Tegna’s BOLD will now be called Daily Blast Live, and it will launch this fall on 36 Tegna stations covering nearly 25% of the country.
The show, the former name of which stood for Broadcast Online Live Daily, will still be produced out of Tegna’s KUSA Denver and will offer seven live feeds a day. Originally, the show had planned to shoot 13 live feeds a day but is scaling back in light of the new plans.
Tegna had been trying to clear the show nationally but could not get the license fees from stations it needed to warrant a national clearance, says Bob Sullivan, senior VP of programming at Tegna. Stations had been willing to clear the show on an all-barter basis, but the economics of that also did not work out because Tegna was having difficulty getting the show fully cleared across the country. Without national coverage, a show cannot attract national advertising, and that makes the economics difficult.
Related: 'Page Six TV' Sold in More Than 90% of U.S.
For this first year, Tegna has decided to go it alone, parting ways with MGM Domestic Television Distribution, which was shopping the show nationally for Tegna. Should Daily Blast Live perform well for Tegna stations in its first year, Tegna hopes to re-team with MGM to try again to get the show distributed nationwide.
Daily Blast Live is close to naming a showrunner, and once that person has been hired, Tegna will hire the show’s hosts. Sullivan says they’ve already got potential talent lined up for chemistry tests, but Tegna wants the showrunner to make final selections.
“Our focus isn’t on entertainment, it’s on what are people talking about, what’s being shared, what’s viral,” said Sullivan. “In this environment in which we all live, all of us get up in the morning looking at our cell phones and go to bed looking at our cell phones. Everyone is already multi-tasking. We’re saying ‘give us 30 minutes, we’ll catch you up on everything you would have done if you were on your device.’”
Daily Blast Live is one of four new news and information shows that will premiere this fall on TV stations. Twentieth is launching Page Six TV and Top 30. Page Six TV, which is produced by Endemol Shine North America, is cleared in more than 90% of the country, while Top 30 is currently cleared in about 70% of the U.S. DailyMailTV is being produced out of New York by Jay McGraw’s Stage 29 Productions and DailyMail.com with CBS Television Distribution distributing and selling the advertising.
