‘Meet the Press’ host Chuck Todd reports from the frontlines of TV news’s shift to streaming

The Digiday Podcast

NBC News’s “Meet the Press” is the longest-running show on TV. For the program to remain relevant in the streaming era, it needs to appeal to people who are not tuning in to traditional TV. This notion is not lost on the show’s host Chuck Todd, who also anchors “Meet the Press Reports,” a streaming-only series that debuted on NBCUniversal’s Peacock in September.

However, Todd also saw an opportunity to seize streaming as a means of stretching beyond the limitations of a linear time slot and doing deeper coverage of topics like voting rights and climate change.

“It’s not as if we didn’t have a desire to [cover those topics more in-depth]. We just run out of linear bandwidth,” Todd said in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.

“Meet the Press Reports” is part of a larger trend at NBC News — as well as other TV news organizations — to make streaming more of a centerpiece in their strategies, rather than a supplement to traditional TV.

“When Peacock consolidated everything, they don’t have someone separate trying to find TV shows for the broadcast [network] and then TV shows for Peacock, right? It’s the same. We’ve got all these platforms, but it’s one entity. The news division is now moving in that direction,” Todd said.