NBC acquires stake in NowThis News

NBCUniversal News Group has acquired a minority state in NowThis News, a short form video news network built specifically for mobile and social.

The companies will also co-produce original short form news videos to be distributed across mobile and social platforms out of NowThis News’s New York City studio.

NowThis News is a news organization that specializes in creating original short form video for audiences across social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Vine, YouTube and Snapchat. Videos are combined into NowThis News’s Android and Apple apps and a mobile website. 

“We know that news consumption among younger audiences continues to grow, but in order to reach that audience, we need to continue to create video for the platforms they use most. NowThis News does exactly that — delivering relevant news stories for the mobile and social platforms that resonate with this audience,” said Patricia Fili-Krushel, chairman of the NBCUniversal News Group, in a statement. “We’re excited to incorporate this relationship into our overall strategy — to innovate inside and outside the company — positioning the News Group for future success.”

Also in the statement, Kenneth Lerer, NowThis News’s co-founder and manager director of Lerer Ventures said, “By working together, the NBCUniversal News Group and NowThis News can learn from each other and build a great digital news experience that’s a win-win for the new news consumer who wants all video, all the time, built for social and mobile. This partnership allows us to showcase our shared vision of combining the world’s strongest news brands with NowThis News to super serve consumers.”

The teams will co-produce content for “Today,” MSNBC, NBC News and CNBC such as:

  • Mashups: Covering daily political, pop culture or business news
  • Explainers: Breaking down business, political or financial news

The partnership represents the latest in a series of moves that the NBCUniversal News Group, whose digital assets include NBCNews.com, msnbc.com, Today.com and CNBC.com, has made in the digital space. Together these assets reach more than 70 million unique users.

Recently, the group also announced an investment and content partnership with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg’s new venture, Revere Digital, launched a new msnbc.com, created new original video units for NBC News and CNBC and acquired live stream video platform, Stringwire.

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