TV shows go into overdrive on Snapchat
LOS ANGELES —Snapchat was once a place for teens to send photos and videos that would disappear within 10 seconds. Now it’s featuring TV shows like you’ve never seen before.
Snapchat, the popular communications app whose parent Snap is set to go public in March with a $25 billion IPO, is ambitiously expanding beyond photos and videos that disappear within 10 seconds. The company is bankrolling the production of original "shows" for the platform, from the likes of Disney’s ABC, NBC-Universal and Turner networks, which includes TBS and Adult Swim.
Disney shows are coming to Snapchat
And like Snapchat, they are designed for short attention spans. The shows zip along at a fast pace, with lots of graphics, headlines and upbeat music—they go so quickly they almost make TV seem like slothful.
It's yet one more way Snap is trying to keep its 150 million daily users engaged. Some 60% of Snapchat's users are aged 13-34, according to Comscore, a demographic that's highly sought by advertisers. Even before the advent of Snapchat shows and its Discover platform, users flocked to Snapchat after school and during the evenings to tell and watch their own Stories — annotated snippets of their day — creating a vibrant, though short-lived entertainment platform that rivaled prime-time television and more established social networks, Facebook and Twitter.
Snap wants to give these users more to watch, in that same rough-and-ready style.
The Snapchat Discover platform, which debuted in January 2015, is a way for users to watch short, flashy original content from publishers such as Cosmopolitan, People magazine and BuzzFeed.
Now come the "shows." The new ABC Watch Party: the Bachelor series, which runs on Tuesdays, is two programs at once. It's produced in vertical video, like holding a phone upright, with clips from the previous night's episode of the dating reality series The Bachelor on the bottom of the screen. On top: a trio of fans on top sitting around the couch offering their opinions of the show.
Watch Party moves along at a Snapchat like fast-forward speed, and before you know it, you’ve watched two commercials and the show, and it’s all over. Like the photos and videos that get snapped and shared on Snapchat, the Watch Party episode disappears within 24 hours. There's no archive of past episodes available for viewing online, as with other mediums.
Snapchat also produces the Good Luck, America show with Peter Hamby, a veteran CNN journalist who brings news and commentary to the Snapchat audience. When he interviewed President Obama, Jeb Bush and Bernie Sanders, for instance, they didn’t sit down, but instead stood up to talk— which again, looks better on a vertical screen.
Good Luck is expected back on the air in February, along with new shows from Turner and NBC's Saturday Night Live later in the year.
Other shows include a new take on The Voice, NBC's reality competition, featuring the judges commenting on submissions from Snapchatters, E! Entertainment Television's Rundown, celebrity news recap and Fallon, featuring Jimmy Fallon from the Tonight Show doing skits for the Snapchat audience. So far only one episode of Fallon has aired, featuring the comedian and his friend Justin Timberlake.
The current roster has three programs: The NFL Show, featuring clips and highlights, on Mondays, Watch Party on Tuesdays and the Rundown on Thursdays.
In the Discover tab are dozens of zippy short-form entertainment content. The Latino themed YouTube network MiTu this week showed off a tortilla toaster, NFL Films ran football highlights, BuzzFeed did a piece on the "25 Biggest Lies You Were Told during Childhood," while the Tastemade network showed off how to add peanut butter to Oreo cookies.
The new Snapchat shows aren't to be confused with Snapchat's "Our Stories," which are curated videos from Snapchat editors that theme submitted "Snaps," with headlines and fast-paced editing. (Our Stories were formerly called "Live Stories.") And these, in turn, are separate from a user's Snapchat Story, which can only be viewed by his or her Snapchat friends.
A Friday "Our Stories," showcased snaps from the "March for Life," demonstrations in Washington, D.C., with headlines, geo-filter graphics and closed captions. It was presented in the same, raw, unfiltered look at real people talking to their smartphones on Snapchat that we saw with the recent women's march coverage as well.
We spoke with college students at the University of Southern Californiaabout how they use Snapchat, and several told us they like watching programming on the app for a simple reason: "It's more convenient because I'm already on Snapchat," says Amelia Montooth, 19, from Phoenix.
"It's the way Snapchat does it," says Jordan Lam, 20, from Los Angeles. "It's very cohesive and everything is just a swipe away."
Follow USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham on Twitter, @jeffersongraham and subscribe to the daily #TalkingTech podcast on iTunes and Stitcher.