Brief:

• NBC News on Wednesday debuted the first daily news show on Snapchat's Discover platform. "Stay Tuned," the twice-daily program anchored by the news outlet's Gadi Schwartz and MSNBC reporter Savannah Sellers will cover national and international news, politics and pop culture among other topics, according to NBC.
• Andrew Springer, an executive producer at NBC News who used to work at Mashable, leads a 30-person team that will create three-minute shows each weekday at 7 a.m. and 4 p.m., in addition to a weekend show. They also plan to cover breaking news throughout the day with short clips.
• NBC News parent company NBCUniversal invested $500 million in Snap, the parent company of the mobile image-messaging service that went public in March. NBC has run entertainment programming on Snapchat, including The Voice, World of Dance, E!'s The Rundown and Saturday Night Live.

Insight:

In its latest effort, NBC News seeks to reach a younger audience through Snapchat, whose 166 million users worldwide are mostly millennials. The median age of an NBC News viewer is 54, compared with Snapchat's core audience of 18- to 24-year-olds, Mashable reported.

NBC News is supplying programming that's customized for Snapchat's vertical video format instead of simply re-purposing other content. This also demonstrates the news outlet's effort to cater to consumers' shifting media consumption habits.

For Snapchat, its recent push to provide news programming is another way to engage its audience as Instagram seeks to lure younger viewers with features that mimic Snapchat's. The platform needs to build steady viewership right away as it diversifies its tools and content beyond the original function of delivering messages that disappear after several seconds. The company isn't bound to have NBC as its exclusive supplier of programming, which leaves the door open to potential partnerships with other major networks to supply shows to the app.

The biggest drop in TV viewing last year was among teenagers, a key audience for Snapchat. They watched 13 hours and 54 minutes of traditional TV a week in Q4 2016, an 11% decline from the year before and a 38% drop from five years ago, according to data by Nielsen. As broadcast TV struggles to find its next generation of loyal viewers, several major mobile-first companies like Snapchat are leveraging this shift in TV viewing and trying to harness younger audiences by experimenting with original programming.

Snapchat's most popular original show, "The Rundown," by entertainment news network E!, averages about 7 million viewers a week — half the audience of the top-rated show on broadcast TV, CBS's "The Big Bang Theory" with 14 million viewers, CNBC reported. Snapchat claims viewership for its political show "Good Luck America" grew 53% between the first and second seasons but didn't disclose specific audience sizes.