Tivli, a start-up founded by two Harvard graduates, is trying to reconcile students’ viewing habits, which increasingly involve mobile devices, with the desire of cable companies like Comcast and programmers like HBO to be paid for wireless content. As Brian Stelter reports, resident students at Harvard and, of as of last week, Yale, can use a service created by Tivli to stream local TV stations, a couple of dozen cable channels and the universities’ own in-house channels to computers, tablets or video game consoles. This ability, available anywhere on campus, may be part of the answer to a conundrum for the television industry. Young people watch less TV than they used to, and some say they do not see the pint of an expensive cable or satellite subscription. If they become accustomed to viewing programming through services like HBO GO while in college, however, some believe it could lead them to become cable subscribers after they graduate.
NBC, looking for newsmen and newswomen to star in a planned reality show, has received more than 150 responses from newspapers across the nation. As Christine Haughney reports, NBC executives say they’ve been inundated with all types of pitches, from newspaper editors talking about how they are struggling to survive to newspaper staffs eager to show off their talents, sometimes well beyond their coverage of school meetings. NBC executives said they were intrigued by how quirky and diverse some newspapers were â€" from the Kodiak Daily Mirror in Kodiak, Alaska, to the Hungry Horse News, wh! ich is run out of a log building near an entrance to Glacier National Park in Montana. As NBC’s producers start the process of reading and deciding which newspapers may make the final cut, newspaper editors like Richard Hanners, editor of The Hungry Horse News in Columbia Falls, Mont., are waiting for answers. Mr. Hanners said that while he hadn’t heard that his colleagues had pitched his newspaper for a reality show, he was receptive to it because his newspaper was rich with stories.
WBEZ, the Chicago public radio station, is hoping that Chicagoans will help create a new generation of listeners. In a new ad campaign that begins on Friday, the station encourages residents of the city to, well, “hook up†with other Chicagoans and procreate. As Tanzina Vega reports, a tag line on one ad sums up the new campaign, called “2032 Membership Drive,†succinctly: â€We Want Listeners Tomorrow. Go Make Babies Today.†Other ads read: “Do It. For Chicago.†and “Interesting People Make Interesting People.†Daniel Ash, the vice president for corporate sponsorship, marketing, membership and partnerships at Chicago Public Media, which owns the station, said the campaign was meant to playfully encourage listeners in their 20s and 30s to “make babies†so that by 2032, the station will have a slew of teenage listeners. “We wanted to break the mold and take some risks,†Mr. Ash said.
