CBS News is adding more traditional TV talent to its streaming outlet. After rebranding its streamer as CBS News Streaming Network in January and adding a show hosted by “CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell, the Paramount-owned news organization is now updating its streaming service’s primetime lineup by having former “Face the Nation” host John Dickerson anchor CBS News Streaming Network’s 7 p.m. slot.
In the latest Digiday Podcast, CBS News and Stations co-presidents and co-heads Neeraj Khemlani and Wendy McMahon discussed the new nightly primetime news program and the streamer’s development since its November 2014 debut.
“We’re now lapping a year working together across CBS News and Stations, and the momentum’s been awesome,” said Khemlani. After accumulating more than 1 billion streams in 2021, CBS News Streaming Network is averaging more than 80 million streams per month — the number of times people have started streaming a video on the service — with viewers spending 1.4 billion minutes, on average, in aggregate per month watching the service’s programming, according to a CBS News spokesperson.
CBS News is also plying the streaming service with more programming from its local news stations. At the start of this year, the news organization set the goal of increasing its live local coverage on CBS News Streaming Network by 15,000 hours to 45,000 hours by the end of 2022. But it has updated the amount, coinciding with the upcoming launch of CBS News Detroit in November, which will mark its fourteenth local channel on CBS News Streaming Network.
“It’s quite the expansion effort, not only through the lens of more channels but also through the lens of the number of hours we’re producing live now across those channels. Nearly 46,000 hours annually of live coverage on those 14 streams by the end of the year,” McMahon said.