According to Forbes, the free, ad-supported service will knit together partner content with locally produced news, sports and other programming in about 75 markets – including big ones such as Washington, D.C., St. Louis, Cincinnati, Salt Lake City, Austin and Seattle – where Sinclair operates many of its 191 stations, said General Manager Adam Ware.
Site visitors will be able to choose which local station they'd like to supply local news and other content. A team of about 25 STIRR staffers based in its Santa Monica, Calif., headquarters under Editor in Chief Stacie Anthony weave that local content in with other programming on a range of channels.
If a site visitor doesn't have a nearby station to follow, the site will recommend using Sinclair's WJLA-TV Washington affiliate, where it already produces an array of national news stories daily.
Partner channels include business-focused Cheddar, Jukin Media's Fail Army, live gamer-streaming site Mobcrush, Cinedigm's faith-oriented Dove Channel and nerd-culture-focused CONtv, and such Sinclair-connected channels as Comet, The T, Stadium and TBD. Other content providers include World Poker Tour, MovieMix, NASA TV, Outdoor America, Futurism and Gravitas.
The company hopes to have as many as 50 partner channels on board by the end of the year, but which of many potential options ends up on STIRR will keep evolving. The company likely will focus most on sources of additional movies and esports.Other in-house channels include STIRR Movies, STIRR Sports, STIRR Life and STIRR City. The entire service is built on an in-house platform that has been in development by Sinclair's 200-person technology unit in Seattle. Ehrlich said he also anticipates that local stations may have untapped ideas for programming that can be of interest more broadly. STIRR will give the stations a place for those ideas beyond the daily broadcast programming grid.
The two executives acknowledged that STIRR Is also basically a dress rehearsal for what Sinclair hopes to do as next-generation ATSC 3.0 broadcasting technology rolls out over the next couple of years.
ATSC 3.0 will allow over-the-air broadcasters to provide targetable, addressable advertising, interactive programming, a wide range of additional over-the-air networks and other data services, all in ways similar to what's possible online or through traditional cable systems. Sinclair has been a major booster of ATSC 3.0, though Wall Street analysts remain cautious of the technology's transformative potential because of challenges with rollout and consumer adoption.
No comments:
Post a Comment