The Future Of News Is Artificial Intelligence Posted on : Oct 03 - 2018

For almost 80 years, people have tuned in to their television sets to get their daily dose of news.

All around the world, people watched the Vietnam War, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the two Gulf Wars unfold in front of them on their TV screens.

For most of us, television news has been a constant in our lifetime – something we turn to when the big news breaks.

But, for the first time since the introduction of television news in 1940, the dominance of the nightly TV news bulletin is being challenged by a serious competitor: online news.

A 2017 report by the Pew Research Center found the gap between the share of Americans who get their news from TV and those who get their news online is narrowing – rapidly.

While half the population still often gets their news from television, 43% of Americans now say they regularly engage with online news sources. To put this in perspective, in 2016, the gap between television (57%) and online (38%) news sources was 19 points.

The trend toward digital news content takes on greater significance when you consider the generational gap, with millennials twice as likely as their parents to get their news online.

The Business Model Of TV News Is Changing

There’s been much speculation about the end of newspapers as mastheads go digital, but the reality is that online content is also killing off commercial TV news.

The business model of commercial television news centers on the fact that the editorial content is funded by advertising shown during the commercial breaks. The news content is technically free for the consumer. Instead, the cost to the viewer is dull and often annoying advertising.

One of the biggest disruptions to the nightly news broadcasts was the introduction of 24/7 cable news broadcasting in the '80s, with the arrival of CNN and the Financial News Network, which merged with CNBC.

Since then, people in the United States (and many other developed countries) have shown an appetite for consumer-funded news content. For example, American adults over 18 years old spent more than 72 billion minutes consuming news in 2016, according to the Nielsen Ratings Service.

But thirst for more user-paid content hasn’t only given rise to new media platforms; it also impacts delivery methods used to connect consumers with the information that matters to them.

Are Online News Subscriptions The Future Of News?

Subscription media services, such as Spotify and Netflix, are conditioning a whole new generation to pay a small fee for quality content.

According to Deloitte Global, 50% of adults in developed countries will have at least two online-only media subscriptions by the end of 2018, rising to four by 2020.

Not only do we know that online subscription-based delivery models are where the future of media consumption is being fought, but we also know that the prevailing form of that media is video.

According to Cisco, video will soon represent around 82% of total consumer web traffic by 2021, up from 73% in 2016. Growth has been spurred by proliferation in, and adoption of, video streaming services. View More