Every so often, there’s something at my “real job” at BreakingNews that I can’t resist sharing. Today, our team launched a Samsung TV app that brings breaking news alerts to your TV, over any live channel you’re watching. When a story breaks, a ticker appears, scrolls the alert and disappears a few seconds later.
The Breaking News app also features a consistent ticker of the moment’s biggest stories, and you can set a kind of “screen saver” mode to display big scrolling updates across the TV set when you’re not watching. As viewers see a breaking story in the ticker, they can flip to their favorite news channel for live coverage.
The updates originate from an around-the-clock team of editors — the largest real-time curation team in journalism, as far as we know — who scour the planet for breaking news around the clock. While many know us from @breakingnews on Twitter, we publish 3X the stories on our mobile apps (with big-story push alerts) and BreakingNews.com. As always, our team is careful to credit the originator.
It’s great to see connected TV technology emerge to enable integrations like this, and you can only imagine what the future of TV apps holds in the coming months.
(Full disclosure: I’m GM of BreakingNews.)