The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Future of TV Cnn Media

2016 TV Year in Review: Chris Berend, SVP, Digital Video for CNN

By Chris Berend, SVP, Digital Video

|

Promoted article

December 22, 2016 | 4 min read

Sponsored by:

What's this?

Sponsored content is created for and in partnership with an advertiser and produced by the Drum Studios team.

Find out more

The below post is part of Found Remote's 2016 Year in Review guest post series and is written by Chris Berend. Berend is the Senior Vice President of Digital Video for CNN and CNN Digital Studios and the Co-founder of Great Big Story.

CNN

What is the future of television?

If we’re being honest, I don’t think any of us really have a clue.

Maybe it will turn out to be an augmented reality experience (remember 3D!?). Maybe one day a YouTube star will actually break through (still waiting). Maybe the new Apple TV will become our default viewing experience (optimistic). Whichever way the industry turns, it’s clear that how and where video is consumed will shift significantly over the next few years to mirror the way people under the age of 50 now live—us peripatetic, finicky creatures clinging to our phones and streaming services. And there are some wonderfully talented people, mind-blowing technologies and quickly morphing business models trying to catch up to it. It’s necessary and important work. And it will be innovative. But it’s also a version of PowerPoint that doesn’t really turn me on.

Regardless of how it’s delivered, the power of video lies in the emotion it provokes, the feeling it burns into our memory. And right now, there is way too much video out there that doesn’t make us feel anything—paint by numbers storytelling (if you can call it that) driven by news feeds and business models that you forget as soon as your thumb swipes up. There’s nothing special about that. It’s doesn’t captivate, much less scale up to an experience worth paying for.

The future of video will be determined by those brave enough to invest in making it memorable, in whatever format and on whatever size screen. The most important innovation to our video future is not the product chrome or hybrid business models that come and go, but rather a long-term commitment from publishers and producers to invest in quality, to fund the memorable even in the face of a shape-shifting future.

I’m fortunate to work at a company that, for decades, has put storytelling first. On any given day, CNN invests an incredible amount of resources to transport its audience live to any spot in the world. As distribution models and delivery methods have changed over decades, that has not. That’s the biggest advantage.

With Great Big Story, we have doubled-down on craftsmanship and quality to stand out in the Great Sea of Commodity that has become our feed-driven lives. And it turns out that storytelling works incredibly well in your living room, too (not to mention venues much bigger than that, stay tuned!). And in bringing Casey Neistat and his team from Beme into our family, we are signaling that we will continue to invest and innovate, with the highest bar of storytelling at our core.

Our mission—our entire model, in fact--is to tell stories that compel people to think, laugh, cry, share, act…to feel something. The methods of delivery may change, but our future will be determined by how well we do that.

You can access the Future of TV hub here. Sign up to receive The Drum's Future of TV newsletter.

Future of TV Cnn Media

More from Future of TV

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +