Newsy, Captivate Partner To Bring Content To Elevator Screens

Newsy, the Scripps-owned video news outlet, is partnering with Captivate to get its content on screens in office buildings.

Captivate partners with publishers to display their content on screens in elevators and lobbies of urban areas.

Newsy’s video news content is translated into text headlines and featured on office screens in 34 markets across the U.S. and Canada, including New York City, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Vancouver and Toronto.

“Our focus has been on television consumers, as well as traditional, streaming and digital audiences. Partnering with Captivate is exciting because our journalism can work across platforms and reach audiences wherever they are,” Newsy’s vice president of news and programming, Christina Hartman, told Publishers Daily.

Hartman said Newsy’s focus is “on unbiased and independent journalism. We are conscious of news outside of Washington. For our competitors in the space, Washington is dominating the headlines.”

Newsy has newsrooms in other cities, such as Denver and Chicago, and covers categories like science, tech, business and culture.

On average, an elevator ride is 67 seconds, according to Captivate’s content director, Kate Scanlan. Newsy’s content “is easily digestible,” a good fit for Captivate’s media screens, she said. Its feeds are “40% news, 20% business, 20% lifestyle and 20% sports… and Newsy has all of that,” she added.

USA Today, The Washington Post, The Week, Business Insider and AP re among the 150 content providers working with Captivate.

Why the interest in elevators?

“There’s not a lot of serendipitous discovery” in this media landscape, Hartman said.

Captivate gives “busy professionals” who “do not have time to sit down and read newspaper … up-to-date content that they don’t have to seek out on their own,” Scanlan added.

Audiences get a “snippet of content, with a mix of different stories,” and if they want do dive deeper, they can go the publishers’ site to read further.

The deal expands Newsy's out-of-home media, which reaches nearly 12,000 screens in 1,600 buildings. That number is expected to continue to grow in 2019, per the company.

Newsy is available in over 36 million cable homes, on OTT services including Hulu, Roku, Apple TV, Sling TV, Pluto TV, Amazon Fire TV and Google Chromecast, as well as connected televisions, including Samsung, VIZIO and LG.

It also operates mobile news apps and its website, newsy.com.
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