, dramas and cartoons. Sinclair has posted double-digit ratings growth for what it calls “The Stack” — a group of digital networks that center around broad themes like police procedurals (Charge), science fiction (Comet) and unexpected comedy (Roar, formerly TBD). Scripps-owned Court TV is just that — television about things that happen in court.
Seeso? The lessons from that comedy-focused streaming service live on in Comcast’s Peacock and NBC Universal’s free streaming channels, like SNL Vault. Quibi — well, the company had the right idea. It is fun to think about what might have been if Quibi had given independent content creators big production and marketing budgets, instead of A-list Hollywood celebrities. Still, the fundamental idea of Quibi works — as YouTube, TikTok and Instagram have proven in the years since.
Those are things I could not write on The Desk — that platform contextualizes what has already happened, but it isn’t an appropriate place to think about what could have been. But Multicast News can, and will.
Our perspective at Multicast News is this: The video industry is an ecosystem, one where everyone benefits everyone. There are no “winners” or “losers,” just things that work, and things that don’t. The things that work today, may not in the future. The things that didn’t work yesterday, may work tomorrow. Those elements, and the various players in the industry, keep the entire ecosystem alive, and helps it move forward.
Those are the harder stories to write. But I believe they are the better ones.
Still with me? Great. Here is where we talk business. Multicast News is a subscription-based platform. It costs $7.50 per month to read. And I think that is a fair price for the investment it will take in producing the type of facts-first, solutions-oriented stories that Multicast News aims to deliver. It also allows us to do a few other things:
Work with new storytelling formats. The best format for a particular story may not be a written article — it might be better to hear from an executive or thought leader directly, and a subscription-based platform allows us to deliver stories through video interviews, podcasts and live blogs. We’re going to try them all.
Collaborate with peers. We already do this quite liberally at The Desk, but an advertisement-supported platform that is free to read still prioritizes keeping readers on that platform, which really limits our ability to collaborate with others. A subscription-based platform changes the incentive by enabling us to, without reservation, point our audience to excellent stories and analysis being published by some of our peers, in ways we couldn’t before.
Socialize. Stories on The Desk are, largely, one way — we disabled comments a long time ago, and our content can’t easily be franchised on social platforms without a few modifications. Multicast News is built on Substack, which includes powerful social features, including live blogs, comments and the ability to bring content from other Substack publishers into our platform. Whereas The Desk has found a lot of success building an audience, Substack allows us to build a community, and that is going to benefit both publications in so many ways.
So, that is Multicast News. I’ve taken up enough of your time today. If you’re as excited as I am, please click here to subscribe. If you’re still trying to figure out what Multicast News is, have a look around the website — we’ve backfilled it with some of the best stories published at The Desk over the last few months, which should give you an idea of the direction we’re headed in.
And I say “we” because you are a part of this product as much as I am. If you have a pitch, story idea, a desire to contribute or just want to say hello, you can drop me an email by clicking here. I am also extremely active on LinkedIn, and always happy to connect there.
Here we go!
—Matthew Keys
Publisher, Multicast News