Sky News announced a bid to add semantic search to its platforms and prepare for a world when AI chatbots surface video results as broadcasting leaders spoke to Press Gazette at Web Summit in Lisbon.
Press Gazette hosted a discussion on the future of broadcast news featuring Sky News executive chairman David Rhodes, ITN CEO Rachel Corp and Euronews chairman Pedro Vargas David.
UK satellite news channel Sky News has embraced a ‘video-first’ model as part of its Project 2030 bid to expand its audience and become more financially sustainable.
Asked whether Youtube and Tiktok can support high-quality broadcast news in the future, Rhodes said: “In terms of the value our corporation gets from the investment, it’s great value. There is a real market for news on the platforms you refer to.
“We’ve had, in the last seven days, 100 million Tiktok video views. We see these platforms as an important audience acquisition tool and increasingly we see good actual financial outcomes from engaging with those audiences.”
He added: “We talk about being video first. Keyword search is dying. Those economics weren’t that great for publishers like us in the first place, it wasn’t that great for journalism, it wasn’t a great user experience.
“What about when these chatbot models come for video? We are working with Prorata on a proper attribution model. But what’s better is if video is the answer that you get.
“We announced yesterday a partnership with Arc XP to add semantic search functions to the Sky digital estate. What we all need to be thinking about is not what is going on in the text ecosystem now, but what will the video ecosystem look like in three to five years? And how will that function like a chatbot? That is what we are thinking about at Sky.”
He added later: “I think the world we need to prepare for is one in which you ask and you get a video result, and you get the pictures. Are they our pictures and are their payments in the background?”
‘We have to be very early adopters’ on AI
Euronews chairman David spoke about how technology had enabled his journalists to report from the field without camera operators, using three iPhones and a tripod.
He said AI has also had huge benefits for the Europe-wide satellite news channel and online publisher: “We operate in 19 languages. AI has freed up a lot of journalistic time to do proper stories, rather than translating and adapting.
“We have to be very early adopters. We use it in a lot of streamlining and in a data gathering perspective, but not in a driver of the story perspective. If we go into driving the story we will all be in trouble.”
‘All those eyeballs on Tiktok are not bringing anything back’
ITN has the contract to produce TV news bulletins for Channel 4, ITV and Channel 5 in the UK.
Corp said: “We are seeing some digital revenues but they are not going to replace the funding that we’ve got.
“With our public service media remit, I want to get eyeballs everywhere, I want to go to audiences where they are. I’m not needing to monetise any of those at the moment. Thank goodness because all those eyeballs on Tiktok are not bringing anything back.
“We should not be complacent that traditional models are going to be replaced by revenues from platforms.”
Corp said ITN is using AI agents in its production gallery for tasks like spellchecking and pulling archive photos: “So just enhancing what you are doing and making it better.”
Asked whether journalists generally should be concerned about Donald Trump’s attacks on the BBC and his threatened $1bn lawsuit against the broadcaster following a misleading Panoroma edit, she said: “We’ve got something very precious in the UK with the public service media system.
“There’s never been a more important time for impartial fact-checked news. It’s vital that we hold on to that ecosystem and the BBC is part of that.
“A weakened BBC is not good for anybody and not good for the world.”
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