Cable news veteran Chuck Todd is exiting his on-air position at MSNBC, a cable network, and headed for a service called NBC News Now, a streaming website in the same vein as the ill-fated CNN+.
Long time viewers of “Meet the Press” will now need to subscribe and log in to a service called NBC News Now, which mostly features a simulcast of normal NBC News programming. Todd had already been moved from his MSNBC show’s previous 5 p.m. time slot to 1 p.m., and now that position will be filled by NBC’s Chris Jansing.
While NBC News Now originally expected fierce competition from CNN+, the defunct live streaming project scrapped by CNN’s new owners, the platform appears to be faring better. Its mix of NBC standards like the “TODAY” show mixed with political commentary led it to average “60 million views and more than 20 million hours watched” throughout 2021, according to a press release published by the network on the NBC website.
Still, the NBC News Now Twitter account barely cracks 100,000 followers. This pales in comparison to the 9.1 million followers accrued by NBC News.
At press time, the platform’s most recent tweet had one like and one retweet more than two hours after it was posted. The tweet contained a video seen by 103 people, including this reporter.
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Florida police get some help to catch a jet ski thief.@VickyNguyenTV has the stories Making News Now. pic.twitter.com/elM72hM3yI— NBC News NOW (@NBCNewsNow) June 7, 2022
Not the first cable news host to leave the medium for live streaming, Todd will join former Fox News host Chris Wallace in making the leap.
Wallace famously left his position at the network to host a new weekend show for CNN+, only for the network to be scrapped almost immediately after launch. He will instead live stream a new show on HBO Max.
The allure of Internet live streaming is not confined to political pundits, either.
Former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki famously left her role in the Biden administration to take a live streaming job for MSNBC for its “hub” on Peacock, another live streaming platform.
Some raised ethics concerns when this was announced via the media, and questioned whether Psaki should have been negotiating for a pundit gig for a major media organization – to host live streams, nonetheless – while representing the White House. Psaki assured Americans that she did nothing wrong before leaving the White House.
