David Blecken of Campaign Asia spoke with Bloomberg Media CEO Justin Smith about recent moves that the company has made.
Here is an excerpt:
Your partnership with Yahoo here marks the first time for you to feature Japanese-language video content. Please explain the thinking behind the move.
In a number of national markets that we deem of great commercial importance we’ve ventured into local language media activities. Japan fits the bill of a market that’s large and exciting, where we have a strong core business. The objective is to lean into those advantages and [make use of] our substantial digital video assets. We’re reaching many millions of people in English but if we want to penetrate Japan or other local markets we need to go further into local language. That’s the nature of the deal to take that segment, translate it into Japanese and distribute it on Yahoo Japan’s platform and our own Japanese platform.
You are also working on a live video channel on Twitter. How is that going to work in practice?
We’re very excited about that. The vision is that Twitter is by many measures the largest news media in the world; Bloomberg is close to being the largest news gathering organization. So it’s a marriage of Twitter’s assets with Bloomberg’s assets. Twitter is winning the breaking news game right now, because content is being generated by users. The challenge with that content is it’s not always clear what is real and what is not real. So while it may be first, Twitter has not yet become the place for truly verified content. That’s where Bloomberg’s journalistic operation comes into play. If our journalists can rapidly verify breaking content on Twitter and create packages of content around that, we can marry the speed of Twitter with the accuracy of Bloomberg. We’re building the product now and are expecting to launch in Q4. We’ll start with a focus on the US but we’ll be looking at local language adaptations as well.
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