Navigating the changing local TV landscape to maximize monetization and growth
Navigating the changing local TV landscape to maximize monetization and growth
In a world increasingly dominated by global news cycles and digital platforms, the enduring relevance of local news remains a steadfast pillar of communities worldwide. Local news is a cornerstone of information, connecting neighbors, businesses, and events in a way that resonates deeply and uniquely with its loyal audience. Still, as the landscape of media consumption continues to evolve, so too must local news outlets adapt to ensure they continue to engage and serve their devoted followers effectively.
In this blog, we’ll look at the pivotal role of local news and explore innovative tools and strategies to enhance engagement among local TV viewers while creating opportunities for monetization. From introducing new ways for viewers to interact with their content to harnessing the power of viewer data and leveraging local loyalty, as well as introducing sponsored content and targeted ads based on viewer preferences, local broadcasters have numerous avenues to thrive in today’s increasingly digital and competitive landscape.
What Are the Major Challenges Currently Facing Local TV Broadcasters?
The landscape of media consumption is constantly shifting, driven by technological advancements and changing viewer behaviors. In 2024, the major hurdles local broadcasters need to overcome are the following:
The Rise in Desire For Interactive Content: Traditional TV consumption is waning, particularly among younger demographics, as interactive digital media gains momentum. In fact, according to a study by Deloitte in 2021, 84% of consumers aged 18-24 use a second screen while watching TV, indicating a desire for interactive content. This rings even more true in 2024, as viewers are no longer satisfied with passive content consumption and instead crave ways to engage and hold real-time discussions with other viewers.
Limited Viewer Data Access: Local TV broadcasters currently lack detailed insights into their demographics, relying on traditional methods like 3rd-party surveys and focus groups. This lack of viewer data restricts broadcasters from improving their user experience and tailoring their content to meet the needs and interests of their audience. Without accurate demographic information and insights into viewer behavior, broadcasters may find it challenging to make informed decisions about programming, scheduling, and content development.
Competition with National Broadcasters: Local broadcasters are constantly at risk of losing viewers to national broadcasters and third-party platforms. National broadcasters typically have greater resources and established platforms, posing a significant threat to local broadcasters’ market share. In other words, local broadcasters need to leverage their unique strength, namely the power of community, or risk losing their viewers to larger broadcasters. According to Nielsen, national broadcast networks capture approximately 70% of prime-time viewership, leaving local broadcasters to compete for the remaining 30%.
So, What Can Local Broadcasters Do to Stay Competitive?
In the face of these challenges, local TV broadcasters need to embrace innovation and reinvent their approach to content delivery. Simply replicating traditional broadcast models on digital platforms will not suffice. Instead, broadcasters must prioritize interactivity, personalization, community-building and engagement to truly resonate with modern audiences.
Introduce Ways to Engage with Their Content in Real-Time: From live polls and viewer Q&A sessions to immersive storytelling formats, interactive features have the power to transform passive viewers into active participants, fostering a sense of community and connection. By embracing interactive technologies, local TV broadcasters can differentiate themselves from digital competitors and create compelling, immersive experiences that captivate audiences.
Leverage Engagement Tools to Gather Crucial Viewer Data: By integrating engagement tools that viewers can interact with while enjoying live coverage of local news stories, local broadcasters can not only enhance viewer engagement but also gather crucial viewer data insights specific to their community’s interests and concerns. Features like live polls asking about community issues, trivia quizzes about local history or events, and real-time chat capabilities for viewers to share their perspectives provide broadcasters with valuable insights into viewer preferences, behaviors, and demographics within their local area. This data can inform content decisions tailored to the unique interests and needs of the local audience, improve user experiences by delivering relevant and engaging news coverage, and ultimately drive audience growth for the local news program.
Lean on the Power of Loyalty in a Local Community: Local TV broadcasters have a unique advantage in their connection to the local community. By fostering loyalty and building trust among viewers, broadcasters can solidify their position as a trusted source of news and information. This can be achieved through community outreach initiatives, partnerships with local organizations, and tailored content that reflects the interests and values of the local audience. According to a report by the Pew Research Center, 77% of Americans feel a strong connection to their local community and are more likely to engage with content that reflects local interests and issues. By tapping into the power of community loyalty, local broadcasters can strengthen their relationship with viewers and ensure long-term success in an increasingly competitive media landscape.
How Do These Efforts Affect Monetization?
Introducing new engagement tools helps local broadcasters remain competitive and expand their viewership, leading to significant potential for monetization.
These community-building tools directly impact user retention and session duration, leading to more advertising and sponsored content consumption. In other words, longer sessions and increased retention translate to higher ad revenue, as advertisers are willing to invest more in platforms that attract and retain engaged audiences. Moreover, enhanced engagement exposes users to a greater number of ads and sponsored content placements strategically integrated into the platform. As users interact with community features, they naturally encounter these advertising opportunities, increasing their value to advertisers.
Additionally, the data collected through these engagement tools provides broadcasters with valuable insights into user preferences and behaviors, enabling them to optimize ad placements and sponsorship deals. Leveraging this data-driven approach, broadcasters can tailor their monetization strategies, offering personalized subscription options and attracting new sponsors/partnerships based on comprehensive traffic metrics and user data.
Ultimately, the integration of engagement tools enhances the user experience while unlocking diverse revenue streams, ensuring the long-term profitability and sustainability of local broadcasting platforms.
Empowering Local TV Broadcasters With LiveLike’s Interactive Toolkit
As local broadcasters in the 21st century look to evolve their traditional format, they need the right tools that will infuse interactivity, personalization, and targeted content into their platforms to drive engagement among viewers. And they need look no further than the LiveLike Audience Engagement Suite. By integrating LiveLike’s suite of engagement tools, local broadcasters can not only bridge the gap between traditional broadcasting and digital interactivity but also transform their content into immersive, personalized experiences.
With features such as live polls, trivia quizzes, real-time chat capabilities, and loyalty rewards systems, broadcasters can foster deeper audience engagement, capture valuable data insights, and unlock new revenue opportunities. By embracing LiveLike, local TV broadcasters can not only survive but thrive in an era of unprecedented change, securing their relevance and success in the digital age.
The 21st century presents an era of change for the local TV broadcasting industry, presenting both challenges and opportunities for those willing to adapt. As viewer expectations evolve and digital platforms reshape the media landscape, broadcasters need to embrace innovation, experimentation, and a relentless focus on audience engagement. By harnessing the power of data-driven insights, emerging technologies, community-building and interactive content formats, local TV broadcasters can not only survive but thrive in an era of unparalleled transformation.
The time to act is now—to reimagine the future of local television and secure its place in the hearts and minds of viewers for generations to come.
Get in touch to learn more about activity feeds-as-a-service or to find out how LiveLike can enhance your platform experience.
The LiveLike Audience Engagement Suite is a finalist in the region's leading broadcast technology awards, recognising the fan engagement platform's work with sports broadcasters and rights holders
New York, July 31 - LiveLike, the fan engagement platform used by sports broadcasters, streaming services and rights holders worldwide, has been shortlisted for Best in Sports at the BroadcastPro ME Manufacturer Awards 2026 for the LiveLike Audience Engagement Suite.
The awards recognise product innovation, engineering excellence and technology development across the broadcast ecosystem. Finalists were selected across 21 broadcast and satellite categories following industry-wide voting and review by an independent panel of experts. Winners will be announced on Tuesday 6 October 2026 at The Westin Dubai Mina Seyahi Beach Resort & Marina in Dubai, UAE.
The Audience Engagement Suite gives broadcasters and rights holders a way to build interactive experiences directly into their streams and owned platforms - predictions, quizzes, live chat, rewards, loyalty programmes and community hubs - without assembling separate point solutions for each one. Every interaction feeds a single evolving profile of the fan, which the platform then uses to personalise what that fan is offered next.
That combination is the argument LiveLike has been making across the industry this year. Fan engagement has been mischaracterised as a set of features layered onto a broadcast, when the durable value sits underneath: the behavioural graph that every interaction contributes to, and the AI layer operating on top of it. LiveLike's AI layer, Genie, now runs a growing share of the programmes the company operates on behalf of clients, moving the work from manual content management toward automated orchestration.
The Middle East and North Africa is one of the most active regions in the world for this shift. Major tournament rights, rapid growth in sports streaming and rising expectations around second-screen and in-stream interaction have made direct-to-fan engagement a commercial priority for broadcasters across the region rather than an experiment.
"Fan engagement gets treated as a set of features bolted onto a broadcast, and we've never seen it that way," said Miheer Walavalkar, co-founder and CEO of LiveLike. "What we build sits underneath the experience. There are the surfaces fans actually touch, and then there is the profile of that fan which gets sharper every time they touch one. The second part is the part that compounds, and it's the reason a broadcaster can keep getting more out of the platform in year three than they did in year one."
"Being shortlisted in a category assessed by the people who operate live sport in this region carries weight," he added. "They know the difference between something that demos well and something that holds up on a match night."
Sports organisations have spent decades refining three core revenue streams: direct fan spend, media rights, and sponsorship. The playbook is well understood. What is less understood, and far less developed, is the data infrastructure that connects those streams to each other and to the fans who power all of them.
Most organisations know they are sitting on significant amounts of fan data. Ticketing systems, CRM platforms, social channels, digital content interactions: the signals are there. But in the vast majority of cases, that data sits in disconnected silos, producing consulting reports rather than actionable intelligence. The result is a fragmented picture of the fan - one that limits commercial potential across every revenue line.
On a recent episode of Future of Fandom, LiveLike CEO and co-founder Miheer Walavalkar sat down with Aidan Cooney, CEO of Envision Sport Group and co-founder of Opta, to unpack this problem in detail. Cooney has spent 25 years building data and fan intelligence businesses across football, cricket, tennis, and rugby. His perspective on unified fan data, the shift from B2B to B2C thinking, and the convergence of sponsorship and performance marketing offers a practical framework for any organisation trying to move beyond fragmented data toward genuine sports intelligence.
From performance data to fan data: the Opta origin story
Cooney's career started with a simple hypothesis. In the late 1990s, football's status as the world's biggest sport came with surprisingly thin storytelling. Broadcasts offered a scoreline, occasional possession graphics, and goalscorer information. American sports, by contrast, had long used statistics to bring audiences closer to the action.
"If you give fans a higher-resolution understanding of what's happening on the pitch, you bring them closer to the sport they love," Cooney explained. That principle drove the creation of Opta, which transformed how football was analysed, discussed, and consumed. The OptaJoe account became a case study in sports data storytelling, building a following of hundreds of thousands across media, journalism, and the broader sports industry.
But Opta was fundamentally about what happened on the pitch. The return path - how fans reacted to that information and what their behaviour revealed - became the foundation for everything Cooney built next: Ellipse Data, InCrowd, and ultimately Cortex.
The difference between a customer data platform and a fan data platform
One of the most important distinctions Cooney drew in the conversation is the gap between conventional customer data platforms and what a fan data platform actually needs to do. Standard CDPs are designed for rational, price-sensitive purchasers. A fan is something else entirely.
"A fan wants to belong. They're passionate about the player or the team they support. The data that matters to you is very different from a purely rational, transactional data proposition," Cooney said.
The implication is that transactional data - which most sports organisations have invested in through ticketing CRM - is necessary but insufficient. Behavioural data is where the real value sits: how a fan reacts to a particular piece of content, when they react, whether content about a specific player activates more engagement than content about the team as a whole. This is the layer that informs personalisation, shapes content strategy, and ultimately creates trackable, monetizable assets for brand partnerships.
Cooney's platform, Cortex, is designed specifically for this purpose: unifying transactional and behavioural data into a single fan data platform that can activate across channels. LiveLike's engagement and gamification tools then sit on top of that foundation, turning data into community and interaction into measurable value.
The silo problem and why unification comes first
When asked about the most common mistakes sports organisations make with their data, Cooney's answer was immediate: silos.
"Very few organisations have a true single view of their fan base. That is the starting point for everything." Some silos are functional, built by design for specific use cases like ticket sales. Others are structural, created by the relationship between leagues and clubs or by the patchwork of technology vendors an organisation has accumulated over time.
The cost of these silos is not abstract. Without a unified single view, organisations cannot connect their content strategy to their commercial strategy. They cannot attribute sponsorship value to specific fan interactions. They cannot retarget fans who engaged with a poll, a vote, or a piece of branded content. Every disconnected system represents lost compounding value.
Cooney's prescription is direct: "You can't activate until you unify." And the use cases for doing so - from personalised content delivery to integrated brand campaigns - are available now in ways they were not five or even three years ago.
Sponsorship, media, and the hybrid model
One of the most commercially significant ideas in the conversation was Cooney's framing of the convergence between sponsorship and performance marketing. Sponsorship, in its traditional form, has not fundamentally changed since Mark McCormack and Arnold Palmer in the 1960s. It remains an awareness play, hard to attribute, and increasingly constrained as a share of total brand marketing spend.
Performance marketing budgets, by contrast, are growing rapidly. Social media ads, YouTube pre-rolls, programmatic buying: brands are spending heavily on audience acquisition through channels that offer clear attribution. The problem for sports properties is that these two budget pools rarely connect.
"If you create a more diverse set of assets and present them as an integrated media plan, you open up new budget areas within brands," Cooney argued. The opportunity for rights holders is to bridge that gap by combining the premium, trust-based qualities of sponsorship with the attribution model of performance marketing.
In practice, this looks like branded content paired with interactive fan experiences - polls, votes, and predictions that generate first-party data - which can then be used for retargeting and attribution. LiveLike's interactive tools are designed to create exactly these kinds of measurable, brand-integrated fan touchpoints that produce both engagement data and commercial inventory.
AI, personalisation, and the crawl-walk-run path
Both Cooney and Walavalkar addressed the promise and the practical limits of AI-driven fan personalisation. The long-term vision is clear: AI that can serve individual fans with content, offers, and experiences tailored to their specific behaviours and preferences. The economics and infrastructure to do this at true 1-to-1 scale, Walavalkar noted, are still being worked out across every industry.
The pragmatic starting point is cohort-based personalisation. Group fans by location, by behavioural patterns captured in your fan data platform, by engagement tendencies during comebacks or winning streaks. Let cohorts emerge dynamically from the data rather than relying on predefined segments.
"By putting the fan at the centre and serving them at the cohort level, you improve the fan experience, which drives up engagement levels, which drives up the value of the inventory you create on the back of it," Cooney said. "If you then take it to the next level and use AI to super-serve the individual, you drive that engagement and value further."
The compounding logic here is critical. Organisations that delay building cohort-based personalisation while waiting for perfect 1-to-1 capabilities lose years of compounding value - both in fan engagement and in commercial inventory quality.
The B2C shift and why it matters now
Cooney's overarching thesis is that sports organisations are fundamentally B2B businesses today, structured around selling rights to broadcasters and sponsorship packages to brands. The future is B2C: direct, data-informed relationships with fans that create value for both the organisation and its brand partners.
This does not necessarily mean streaming video direct to fans - a path Cooney sees as extremely difficult given the sophistication of existing broadcasters. It means building digital properties that offer genuine value to fans, capturing the behavioural data those interactions generate, and using that data to create a fan balance sheet that reflects the true economic potential of the audience.
"The whole original idea, that the fan base becomes a real balance sheet item, becomes a reality," Cooney said. "And that balance sheet isn't just about the lifetime value of the fan to the sports organisation directly. It's about lifetime value, plus the opportunity for brands to invest in that person over the duration of their fandom."
Listen to the full episode
Hear the full conversation between Aidan Cooney and Miheer Walavalkar on Future of Fandom:
A unified single view of the fan is the prerequisite for every commercial use case in sport, yet most organisations still operate with fragmented data silos.
Fan data platforms differ from standard CDPs because fan behaviour is emotional, making behavioural signals more commercially valuable than transactional data alone.
The convergence of sponsorship and performance marketing opens access to larger brand budgets, but only if rights holders can offer integrated media plans with measurable, interactive assets.
Cohort-based personalisation is the practical starting point for AI-driven fan engagement - delaying it sacrifices years of compounding value in engagement and revenue.
Organisations that treat their fan base as a balance sheet asset - and build the data infrastructure to
LiveLike, the digital fan engagement platform, is powering eight confirmed World Cup activations spanning North America, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, marking the company's largest simultaneous global deployment to date. The activations cover a cross-section of the sports media ecosystem, from major broadcasters and OTT platforms to payment providers and national football associations.
The deployments demonstrate LiveLike's capacity to operate at tournament scale, handling concurrent traffic spikes across time zones as billions of fans follow the world's most-watched sporting event. Activations range from prediction games (Play Predictor+) and loyalty leaderboards to trivia, squad selectors, community features, and gamified rewards programs - reflecting a broader industry shift toward interactive, data-driven engagement as rights holders look to convert passive audiences into identifiable, loyal fans.
Clients include CazeTV in Brazil, where a prediction game with their sponsor iFood is expected to generate record platform traffic, and Minute Media's Sports Illustrated, which is running a full-tournament match predictor covering every stage of the competition on its global digital platform. Additional activations are live with a leading European broadcaster operating a multi-event FanZone with gamification and a rewards shop, and a global payments company deploying wallet-based loyalty and leaderboard campaigns across Latin America.
The FA (Football Association) is using LiveLike to support its World Cup engagement strategy, while one of the largest North American and European sports media groups is using LiveLike’s whole tech stack in various ways across the world (Community, Mini-games, engagement etc…). SBS, Australia's public broadcast service has launched a complete match center experience, combining official World Cup Statistics & engagement widgets.
The scale of deployment reflects a deliberate infrastructure approach. LiveLike's platform is built to absorb the kind of unpredictable, high-volume engagement spikes that define knockout tournament football, where a single goal can trigger millions of simultaneous interactions across dozens of markets.
"The World Cup is the one event where everything has to work everywhere at once. There is no quiet period, no soft launch, no second chance," said Miheer Walavalkar, CEO and Co-Founder of LiveLike. "What we are seeing across these eight activations is proof that our platform does exactly what we built it to do: give every broadcaster, every rights holder, and every platform the tools to turn passive viewers into active fans, at whatever scale the moment demands."
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