Reuters TV: Not your great-great-great grandfather’s news app from freeamfva's blog

Reuters TV: Not your great-great-great grandfather’s news app

A surprisingly strong effort comes from one of the oldest companies in the news business. Reuters got its start 166 years ago when journalists delivered breaking news reports by carrier pigeon. Now the venerable news agency has embraced 21st Century media.To get more news about moonlive, you can visit official website.

The Reuters TV app launched a few years ago as a subscription service. The company dropped its paywall last year in favor of an ad-supported business model. Some of the advertising appears as company logos on sponsored sections, but most of the ads are traditional thirty or sixty second video spots. Reuters claims that the “premium” ads consume only 5% of viewing time compared to 25% on traditional TV. If even that is too much for you, an in-app subscription will give you an ad-free experience.
The app opens in the Reuters Now section. You choose whether you have time for a ten, fifteen, or thirty-minute news report. This is not a rehash of an earlier newscast. Reuters has more than 2,500 journalists around the world producing video reports every day. The ten minutes of Reuters Now you watch during lunch will not be the same ten minutes you watched in the morning. In effect, it is the same experience you get on a traditional newscast but without a news anchor introducing each video. Reuters promises that the app will evolve over time as its algorithms learn what kind of news you prefer watching.

The menu bar lets you navigate between the Reuters Now, Featured, Live, and Settings sections. Featured is home to Reuters’ on-demand reports. Within each topic you can select specific videos or watch the entire topic as a single stream. Some of the topics are sponsored. Microsoft, for example, sponsors the “Race to the Future” technology section.

Reuters does not produce a live stream with anchors introducing pre-produced reports or interviewing other journalists like you will see on other networks. The Live section instead hosts Reuters coverage of specific events. Most of these are press conferences or public addresses by world leaders. During breaking news events, such as the recent Finsbury Park attack in London, the Live section is where you will find live streams from Reuters journalists on the scene. A badge appears next to the Live bar menu item to notify you when a new stream is available

The Settings section lets you toggle between the US and International versions of the app. Reuters may have bigger plans, but right now this looks like a poor decision. The Live and Featured sections are the same in both versions. The only thing that does change is the content in the Reuters Now feed. It would have been much easier for the user if the app had separate menu bar items for Reuters Now US and Reuters Now World. But that is the only flaw in an otherwise solid app.

The traditional TV networks, both cable and broadcast, are not cord cutter-friendly. Apps from the cable news channels require a cable subscriber code to activate. Fox’s app only streams a webcam from the studios of its talk radio network. ABC promotes the ability to watch four live streams simultaneously, but most of the streams are not related to news. NBC’s news app only provides on demand reports.

CBS is the only traditional network that gets things right. It was the last network to set up a 24×7 news operation, so CBSN went with a digital-first strategy that skipped cable entirely. CBSN is a pure over-the-top news network that is only available on the web, through CBS News mobile apps, and on home streaming devices like the Apple TV.

Of course, you cannot expect an old network like CBS to change completely. The CBS News app has more advertising than any of the others in this review. Two or three ads will run between programs and during programs’ regular commercial breaks.
The app’s live stream autoplays at launch. Anchors introduce news reports, conduct in-studio interviews, and coordinate breaking news coverage just like any other news network. The news you see is not a rehash or what you get on TV. While some of the reports are rebroadcast from the parent network’s news shows, CBSN’s in-house journalists develop their own reports as well.