C5N is Argentina’s second most viewed news channel. Founded in 2007, the channel always stood out for its innovative use of technology and it is known for its large LED screens and touch interfaces that have become a key part of its live shows. In addition, C5N is also a part of Indalo Media, a media conglomerate with which we had worked before in the technological update many of its assets.
Even though the channel was familiarized with many bleeding edge technologies, we believed that it required a strategical assessment of their use.
The challenge
Even for tech-savvy organizations, to keep a coherent digital strategy is not an easy task. The speed at which new developments rise forces the adoption of new technologies even before these are fully validated. Sometimes, this leaves organizations with a weird montage of solutions, which often implies great differences in adoption and impact.
Our challenge was to bring the audiovisual essence of a TV channel to its mobile app. The dangers were many, such as making it look as a news portal like CNN, losing focus on the type of contents a TV channel generates.
Never miss a headline again.
In tune with our overarching research questions about news consumption, we set out to establish key learnings that could be used by any media company, from a radio station to a TV channel. To our surprise, we couldn’t find many published best practices on how to adopt digital technologies in the media industry, and even less on how to best leverage mobile apps for TV channels.
But something was clear from the outset: content is still the key factor. The key was to find the best format for the contents the channel was already producing and, taking into account that young adults are more likely to turn to their mobile phones than to a TV to get informed, we needed to understand the reasons behind these content consumption habits.
We proposed having the main screen of the app working as a carousel to display the top headlines of the day. This was largely inspired by the way Snapchat — and later Instagram and Facebook— Stories work and was meant to be reminiscent of the news summary that TV channels generally air every 30 minutes.
The results
The mobile app ended taking advantage of the contents that the channel was already producing, without introducing any dramatic changes in its working processes. One of the recurrent remarks during our research was that media companies tend to have overcomplicated workflows with editors, journalists, and additional staff members that take different tasks simultaneously.
This is why we also developed a custom dashboard to enable C5N’s staff to update the the mobile app with ease and integrate it swiftly with the rest of their routine operations.
The audience decline of television news is undeniable, and rightly comparable to the downturn of printed newspaper circulation that started more than ten years ago.
As developing countries catch-up with technologically developed markets, this trend will probably accelerate even further, and we will continue to see the rise of consumption in video-on-demand and video on social media. Its probably true that TV will remain important for many more years, but everything indicates that it won’t have the strength it had during the last century.
The risk television faces is to become irrelevant against new formats and new platforms. This means that TV news channels will have to reinvent themselves while increasingly embracing experimentation and creative exploration.
The good news is that we’re up for the challenge.
You can download C5N’s mobile app on Apple Store and Google Play.
