Launch a 24/7 local news channel app for your city, without a broadcaster's budget

A version of this message lands in our inbox often: someone wants to cover the news in their city, on their own app, and wants to know what else belongs in it once it's live. It's a good question, because the honest answer isn't just "start streaming." It's what to build so a channel with one or two people behind it can still run 24 hours a day, and what to add once it does. Here's the practical version, including how people solve this today without a dedicated platform.

Published 22 September 2026 · My TV Channel

What a city news channel needs on day one

Strip away the equipment lists and studio talk, and a city news channel needs exactly two things. A way to go live when something is happening, and a way to keep the channel running when nobody is. Almost every question we get about "what else should I add" is really a question about the second one, because the first is the easy part: point a phone at yourself, or plug in a camera, and you're live.

The second part is where most one- or two-person newsrooms stall out. Nobody can staff a live feed for 24 hours. The channel still has to be there at 3 a.m., on a day nothing happened, for the one viewer who opens the app anyway. That's a scheduling problem, not a production problem, and it has a specific answer covered below.

You also don't need much to start. Inside the app, a channel needs four videos and fifteen minutes of ready content before it's allowed to launch. That bar exists so a channel never opens to dead air, and it's low on purpose: four short clips (a weather rundown, a headlines recap, an interview, yesterday's bulletin) clears it.

How people do this today without a dedicated platform

None of this is invented from nothing. Independent local news already travels through several paths that weren't built for the job, and it's worth being honest about what each one gets right before making the case for something purpose-built.

WhatsApp and Telegram broadcast lists

In much of Latin America and Spain, this is the default, not the exception. Pamplonews built a genuinely large hyperlocal audience in Spain this way, and outlets such as Correio Sabiá in Brazil and Chilango in Mexico use WhatsApp broadcast lists and channels specifically because that's where the audience already is. It costs nothing and the reach is real. What it doesn't give you: live video, a schedule, an ad product a local business can buy into, or an app with your name on it. It's a message list, not a channel, and independent outlets in the region report real friction getting Meta's own verification for a WhatsApp Channel at any real scale.

Facebook Live and YouTube Live

Also free, also instantly familiar to viewers. The catch is that you're a post in somebody else's feed. The platform's algorithm decides who sees it, there's no scheduled channel a viewer can just tune into the way they would a TV station, and the platform keeps whatever share of the ad revenue its rules say it keeps.

Dedicated live-streaming platforms

Services such as Boxcast (streaming plans from roughly $19 to $119+ a month), Dacast (from $29 a month, with bandwidth overage billed on top) and Castr (from around $16 to $20 a month, up to $200+ for OTT-app tiers) are real streaming infrastructure, and closer to what a news operation needs than a social feed is. But they're priced and built for production teams pushing content they've already made, not specifically for a 24/7 channel bundled with a mobile app, community chat and a monetization model aimed at local advertisers. It's still a monthly bill before you've proven the channel works.

The format to aim for: NewsON

NewsON, owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, is the clearest example of what a mature local-news app looks like: live and on-demand newscasts from more than 285 local TV station partners across 165+ U.S. markets, free, ad-supported, with up to 48 hours of replay. It's a good north star for the format, live plus a replay window plus ads, but it's an aggregator of existing, already-licensed broadcast stations. A new city operator without a TV license can't get listed on it. It shows you the shape of the destination; it isn't a way to get there.

Turn one bulletin into a full day of programming

This is the part that actually solves the 24/7 problem, and it's simpler than it sounds.

Go live for your bulletin, whenever your team can actually produce it, once a day is enough to start. When it ends, that recording is a video like any other in your library. Add it to the channel's rotation, and Smart Scheduling (weighted or manual) plays it back through the day and overnight, until tomorrow's bulletin replaces it. One hour of live production turns into a full day of programming, without anyone at a desk between broadcasts.

Two smaller features carry more weight for a news channel than they might look like on a feature list:

• Start Over: a viewer who opens the app mid-bulletin can restart it from the top rather than catching only the tail end.
• Offline Downloads: a bulletin saved for later plays without needing a connection at that moment. That matters more for a city audience than for a niche entertainment channel, since local viewers are more likely to be dealing with patchy data or an older phone.

What to add once you're live

Once the core loop is running, here's what turns "a news channel exists" into "a news channel people come back to."

Community Chat

Connect a Discord server and viewers get a live chat overlay right on the video player during breaking coverage. It's the same energy as a local Facebook group's comment section during a storm or an election, except it's attached to your channel instead of living inside someone else's platform.

Ad Management

Local news has sold advertising to local businesses for as long as local news has existed, this just gives it a modern pipe: pre-roll and mid-roll spots through HLS interstitials, plus pause ads on iOS and macOS. It's the most familiar revenue model to pitch a city's own businesses, because they've already bought it from local radio and TV for decades.

Pay-Per-View and subscriptions

Gate the coverage worth paying for, an election night or a big investigation, behind subscriber codes, or run an ongoing subscriber tier. Connect Stripe, PayPal or another provider directly.

Live Quizzes

A lightweight way to keep an audience engaged during a broadcast: a local trivia segment, a "name this landmark" round, anything that gets a phone-in-hand viewer to answer instead of scrolling away.

Every screen your city already owns

The same channel reaches iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV, plus Roku, Fire TV and the web, without building any of that separately. For a city audience, that matters more than it sounds: it means the channel shows up on the TV already in the living room, not just on a phone.

Picking the right plan for a news operation

One detail is worth knowing before you pick a tier: weighted random scheduling is fine for a music or clips channel, but a news rundown usually wants to run at a fixed time, not whenever the rotation lands on it. That's Manual Schedule, and it's only available from the Pro tier up.

Start on Starter or Creator to prove the format works with real viewers. Move to Pro once you want your bulletin pinned to an exact time instead of rotating in randomly.

Step by step: launch this week

1. Download My TV Channel for iPhone, iPad or Mac, it's free.
2. Create a location-based channel named for your city.
3. Add four starter clips, fifteen minutes total is the minimum: a headlines recap, weather, an interview, anything that establishes the channel before you go live.
4. Go live for your first real bulletin.
5. Add the recording to your rotation so it replays through the day and overnight.
6. Connect Discord, turn on ads, and set up subscriber codes once the channel has a rhythm, not before.

FAQ

Sources

• NewsON, About. Station partner count, market count and replay window.
• Audiencers, on Pamplonews. WhatsApp-based hyperlocal news in Spain.
• LatAm Journalism Review, Knight Center. WhatsApp Channels among independent Latin American outlets, including Correio Sabiá and Chilango, and verification friction.
• BoxCast, Pricing. Streaming plan pricing range.
• Dacast, Pricing. Starter plan pricing and bandwidth overage.
• Castr, Pricing. Live streaming plan pricing range.

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