Brian Williams’ Amazon Election Night Special Signals Streaming’s Emergence For Live News Moments: “It Might Be The Next Big Thing”

deadline.com:

Turn on Amazon‘s Prime Video on Election Night, and you will see the streaming giant do something it has never done before: Live coverage of a breaking news event.

Brian Williams, the former NBC News and MSNBC anchor who will host Election Night Live, has compared the special as the first “new product introduction in the election night space since color television.” In an interview with Deadline, Williams wouldn’t go into specifics, but promised a reveal of “our own exclusive IP.” A set built on a Culver City soundstage will be “all LED,” and he will be mobile “between different areas of the studio where analysts and journalists and a historian or two and our data folks are working.” He said that he has asked Amazon to take no breaks during the special, but “I don’t know if I’ll win that tug of war.” “I think we go a minimum of 10 hours, and I think it will grow north from there,” Williams said. “We don’t want to miss a moment.

We don’t want to miss a vote. We certainly don’t want to miss a projection, and along the way, we’re hoping to offer fantastic context from veterans in the field.” All of the major broadcast networks are planning ongoing election coverage on their streaming channels, which also appear on the Amazon platform.

NBC News Now, for instance, plans to start coverage at 7 a.m. ET and continue late into Wednesday evening. The NBCU streaming service Peacock, meanwhile, is taking a page from the Olympics by offering a multiview of NBC News Now, the Steve Kornacki cam and election results and a balance-of-power map.