Video views on Twitter have nearly doubled in the past year, the company said during its Digital Content NewFronts event this week.

“Where we first start is, we look at the conversation that’s already happening on the platform. The goal is to actually marry the organic conversation that’s happening on the platform with the content that they’re talking about,” Kay Madati, Global VP & Head of Content Partnerships, says in this interview with Beet.TV. “The marriage of those two things deliver quality content for our audiences and real distribution and engagement.”

NBCU will be sharing live video and clips from properties including NBC News, MSNBC, CNBC and Telemundo, as TechCrunch reports.

Twitter has been working with NBC for many years. The new expansion gives it the opportunity to now work with seven different brands inside the organization.

“Part of what I think the value that we provide for our content partners is that we end up being an extension of their reach,” Madati says. “The ability for a producer like NBC or the Ellen show to be able to reach our engaged audience on our platform.”

Linking content with social conversations and tying in advertisers provides opportunities for all types of publishers, according to Madati. “We’re not trying to dis-intermediate their businesses. We’re here to extend the ability to tie the conversation that’s happening around their content on our platform and allow us all to take that out to market.”

Twitter is “excited to see what we can do with Telemundo around approaching Hispanic conversations on the platform, we’re excited to see what we can do with E Networks, NBC news.”

The deals stem from the core understanding that “eyeballs in this new world of multi-platform, multi-device consumption are going everywhere,” Madati adds.

He believes that one of the best things about Twitter is that communities and movements that use the platform to disseminate their messages are self-organized. “When I think about the violence in Florida with guns and how a couple of students got together, joined our platform and a month, two months later they have millions of people listening to them, that in its essence is what Twitter is fantastic at.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018. The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB. Please see additional videos from the series on this page.

“I saw nobody recreating the MSNBC, CNN, CNBC for people under the age of 60,” Steinberg recalls of his spring 2016 launch of a live news service focusing on business and technology. “It’s a cable network. Instead of living on a cable box it lives on Twitter at three o’clock every day and on Facebook live.”

Cheddar also has its own channel on Sling TV “in the base bundle right next to CNN” and is live on Amazon’s bundles as well, Steinberg explains in an interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. “We’ll have two more of these announced by mid year.”

Steinberg’s bet is that young people who are hooked on on-demand programming like House of Cards and Transparent “would have a need for what I call ambient, non-appointment viewing to see what’s happening. And that’s effectively what Cheddar is. It’s a live news network.”

Last fall, Cheddar went behind a pay wall with a monthly subscription price of $6.99, as The Wall Street Journal reports. It also gets a fee from pay TV bundles “and the ability to monetize the advertising on those bundles as well,” Steinberg says.

Another revenue stream is what he calls “Native 3.0,” wherein advertisers have a presence on the lower third of the screen. For HP, it’s the Keep Reinventing message that’s promoted, while Dunkin Donuts prefers an On The Go theme and Fidelity’s app is used to reference stocks being covered by the correspondents at Cheddar.

“The direct subscription model is our restaurant regulars. They’re people that just want Cheddar and don’t want a bundle,” Steinberg says. “But ideally any skinny bundle out there, I intend for us to be in those and the consumer can buy us that way.”

He counsels against every publisher thinking that live video is where it’s at. “It’s about looking where there is white space,” says Steinberg.

As for so-called fake news, he blames social media networks like Facebook and readers themselves.

“If people just read credible sources, if you went to BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Cheddar even, there would be no fake news,” Steinberg says. “Fake news is a consequence of the fact that people got disoriented from what they were actually reading and this stuff was able to spread.”

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.