Sounds like a good idea. It'd be a lot cheaper to do in text (and wouldn't require any technology that didn't exist in 2000); has anyone done it? If not, why not? If so, what happened? Does making it video greatly change the value proposition?
The infrastructure cost of it is a barrier. One has to understand the 'news' is "the highest value video production out there next to porn" [1], you take a producer, a camera person, and a talking head, and you record what you see.
And to the text only question, efforts using text have not been successful, people seem to prefer to consume it as video or audio when doing something else. The goal is to disrupt Fox, not the Chronicle, you need to do it in a way that the average person has very little friction between wanting to know 'what's happening' and getting the news. They have been voting 'video' by their consumption habits to date.
Most of the efforts I've seen that have started along here have chickened out when it came to being the network vs being a repackager. They spend a weekend writing a server that repackages the AP feed and maybe reads it aloud. But the editorial voice is pretty important for this endeavor. You really do need to be the news organization.
The other barrier is that the 'value chain', which is to say the way in which news is monetized is very well understood and so you cannot succeed by being another 'channel' to get to the same stuff someone else has, if you are successful they cut you off from the content. Or if you leverage someone else's network they cut you off from the bandwidth. So you either have to 'go big' here, or not go at all. That means a studio for putting the final product together, a mobile reporting force which can get to places, and partnerships in place for places where you cannot afford to get to yet.
The change which has been occuring which will make this possible today when it wasn't possible before is that enough consumers have the requisite network bandwidth to their home or office to support it, and they are likely to have a device which can stream it (Roku, PS3, Samsung 'smart' TV, etc). The sweet spot of this market is the 22 - 42 year olds who want a better news experience than they are getting and have high comfort with technological solutions. As a 'network' you also already have a business model that can slot you into a relationship with folks like Comcast, DirectTV, or Time Warner. Partner with them and their 'smart set top' on a rev share basis and you give added value add for their customers, and pricing leverage against those networks you are disrupting.
[1] This was a quote from the guy who was the GM or EVP of the KRON TV news group at a talk he gave back in the 90's in Palo Alto.
