Geolocation services are not new to smartphones, and place-based features have only improved over the years however in the battle for attention on your phone, Breaking News, a startup owned by NBC News, wants to win by finding smart ways to show you less. Today they debuted a new feature to their iOS app that pushes proximity-based news alerts when a big story breaks near a user’s physical location. Geo-targeted to mobile devices, the alerts highlight major stories that are relevant to people nearby, including significant earthquakes, tornadoes, wildfires, public safety alerts, evacuations and more.
Proximity alerts will also accompany users as they travel internationally. NBC says Breaking News is the first mobile app to offer the innovative service.
“In a world where news alerts are out of control, our mission is to deliver the breaking stories that are uniquely important to you,” said Cory Bergman, general manager of Breaking News. “Few things are as important as learning about a big breaking story that just happened near your location. Proximity alerts are lightning fast, and the service sets Breaking News apart as the go-to app to discover breaking stories that matter to you, wherever you are.” The app also includes the addition of a “Watchlist,” where users can easily track breaking news in their favorite interests in real time, as well as a new design, infinite scroll, simple navigation, faster search, and an improved iPad view.
The Breaking News app update is available today on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, and it will be available for Android devices soon. To download the Breaking News app for iOS, visit BreakingNews.com/apps. Also read their release - Introducing proximity alerts and much more in the new Breaking News iOS app
News gathering done at the source by Smartphone toting
witnesses has been around for a while as the technology has grown and evolved.
Twitter itself has become the go-to source for many kinds of widely witnessed
breaking news, such as protests and plane crashes. Stepping up to the plate in
support of this trend NBC News announced it has acquired the user-generated
live video service Stringwire as part of an effort to beef up its newsgathering
efforts. “Stringwire is at the leading edge of user-generated video products,
with immediate value to our on-air and digital businesses,” explained Vivian
Schiller, senior VP and chief digital Officer at NBC News. “You could get 30
people all feeding video, holding up their Smartphone’s and then we could look
at that,” Schiller told the NY Times. “We’ll be able to publish and broadcast
some of them.” For breaking news and stories, Stringwire has the ability to
recruit and direct contributors based on geographical location via Twitter and
then to instantly access their live footage. According to Schiller NBC will
utilize Stringwire’s technology to provide its TV and digital platforms with
new tools for newsgathering and for using eyewitness user-generated video
content.
A new Harris Poll survey shows that television is the top source for news among US citizens, beating out #2 online 26%-18%, but the group participants also expect that this order will flip within five
years, when online will be on top with 25% to television's 22%. Cable is expected to show a modest 14%-15% increase over the same period, with a slight 12%-11% drop-off for radio and 12%-10% drop-off for major daily newspapers.
There is nothing surprising here with the results. Technology is changing the future of news delivery as much as Media consumption habits are changing with the generations. In the 2002 movie Minority Report, a passenger on a subway train gets constantly updated news on a flexible, translucent, portable flat-panel device that he carries with him. This is not very far fetched and it is just 5 years later. Now would this be TV or Online, newspaper or some new variations of all of them? I Believe that no matter what the platform is, integrated media systems will revolutionize the methods for acquiring, packaging, organizing and delivering the news in the not-too-distant future and our current definitions of television, online, newspapers will be noted in history.
In the early '90's, video from the Rodney King and Reginald Denny beatings changed the way that news organizations began to gather and disseminate footage. Since that point technology has continued to revolutionize and speed the process. The Blog Lost Remote reported yesterday that Fox News had some of the first live video on the air from the scene of the NYC plane crash live via a Treo phone and CometVision. It may not be pretty (yet) but you get the picture!
National content is great but many consumers are waiting to sample video on their portable video devices when they can get local news, weather and sports. A new service is about to offer local news video and it is coming to mobile phones for the first time. Twenty-five TV stations, including 16 owned-and-operated CBS stations in top markets, and WRAL, Capitol Broadcasting Corp.'s CBS affiliate in Raleigh, N.C., have begun to offer video newscasts called My Local TV. It will be available on Sprint’s “Power Vision” broadband-data service for a premium $4.95 monthly subscription. Link: Adweek 06/19/06 – Local CBS News Streamed to Cells
