PACKTV MOVES TO LOCAL START-UP’S STREAMING PLATFORM
Contact: Evelyn Cox, City News Beat Email: newsroom@getnewsbeat.com.
Raleigh, NC (June 29, 2020) - North Carolina State University’s PackTV has agreed to license the use of local area start-up City News Beat’s proprietary streaming video monetization platform, nicknamed “CHARLIE”, to help monetize LIVE and existing sports content on Roku, Amazon Fire TV and Apple TV. The two groups had worked together to stream the 2020 ACCHL Hockey tournament in February and found a mutually beneficial opportunity to expand their relationship.
BJ Attarian, Program Director at PackTV, stated “CHARLIE enables us to monetize across multiple different sports and sports content verticals our students produce every school year. We’re all seeing COVID-19 pressure on our budgets, but now thanks to CHARLIE, we can build revenue from something we previously could not.”
City News Beat, Inc. is an early stage streaming video start-up, incubated here in the Triangle area in Cohort 11 @Launch Chapel Hill. The company spent 13 months in production and development, first initiating streaming operations in February, 2020 in time to stream the ACCHL Hockey Tournament on Roku and Amazon’s Fire TV. CHARLIE is responsible for streaming 10 local news apps for 5 US cities on 2 platforms.
Under the agreement, City News Beat will relaunch PackTV for Roku and build new Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV apps before the new semester begins. City News Beat’s CEO and Co-Founder, Greg Morey, described the scenario: ”We built CHARLIE as a way to connect local citizens without cable TV to their local communities. Competitive sports is one of those community connection points and NC State’s PackTV has greeted the idea of advertising supported video with open arms. We are extremely grateful for their selection and validation of our streaming television monetization platform – CHARLIE is hungry and ready to get started.”
Morey added: “Pack Fans are rabid for their teams, but COVID-19 is changing how consumers experience live events safely. CHARLIE streams at the pleasure of NC State University’s PackTV, their students, fans, alumni and the brands that support Wolfpack sports content. That support is creating an alternative method of funding for student teaching initiatives in Television production. That’s a Win-Win-Win.”
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WolfBytes Video Productions operates the campus cable television system, WolfTV, as well as produces content for NC State Television, PackTV, WolfBytes Television, and community radio station 88.1 WolfBytes Radio for the Office of Information Technology at North Carolina State University. WolfBytes offers a
range of affordable live streaming, video filming, production, editing, Web hosting and podcasting services for the NC State campus community. Staff includes student employees, professionally certified broadcast and video engineers, as well as instructors certified in Apple Final Cut, Apple Motion and DaVinci Resolve.
City News Beat, Inc. is an early stage streaming media company connecting local communities to their local news on streaming TV. City News Beat’s proprietary streaming platform, CHARLIE delivers Bay Area News Beat, Carolina News Beat, NYC News Beat, Seattle News Beat, and Tar Heel News Beat on Roku and Amazon Fire TV, with Chicago News Beat and Apple TV apps for all markets currently in production.
Launch-Chapel Hill, located in downtown Chapel Hill, is a unique collaborative investment by The University of North Carolina, the Town of Chapel Hill, and Orange County, North Carolina that leverages local and university resources to build a stronger entrepreneurial ecosystem in Chapel Hill, at UNC and across the Triangle region. Each year Launch-Chapel Hill accepts two cohorts of entrepreneurs committed to building their early stage businesses into self-sustaining enterprises. We accelerate Launch-Chapel Hill’s resident startups by providing founders with access to UNC’s network of subject matter experts, office space and certain technical resources necessary to achieve success or reduce the costs of failure.