NBC News Purchases Stringwire

Stringwire, a web service that enables live video streaming by broadcasters, was purchased by NBC News to try to compete with real-time, Internet-based news that’s often breaking faster than traditional networks can handle. Stringwire works by trawling Twitter for messages about breaking events, and sends an automatic tweet to that poster asking them to click a link and point their phone (or camera, as the case may be) at what they’re seeing. That video can then start streaming to NBC without any additional feedback. NBC says that the video submissions will be vetted like any other NBC material, but ultimately the goal is relying on crowd-sourced, live video streamed right into its control rooms to build out its coverage in a world increasingly used to interactive, quick-fire news.