As of Friday, NBC News fans don’t have to get up from their computers or turn to their local affiliate to watch Tom Brokaw or Tim Russert.
ShadowTV.com (www.ShadowTV.com) has struck a deal with NBC to stream in "near real time"—a 7 minute delay—the network feed of NBC news programming: Nightly News, Meet the Press and Today, though not Dateline. It already had a deal to stream CNBC.
ShadowTV will maintain a two-week archive of the shows and allow subscribers to do keyword searches (via closed captioning), then retrieve and view the relevant video. Users can also stream the entire shows if they want to time shift.
Chief Marketing Officer Bob Sacco said the company is talking with other broadcast and cable networks about similar deals for their news product. Entertainment is not in the cards, he says, but ShadowTV would be open to similar deals for local station newscasts to give them yet another shot at the vaunted second revenue stream. "News content lends itself much more readily to the searchable component versus entertainment," he said.
In essence, the company has done one of those deals already. New York-based ShadowTV will use a WNBC (TV) New York, feed of the shows, local ads and all. No money is changing hands up front, but Sacco says the company will pay NBC something for each sign-up. He said he has had "hundreds" so far today, Nov. 13, the service’s first day of operation.
ShadowTV is charging subscribers $19.95 a month for CNBC and $12.95 a month for the NBC shows. The price difference simply reflects the different volume of programming, said Sacco. The package deal is $29.95.
