CBS Said to Be Developing Streaming News Channel

The CBS Corporation is developing a 24-hour news channel that would be streamed online and would mainly repurpose video and reporting already produced by CBS News, according to executives involved in the planning.

The head of CBS News, David Rhodes, is said to be a champion of the 24-hour channel.

The executives spoke on the condition of anonymity because the channel, if it were to move forward, would not be publicly announced for weeks or months. The channel does not have a formal name yet, but it is known internally as CBS News Stream, the executives said.

It is a collaboration between CBS News, which is spearheading the journalistic planning for the channel, and the company's interactive division, which is handling the distribution. David Rhodes, the president of CBS News, is said to be the project's biggest champion.

The project's existence was first reported by BuzzFeed on Tuesday. In response, a CBS Corporation spokesman, Dana McClintock, said that “we are currently talking to a number of partners” about a potential streaming news service.

“There are all kinds of exciting opportunities offered by new platforms, and we intend to keep pursuing them,” said Mr. McClintock, who declined to comment further.

For CBS, which sat, sometimes glumly, on the sidelines while its rivals created cable news channels like MSNBC, an Internet channel would be a relatively low-cost way to spread out its news-gathering costs and, maybe, reach viewers who are not home for the “CBS Evening News.”

It might also help attract attention to its website, CBSNews.com, which has lagged behind most other American television news sites.

Executives involved in the planning emphasized that CBS News Stream would not be an investment on the scale of MSNBC, which NBC News and Microsoft started in 1996, or Fusion, the cable news and pop culture channel that ABC News and Univision started earlier this week.

Plans for the Internet channel might be best likened to a 24-hour news radio station, which intersperses live updates with prerecorded interviews and features. The channel would have video clips from news broadcasts like “CBS This Morning” and “60 Minutes,” as well as additional material that did not make it onto television, presented in both a linear format like a normal cable channel and an on-demand format like a website.

CBS has tried to liven up its website with new video efforts before, but to limited success. Mr. Rhodes says this time is different, according to the executives involved in the planning, because Internet streaming has become more mainstream thanks to services like Netflix and YouTube.

Virtually all of the major media companies in the United States are experimenting with Internet video destinations, sometimes to recycle shows and movies they already own and other times to introduce new programming.

These streaming channels may someday show up right next to traditional cable channels on the app-like interfaces that are gradually replacing old on-screen guides.

But CBS, if it decides to start CBS News Stream, will enter an ever-more-crowded marketplace.

Another potential obstacle could be the company's agreements with its affiliate stations, which prevent CBS from live-streaming its newscasts except in certain circumstances. The executives said that any Internet channel would respect those agreements.

A version of this article appears in print on October 30, 2013, on page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: CBS Said to Be Developing Streaming News Channel .