LeadStory: Watching the News at 65 MPH
In the 1920s, entrepreneurs combined two emerging technologies – the automobile and broadcast radio. Original car radio receivers were bulky and expensive, but well worth the price for the revolutionary experience of listening to the radio while rattling down the road in your Ford Motor A.
A hundred years later, we are amid another revolution: It’s predicted that 95% of all vehicles on the road will be connected to the internet - also known as “connected cars” - by 2030. This means the options for in-car information and entertainment are exploding and, if your car is autonomous, will soon include watching streaming video while your car drives itself.
This is where LeadStory, Glen Nelson Center’s most recent Horizon Fund investment, comes in. LeadStory is a personalized news streaming platform optimized for connected cars and smart TVs. They are already inking deals with major car manufacturers to provide local, national, and international news content directly to your car – news that will appear as video when your car is autonomous and switch seamlessly to audio-only when a human is driving.
LeadStory was founded in Sydney, Australia in 2021 by Cameron Price, a career TV journalist, and software engineer Cheyne Wallace. Price’s journalistic background provided him with firsthand knowledge of the immense challenges that journalism is facing today.
“After a decade and a half as a news reporter an anchor, I saw the change in consumption habits in our audience, including the rise of news avoidance,” said Price. “LeadStory gives the audience control over what they want to watch and don’t want to watch, driving revenue from multiple screen ecosystems back to our selection of news partners.”
LeadStory already distributes TV channels across the Asia-Pacific region, Europe, the UK, and Latin America through a global distribution deal with Samsung TV Plus. They have a worldwide ecosystem of paid content partners, securing deals with companies like CNN, CNBC, Reuters, and Network Ten that currently attracts more than eight million monthly viewers across Europe, APAC, South-East Asia and LATAM. LeadStory will also deliver the first personalized TV news channel to U.S. audiences in early 2025.
Building on this success, LeadStory will shortly announce partnerships that will feature their app on the dashboard of multiple, major automakers delivering content to millions of drivers and passengers globally.
“Drive-time will always be critical to public radio,” said Jeff Freeland Nelson, executive director of Glen Nelson Center. “Our LeadStory investment will help us stay ahead of this technological disruption and help us ensure high-quality local journalism maintains a major presence in connected cars.”
Stay tuned for more news about LeadStory and other Horizon Fund investments.
