Al Roker, host of NBC’s The Today Show and winner of 13 Emmys, is moving his 35-year career in a digital direction with the launch of Roker Media, targeting live-streaming platforms. Clive Whittingham reports.

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Al Roker

How would you sum up the key changes in the media industry over your 35-year career?
In some ways, it has changed dramatically, but in others it hasn’t. Social media has obviously impacted the news cycle and entertainment programming. Now you have co-viewing, two-screen viewing and in news you have multiple feeds of the same event with user-generated content.
But in some ways, it hasn’t changed. People still want to get their news, information and entertainment from people they know. There may be influencers and YouTubers but they come and go at such a rapid pace. The people who remain are the folks that people make an effort to let into their homes – the morning show hosts, the local news anchors.

How has this changed the way stories are told?
Stories are more immediate and social media plays into that. Everybody is sold on new media as if that’s the only way to do it now, but if that’s the case, why are there more than 450 scripted shows available on network, cable, and streaming platforms? Isn’t it interesting that at the same time as people are looking to SnapChat, Facebook Live, Twitter and other social media for small bites, binge-viewing of quality television is also up?

How is your production company, Al Roker Entertainment, adapting to this?
We are planning to move into scripted television and kids’ animated programming. We’re still in the wheelhouse of reality and documentary-based programming, but we’re expanding into scripted fairly quickly. It’s competitive, but we’re trying to go to places others haven’t – more traditional, less edgy, but programming we know works.

How are you taking advantage of new financing models that are available to producers?
We’re working a lot in branded entertainment. It’s like everything old is new again, and we’re going back to the future. There used to be the Colgate Comedy Hour on NBC at a time when different sponsors were responsible for programming. If you strip away the sponsor it will still be quality television – a sponsor is wasting their money if the programme bangs the viewer over the head with their product. Less is more in that respect.

Roker Media, which you launched last year, is much more focused on digital. What are the aims for that venture?
Live streaming on social platforms can be the next big thing. You can’t just be live for live’s sake, but you can create compelling programming in a shorter form. We did an experiment with Amazon’s gaming platform, Twitch, with Justin Wilson, a terrific gamer but also a chef, and created a daily two-hour broadcast. Again, it was a throwback to an old format where a talk show host would tell you what he would be making the day after and you bought the ingredients and cooked with him.
Is audience measurement struggling to keep up with the pace of change?
We’ve partnered with a company called Delmondo that has developed ground-breaking, cutting-edge, propriety data gathering so we can go to an advertiser and say this is who is watching and for how long. As we’ve seen with a couple of different platforms recently, numbers can be very inflated. Right now, nobody quite knows what they’re buying or who’s watching.

What challenge faces traditional television in 2017?
The challenge is the same as it’s always been: aggregate the biggest audience in the most efficient and cost-effective way. People say traditional TV is dead, then along comes This Is Us, where there is no nudity, no profanity, it’s on a broadcast network, the entire family can watch together. It’s just a solid, well-written show.
The Thanksgiving Day Parade got its highest viewing figures in 13 years, the tree-lighting at the Rockerfeller did its best number in six years. Vinyl is back, film is back, print is back, people are responding to throwbacks – in this age of information overload there is something comforting about ‘old school.’ ABC did well this summer with three old format gameshows. Everybody always assumes new technology will kill off old technology, but it never happens. Digital was supposed to kill off television and yet there are 450 new scripted series every year.