David Pierce of Wired writes about Cheddar, a business news channel aimed at millennials that airs its content via Twitter and other online systems.
Pierce writes, “After almost a full year of broadcasting, Steinberg says Cheddar is up to a million live views per day across platforms, and is reaching the audience it wants: On Facebook, 60 percent of viewers are under 35. You can also find Cheddar’s shows on Twitter, Periscope, Vimeo, Amazon, iOS, Sling, Apple TV, and Roku, or even on platforms you’ve definitely never heard of, like Pluto and Xumo. For $2.99 a month1, you can get access to exclusive interviews and the full Cheddar archive. The company’s growing up.
“In the process, Cheddar’s programming has become far more polished—more like CNBC, but less formal. It has a pink logo with a slice of cheese, after all. Its shows feature hosts sitting behind a desk talking to expert guests—but the hosts are younger, more diverse, more prone to goof off mid-segment. On the day I visited, a segment about Trump and the economy derailed when the producers noticed the guest, Politico’s Peter Sterne, was wearing Apple’s new AirPods, which became the focus of the segment.
“This informality is, in many ways, a necessity. Cheddar doesn’t have studios around the country or budgets to fly guests in, so the team relies on sometimes-wonky Skype feeds. Since Facebook Live encourages fast and constant viewer feedback—as does Twitter, whose live video offering Cheddar also jumped on immediately—it makes sense to break the fourth wall and involve viewers’ questions and comments. And it makes Cheddar’s inevitable problems a little less jarring. ‘We brought the audience along for the ride,’ Scholer says, ‘so they were hearing about any technology issues we were having, and they were part of it too.’
“Cheddar’s back-end tech allows broadcasting from a phone, a tablet, or really anything with a camera. That’s mostly a cost-cutting measure (Steinberg says Cheddar got up and running for a tenth the cost of a normal broadcast network) but the technical flexibility also gives Cheddar room to experiment with new ways of reporting.”
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