Bloomberg Expanding Its Quicktake Streamer to Documentary and Celebrity Shows

Bloomberg’s 24/7 business-news streamer Quicktake is off to a quick start — from zero to 7.4 million monthly average users within four months of launch — and is already planning a lineup of documentary and celebrity-hosted shows to compete for primetime viewers.

Quicktake launched in December 2017 on Twitter as a younger, hipper, consumer-focused companion for  the more markets-focused Bloomberg TV and made the leap to streaming TV platforms like Roku and Amazon Fire TV in November 2020. The streamer has made a handful of docuseries like Business of Sports and Future of Work and is prepping a higher-profile weeknight lineup.

“We’ll make some announcements later in the spring of some shows,” Bloomberg’s Jean Ellen Cowgill said in an interview with Decider. “We’ll have some recognizable leaders in business and sports and other areas who can bring a following to the channel and have conversations around the big issues for our audience.”

Cowgill is the general manager of Bloomberg Quicktake and Bloomberg’s global head of new ventures. She sat down with Decider to talk about Quicktake’s quick ascent as a streaming outlet.

DECIDER: When you look out across streaming news outlets like NBC News Now, ABC News Live, Cheddar, etc., are you competing for the same viewers or different viewers?

JEAN ELLEN COWGILL: Some of those outlets are going for a broader, general-interest audience where we’re covering tech, media, sports, lifestyle, etc., from a business angle. From our audience research, there’s a cohort of rising business professionals who want an unbiased, fact-based, compelling news channel that takes a business-minded approach to what’s happening in the world.

We see the business lens as a niche that we can own and bring our creativity to particularly in the documentary space. The people we talk to in our research love the documentary programming they’re seeing on Netflix and HBO, but they don’t see those things coming out at the pace the news is moving. For our prime-time programming, we want to do some documentary and talent-driven programming that is focused on the issues of the day.

For documentary content, how much are you thinking about how TV platforms recommend titles — if you liked McMillions on HBO, you’ll like this Quicktake series?

One benefit from being part of a larger company is that we have a global distribution team that has relationships with traditional carriers and platforms. Over the past year with people spending more time at home and more time getting recommendations from their TV platform, we’re seeing how important that can be as a discovery tool for our programming.

So you’re developing documentary programming that will be more current than what you see on Netflix or HBO but still documentary-style and not things that will anchored live?

Right, and those things will be available in a number of places. Those titles will be available on the Quicktake livestream. They’ll be on demand on platforms that have on-demand content. They’ll be available on YouTube and bloomberg.com. We’ll have short versions of these shows on Twitter and Instagram. If you like one of these shows, we want to make it easy for you to find it.

Ina Garten and Melissa McCarthy have a show on Discovery+ called Cocktails and Tall Tales, and Stanley Tucci is touring Italy for CNN. Are you moving in that direction?

Exactly. To be clear, though, we do not have Ina Garten or Melissa McCarthy or Stanley Tucci. [Laughs.] We’re looking at exactly those kinds of known names to bring credibility in their field to a bigger conversation about what’s going on in the world.

These will be lifestyle-ish business shows?

That’s right.

Did you launch Bloomberg Quicktake as a younger version of Bloomberg News?

Bloomberg Television is focused on our core financial audience, which is people who use the Bloomberg Terminal and want to go in depth on markets and financial coverage. Bloomberg Quicktake is focused on business-interested consumers. We think of Quicktake as our second global news network.

Another way to look at Bloomberg Quicktake is in conjunction with the expansion of bloomberg.com. The Bloomberg Terminal is very focused on the financial audience, and bloomberg.com is focused on a much broader business audience. Bloomberg Quicktake is a video expression of bloomberg.com and helps us reach a rising generation of business leaders.

Quicktake’s Twitter account has 1.2 million followers. How did you grow that?

We launched what is now Quicktake in December 2017 as a unique partnership with Twitter. We were the first 24/7, global, Twitter-focused news network. From the start, a Bloomberg team based in New York, London and Hong Kong published short videos specifically for the Twitter audience.

Did Quicktake start mainly as a brand-builder for Bloomberg News?

We monetized the content from the start and put preroll ad spots in front of those videos, and — more broadly — we recognized an opportunity to reach business-minded consumers, professionals and rising leaders on Twitter where they consume a lot of news.

Bloomberg TV is distributed mainly on local cable carriers like Comcast and Charter, right?

Bloomberg TV started as a more traditional cable channel and has expanded to streaming as Bloomberg TV+, which is a 4K experienced with additional charts, graphs, etc.

Are you looking to put Quicktake on those cable and streaming platforms?

We are. We’re focused on building out our streaming, and we’re looking too at traditional carriage. We want to be on all of the platforms where we can reach our audience. Bloomberg TV and Quicktake serve distinct audiences with complementary programming, and we want to bring both of them to the platforms where people are watching TV and video.

Does Quicktake primarily use Bloomberg’s own reporters and analysts in news coverage?

Bloomberg’s 2,700 journalists and analysts are a major asset for us. We have reporters around the world who can share their reporting, and we have relationships in business and tech and policy that we can bring onto Quicktake as newsmakers.

Where are you finding new viewers on streaming? Do viewers discover you on social and follow you to streaming, or are they discovering you on streaming?

Samsung TV+ was one of our original TV partners when we launched in November, and we’ve been doing a lot of marketing with Samsung around that. We also think our social channels are a huge advantage for brand awareness. We have a big presence on Twitter, which is a place where a lot of news breaks, and we’ve seen big growth of our YouTube audience.

Scott Porch writes about the TV business for Decider. He is a contributing writer for The Daily Beast and a podcast producer for Starburns Audio. Follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.