Aaron Silverman has been named executive producer on ABC News Live First. He comes from CNN, where he had been senior broadcast producer on CNN This Morning and New Day. 

Almin Karamehmedovic, who was named ABC News president earlier this month, saluted Silverman in a note to staff. “Our commitment to covering every story on every device our audience uses to consume news is stronger than ever. With the upcoming launch of ABC News Live on the Disney Plus streaming platform, combined with our seamless collaboration with the network’s special events coverage -- as evidenced recently with the late-breaking ABCNL special report on the Israeli-Hezbollah strikes last Saturday -- and the addition of weekend hours, we are delivering for our audience, 24/7,” the note said in part. 

“All of this makes it even more special to have Aaron join the talented ABC News Live team, working closely with [anchor] Diane Macedo. We look forward to the expertise and passion he will bring to our powerhouse streaming channel.”

Before his time at CNN, Silverman worked in local TV. After graduating from Syracuse, he produced morning news at KNDU Kennewick (Washington), then produced at KPTV Portland, KGTV San Diego and WHDH Boston.  

Our America: In the Black, a series from ABC Owned Television Stations, returns Thursday, June 20 with the nine-part Conversations With Arlan Hamilton. An entrepreneur and author, Hamilton focuses on financial health and wellness. Each episode features a discussion with guests from business, entertainment and technology, who share stories and insights on financial health. 

The first episode is available on the ABC-owned stations’ streaming and digital platforms and on ABC News Live. It features entrepreneur Rachel Rodgers, founder of Hello Seven, which coaches minorities on building wealth. 

The second offers a chat with Lauren Chan, who the ABC station group calls “a size-inclusion activist” who founded the plus-size fashion company Henning. 

The third features Holly Levow, co-founder of production companies Equitas Entertainment Partners and Catalyst Studios.

Other guests are Dean Forbes, Suneera Madhani, Teri Ijeoma, Crystal Alonzo, Bridgid Coulter Cheadle and Lamar and Ronnie Tyler. 

Our America: In The Black — Conversations With Arlan Hamilton is executive produced by Nzinga Blake, executive producer, Race & Culture, ABC Owned Television Stations. 

The first installment of Our America: In the Black debuted earlier this year and featured Microsoft Philanthropies specialist Darrell Booker. 

ABC’s owned stations include KABC Los Angeles, WLS Chicago, WABC New York and WPVI Philadelphia. 

ABC Owned Television Stations premieres the documentary NFTs: Enter the Metaverse May 21. A look at how non-fungible tokens have gathered considerable momentum in a short period of time, NFTs: Enter the Metaverse will air on the eight owned stations, on the group’s  streaming channels and on ABC News Live. 

The one-hour documentary looks at digital artist Mike “Beeple” Winkelmann, who “shook the world,” according to the ABC group, when his NFT work sold for $69.4 million at an auction. “The sale marked the beginning of an unstoppable NFT wave, where everyone from digital artists to mainstream celebrities began creating, selling and collecting NFTs via cryptocurrency on Blockchain,” added ABC Owned Stations. 

Those interviewed include Paris Hilton, Mark Cuban, Gary Vaynerchuk, DJ Steve Aoki and ABC News Chief Business Technology and Economics correspondent Rebecca Jarvis. Viewers will also meet teenager Diana Sinclair, who the ABC group said is paving the way for more representation for women and people of color.  

Chris Casey is executive producer of NFTs: Enter the Metaverse. 

The ABC station group includes WABC New York, KABC Los Angeles, WLS Chicago and WPVI Philadelphia. ■

ABC News Live is being added to Samsung TV Plus, the OTT programming app found in Samsung’s newer model smart TVs and its Android-powered smart phones.

ABC News Live is ABC News’ 24/7 streaming news channel that presents coverage of live events, breaking news and analysis from around the world. It features original programs such as evening newscast ABC News Live Prime with Linsey Davis, ABC News Live Update with Diane Macedo, and issues-oriented political program Your Voice Your Vote: The Breakdown with Macedo and Terry Moran.

ABC News Live averaged 23 million monthly viewers from March to August 2020—over double its average viewership from the previous six months.

With the addition of ABC News Live, Samsung TV Plus now touts 10 news channels, including CBSN, NewsNOW from FOX, Bloomberg TV+ UHD, Cheddar, Yahoo Finance, Newsy, USA Today, Newsmax and TYT Network. 

Samsung is the second most popular maker of smart phones in the U.S next to Apple and its iPhone. And it’s the No. smart TV brand, controlling more than 30% of the market. 

Samsung TV Plus is available on 2016-2020 Samsung smart TVs and on Samsung Galaxy S10, S20, Note10 and Note 20 mobile devices.

“Samsung TV Plus is all about delivering free and instant access to linear TV and streaming to our enormous community of viewers,” said Salek Brodsky, VP of strategic partnerships and business development for Samsung Electronics, in a statement. “The addition of ABC News Live extends our commitment to a wide variety of programming—not just in news, but in sports, entertainment, movies, music, and more.”

Streaming services are set to have an outsized impact on this year’s election coverage, both in terms of audience size and in the contributions they will make to more traditional broadcast coverage.

“There has been a lot of speculation about streaming in the news business but this year has shown that streaming is taking hold in a big way,” said Seni Tienabeso, executive producer of ABC News Live Prime, a primetime streaming show anchored by Linsey Davis. “The pandemic has really accelerated what was already happening in terms of people looking for other avenues to watch news, and you can see that in the audience growth. We had over 9 million people alone watching ABC News Live for the first debate. That is a huge number that ranks with any other broadcast.” 

Tienabeso and others said the streaming services are providing audiences with a much wider array of stories and coverage than viewers have ever seen. 

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Users who open the CBS News app will be able to access 12 different live feeds from 24-hour streaming service CBSN, said Christy Tanner, executive VP and general manager of CBS News Digital. They include a live feed of the CBS broadcast coverage, the national CBSN feed and 10 local feeds from CBS’s owned stations. 

“This will give us enormous flexibility in covering live events, races and outcomes simultaneously,” Tanner said.

To make it easier for viewers to find breaking news and content, CBS is launching a new capability to provide live, interactive alerts. “Viewers will get an interactive graphic on the screen when something is breaking and they will be able to use their remote to navigate to it,” Tanner said. 

Streaming services will also give audiences additional
ways to access network feeds on authenticated apps, streaming services or YouTube, where PBS NewsHour will be streaming election coverage. 

Univision will stream its national broadcast coverage starting at 7 p.m. ET on Nov. 3, senior politics editor Carlos Chirinos said, with digital teams filling breaks in the network coverage with original digital content. 

“We will be providing a heavy focus on the local level, because all politics is local,” Chirinos said. 

RELATED: The New Math of Election Coverage

The continuous nature of streaming services also gives news organizations more space and time to explain what promises to be a very complex election. “If you are just approaching this like a horse race for 12, 24, 36 hours or however [long] this goes on, that isn’t helpful to voters,” ABC News Live executive producer Katie den Daas said. “We’re preparing for the long haul so that people can turn on ABC News Live and get the kind of information they want.” 

Part of that will be improved data analytics. Journalists from the ABC News-owned polling analysis website FiveThirtyEight.com will appear on ABC News Live, den Daas said. “They will be able to explain what is happening and why,” she said. “As we inch closer to election and we are inundated with numbers and polling, they’ll be able to really frame and discuss what those numbers might mean or not mean.” 

On election night, Newsy will draw extensively on its investigative and longer-form reporting on such subjects as voting by mail, the ballot-counting process, voter suppression concerns, the integrity of the election and the Hispanic vote, Matt Simon, supervising producer for PM content at Newsy, said. 

“It is easy to go to roundtables of pundits and much harder to produce analysis that is based on fact and data and still find a way to make it compelling and interesting but that is our mission,” Simon said. 

Pandemic-related restrictions have also prompted networks to adopt much more coordinated strategies between their various platforms.

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Fox News will have a separate control room, said VP of politics and the Washington Bureau Cherie Grzech, from which she will talk to TV, digital and radio reporters, then route feeds to the various control rooms handling Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network, Fox Nation and Fox News Radio. 

“You will see reporters on multiple platforms throughout the evening,” Grzech said. “We are definitely trying to maximize the ability to move our people from one Fox platform to another.” 

AVOD platform Xumo has announced the addition of ABC News Live to its channel lineup.

“There couldn’t be a better time to bring in ABC News Live,” said Stefan Van Engn, senior vice president of content and programming for Irvine, California-based Xumo, noting that the ramp of the 2020 national election has “peaked the national interest levels of the U.S. right now as it relates to news.”

Related: Xumo Expands to Comcast X1, Android TV

Xumo’s news channel lineup already includes CBSN, NBC News Now, Cheddar and Newsy.

Since July, Van Engen said, Xumo has seen a 10% monthly increase in news viewing among its audience.

The Xumo app has already been available natively to users of Comcast’s IP-based Xfinity Flex platform. In addition to the set-tops of the largest pay TV operator in the U.S., the Xumo app also lives natively within T-Mobile’s TVision pay TV service.

Meanwhile, Xumo is expanding the reach of its app to 10 Android TV-powered devices, including Sony smart TV models, Nvidia Shield, and Xiaomi Mi Box. The new partnerships increase the availability of Xumo in the U.S. to over 30 different devices, including Roku and Amazon Fire TV.