Newstag – the award-winning Stockholm-based video news service – has announced at MIPCOM plans to launch a business-to-business news service designed to offer online publishers and telecommunications (TELCOS) companies bespoke, broadcast-quality ready-to-air news programmes.
‘Newsreel’ will provide tailored news bulletins using professionally-produced video content that is curated by audiences. Using big data and machine learning, the result will be to provide top quality news programmes targeted to reflect the interests of viewers in any geographic market or demography.
Newstag co-founder Henrik Eklund, explains: “When you let the crowd curate the news agenda, audiences around the world build a picture of themselves through what they choose to watch and share. By creating packages that reflect these concerns and interests, we put individuals in control of the news they consume. This will create more democratic news programming that has greater relevance for viewers, both on a global and local level.”
Content providers, whether they are online publishers or TELCOS, are set to benefit as much as consumers from this service as the production cost is a fraction of the traditional cost of producing news programming, without any loss of quality or relevance. This will provide a sustainable solution to providers who are looking for news content but unable to fund their own news operation, while also giving existing newsrooms the opportunity to allocate resources to professional journalism, instead of overheads.
The ground-breaking model – which is a world first – is drawn from the Newstag platform, a ‘mobile-first’ news service aimed at consumers that enables users to create their own personalised TV channel or ‘tagtsream’ in seconds, organising, consuming and sharing stories that they find relevant or interesting among their social networks using the latest web and mobile technologies. All the content is drawn from some of the world’s leading professional news producers such as AP, AFP and Bloomberg.
Newstag co-founder Camilla Dahlin-Andersson added: “Audiences want to engage with and understand the world they live in and to provide a balance to videos of cats on skateboards, we want to empower people to engage and make a real difference. Newstag isn’t a shallow ‘light agenda’ platform. Users can explore breaking news topics in greater depth than ever before through personalisable tags, while news from multiple sources gives everyone the opportunity to consume stories from different angles, creating a more nuanced picture of the world.”
The platform’s innovative approach to content distribution has already been globally recognised. It was shortlisted at this year’s Content Innovation Awards hosted by Digital TV Europe and TBI at MIPCOM and is nominated for a TVB Award recognising innovation and outstanding technical achievement later this month. Earlier this year, Newstag was a start-up of the year finalist at the MEG-awards and selected as one the companies best positioned for growth in Asia at Asia Beat. In 2015 Newstag received a bronze award for ‘Best News Website’ at the Asian Digital Media Awards jointly presented by WAN-IFRA and Google. The platform was also selected as a top international start-up by Mobile World Capital Barcelona in a contest to recognise the most innovative use of mobile technology in business and won ‘Best Start-up’ at TVB Europe Awards.
(Source: Newstag press release)