TouchVision

» see touchvision.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

American broadcast television has a layer underneath the layer everyone watches. When stations went digital they ended up with spare capacity on their signal, and they filled it with subchannels: old sitcoms, courtroom shows, westerns running all night. Turkey has nothing structurally equivalent, so this whole category is one I only ever read about, and TouchVision lived entirely inside it.

Weigel Broadcasting in Chicago is the company that made that layer work commercially, with MeTV and later Decades. In 2013 it backed something considerably stranger. TouchVision was rolling news with no anchors at all, no desk, no two people turning to each other at the end of a segment. It cut between reported field pieces continuously, closer to a newsreel than to a broadcast, and it was designed to look the same on a television, a phone or a tablet.

The man shaping it was Lee Abrams, who had spent the 1970s inventing the album-oriented rock radio format, then built the programming side of XM Satellite Radio, then had a short and loud tenure as chief innovation officer at Tribune. He was a format person more than a news person, and TouchVision was a format argument: that the anchor is a convention rather than a requirement, and that a generation raised on video feeds would not miss it.

~ the record ~

~ the pitch ~

It went into beta on 1 July 2013 and launched properly on 16 September. Distribution started on WDJT in Milwaukee, added WMEU in Chicago, and eventually reached WISH in Indianapolis. About a million people a month were watching by the end, which sounds respectable until you notice that a single mid-size local news broadcast can do that in a week.

The apps were genuinely good and the reporting was real. Staff came from proper newsrooms and the field pieces were shot and cut with care, which is why the trade press obituaries all used some version of the phrase honorable failure rather than the usual language for a failed channel.

~ the postmortem ~

Staff were called into an afternoon meeting on 14 January 2016 and told it was their last day. As many as forty people went. Programming continued until 11:59pm Chicago time and then stopped.

The problem was never the product. It was that a subchannel network needs carriage on stations that have no reason to give it any, and TouchVision never got past Weigel properties and a couple of friendly affiliates. Advertisers price against reach, and the reach stayed inside the family. touchvision.com now redirects to a domain broker.

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