NEW YORK/LONDON: Cheddar, a business news TV network that live-streams from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, has been broadcasting for just 18 months but it already has firm plans to expand into Europe.

The start-up, which was founded by Jon Steinberg, a former president of BuzzFeed, targets millennial viewers via digital platforms, such as Amazon, Facebook and YouTube, and claims to reach up to 300,000 viewers a day.

Speaking to The Times, Steinberg revealed that the company intends to set up a branch in London where a small team will start broadcasting by March 2018.

“It’s all about scale in media,” he said. “An important part of scale is international. It’s what makes Netflix much more valuable than HBO.”

Cheddar, which sees itself as a rival to CNBC and Bloomberg TV, has raised more than $30m to launch a second channel and it is also considering whether to move into sports news coverage.

Heavyweight business leaders, such as WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell and Discovery CEO David Zaslav, are among those who have appeared on the channel, which is also making moves into France after forming a partnership with Molotov, a French start-up which TechCrunch has described as one that is “defining the future of TV”.

TechCrunch reporter Romain Dillet said of the deal: “It is a smart partnership as Molotov is already available on many devices and now claims to have more than three million monthly active users just 16 months after its launch and seven months after reaching a million registered users.”

In addition to its expansion into European markets, Cheddar’s strategy is to focus on younger viewers who are genuinely interested in its content. In other words, targeted consumers of value to advertisers rather than a mass audience.

“I want to have all of the young people in their twenties and thirties that are interested in technology, media, innovation and entrepreneurship watching our content,” Steinberg told The Times.

“If that works out to half a million to a million a day, I would rather take that than ten million people watching a tomato explode.”

Sourced from The Times, TechCrunch; additional content by WARC staff