HOLLYWOOD, Florida \u2013 Anyone\u00a0over the age of 60 probably hasn’t heard of Cheddar TV. Which is entirely the point, according to its Founder & CEO, former BuzzFeed executive Jon Steinberg, whose plans include activation within two more popular TV bundles in the coming months.<\/p>\n
\u201cI saw nobody recreating the MSNBC, CNN, CNBC for people under the age of 60,\u201d Steinberg recalls of his spring 2016 launch of a live news service focusing on business and technology. \u201cIt\u2019s a cable network. Instead of living on a cable box it lives on Twitter at three o\u2019clock every day and on Facebook live.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cheddar also has its own channel on Sling TV \u201cin the base bundle right next to CNN\u201d and is live on Amazon\u2019s bundles as well, Steinberg explains in an interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting<\/a>. \u201cWe\u2019ll have two more of these announced by mid year.\u201d<\/p>\n Steinberg\u2019s bet is that young people who are hooked on on-demand programming like House of Cards and Transparent \u201cwould have a need for what I call ambient, non-appointment viewing to see what\u2019s happening. And that\u2019s effectively what Cheddar is. It\u2019s a live news network.\u201d<\/p>\n Last fall, Cheddar<\/a> went behind a pay wall with a monthly subscription price of $6.99, as The Wall Street Journal reports<\/a>. It also gets a fee from pay TV bundles \u201cand the ability to monetize the advertising on those bundles as well,\u201d Steinberg says.<\/p>\n Another revenue stream is what he calls \u201cNative 3.0,\u201d wherein advertisers have a presence on the lower third of the screen. For HP, it\u2019s the Keep Reinventing message that\u2019s promoted, while Dunkin Donuts prefers an On The Go theme and Fidelity\u2019s app is used to reference stocks being covered by the correspondents at Cheddar.<\/p>\n \u201cThe direct subscription model is our restaurant regulars. They\u2019re people that just want Cheddar and don\u2019t want a bundle,\u201d Steinberg says. \u201cBut ideally any skinny bundle out there, I intend for us to be in those and the consumer can buy us that way.\u201d<\/p>\n He counsels against every publisher thinking that live video is where it\u2019s at. \u201cIt\u2019s about looking where there is white space,\u201d says Steinberg.<\/p>\n As for so-called fake news, he blames social media networks like Facebook and readers themselves.<\/p>\n \u201cIf 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,\u201d Steinberg says. \u201cFake news is a consequence of the fact that people got disoriented from what they were actually reading and this stuff was able to spread.\u201d<\/p>\n