Pivot TV launched on August 1–yet it may not even be the newest channel on your cable box. If anyone understands this level of speed, expansion and disruption it’s Pivot’s target audience, the millennials. They’ve been watching the world change a hundred times an hour since they downloaded their first app back in grade school. Now this much-watched generation of so-called digital natives who believe in their power to change the world has its own channel–imbued with a social consciousness theme. But wait, isn’t YouTube their channel?
The last generation famous for world-changing ambition came of age, of course, in the counterculture of the 1960s, when a famous lyric in a Ten Years After song admitted “I’d love to change the world / But I don’t know what to do.” That won’t be the problem for this group. There are a million things to do and Pivot, like its sister company TakePart, is in the business of making the action happen, presenting opportunities. The channel likes to tag millennials as the “next Greatest Generation” and will try to win their elusive loyalty through popular personalities like Meghan McCain and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who both host original Pivot programs. It’s a pretty good target to shoot at: depending on how you measure it, the millennial generation comprises about 80 million Americans.
