As media companies, Meredith and Bloomberg may seem to have little in common. But the lifestyle publisher has just taken a leaf out of the business network’s playbook – by launching a new streaming video partnership on Twitter.

At the same time as turning its PeopleTV in to a full24-hour linear TV channel through FuboTV, Meredith is also carving out a new piece of PeopleTV, especially for Twitter.

“Chatter” will be its first live talk show on Twitter, hosted by TV personality Rocsi Diaz. That echoes an earlier move in which Bloomberg launched TicToc as a Twitter-only live news streamer.

Meredith’s new video SVP Andrew Snyder tells Beet.TV Chatter “will only make sense on Twitter”.

“It will be a show that’s built entirely for the Twitter audience, and it will focus on a real-time update on everything’s that’s happening in the world of celebrity and entertainment,” he says.

Why is Snyder embracing someone else’s network? The clue is in the data.

“In 2017, through no change in our production of content, our distribution approach, we saw a 1,200% lift in the total consumption of video on the Twitter platform alone,” he says.

That gave Meredith a big signal – it needed to do a Bloomberg, partnering with a Twitter that has increasingly become obsessed by video ad dollars as a major component of its ad sales revenue.

So how will the commercials work?

“The opportunity on Twitter is for us to lead the sales effort, but of course, we do that in close collaboration with our partners at Twitter,” Snyder adds.

This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

By Robert Andrews on @robertandrews