Adriano Farano remembers clearly the day he wanted to be involved with the making of news.

“The very first newscast I can remember was when I was 9 years old,” he told Brief. “The Berlin Wall was falling down and that day I realized I wanted to be a journalist.”

But even then the Italian entrepreneur was thinking bigger than just reporting back on what was going on in the world. According to his LinkedIn page, he used the Berlin Wall as an opportunity to start a business: “I noticed that no one of my classmates had really gotten what had happened,” his bio reads. “So I created a newspaper that sold well and paid writers with pizza.”

As an adult, Farano continued to merge his passion for the news with business. His conceptualizing of new media projects like the pan-European online blog platform CafeBabel lead to a Knight Fellowship at Stanford University, a major incubation hub for the Silicon Valley technological complex. At a time when the iPad was just beginning to revolutionize the way we consume television, Farano saw an opportunity to leverage video journalism across tablets and other mobile devices, to “create the first streaming service entirely designed for watching news,” he said.

The result of his vision is Watchup, a news app for iOS, Android, Amazon’s Fire TV, Xbox 360 and even Google Glass that culls video news stories from an array of different local, national and global partners, and customizes their delivery to users’ preferences. Named one of Google Play’s top apps of 2014, the app already receives content from the likes of Fox News, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and many more. But its greatest value may not be to these international publishers, who already have sophisticated content delivery systems of their own, but to those crafting news at the local level.

As the 24-hour news cycle has swept across the Internet, many local stations have seen the must-watch factor of their news broadcasts erode. But viewers aren’t moving away from traditional news broadcasts because they don’t want to see news. On the contrary, “people love to watch news in their community,” he said, “but there has been a new language that has been established for consuming media, and traditional TV just doesn’t work anymore in the new digital era… Older audiences are fine with traditional TV but younger people cannot understand why they can’t have the density of content they are used to with other video products.”

Watchup takes the burden off news stations to not only chop their content into Internet-friendly packages, but find a way to present those packages smoothly and beautifully. Many websites and mobile products from local stations look ugly and are cumbersome to navigate, and it’s understandable why – technology is not their specialty. Rather, their “enormous strength” is what it’s always been, said Farano. “They have unparalleled access to where the news is happening and where the news is produced. That access is extremely valuable.”

Watchup is a product that can bring that valuable content to a new audience of young people who are more accustomed to supreme control of their video consumption across non-traditional platforms, But its appeal is hardly limited to millennials and younger. It doesn’t take a youthful mind to grasp its incredibly simple interface, which requires nothing more than the selecting of news categories (entertainment, sports, etc.) and sources to get set up. From there, the app finds the user’s location and immediately delivers a pertinent feed of video clips, deftly mixing local, national and international news. If the user finds one clip particularly interesting, an icon in the top right corner can be pressed to usher in a whole swath of related clips from across the Web.

It all adds up to an experience that is addictive and, perhaps most importantly, fun, and people in high places have taken note. There’s the aforementioned Google Play 2014 nod of course, on which Watchup was one of only six news-specific apps to make the list of 75. And then there’s the recent announcement of a content partnership with Tribune that will bring online video content in from 30 of the media behemoth’s local TV station websites, including powerhouses such as KTLA-TV in Los Angeles, WPIX-TV in New York, and WGN-TV in Chicago. Watchup intends to announce even more partnerships in the coming weeks, aiming, said Farano, to ultimately cover more than 90% of U.S. territories’ local news content.

Farano’s team is also designing a version of the app for the Apple Watch, and pushing hard to enhance its over-the-top presence, which already includes xBox 360 and Fire TV. “We’ve been seeing an incredible up-tick for the audience” on those [OTT] platforms, said Farano, which isn’t surprising. Phones and tablets are fine and dandy, but the quality of watching news in your living room hasn’t changed since the days of Walter Cronkite. It remains “a very pleasant experience,” Farano said, “and a lot of people want to do that.”

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