The Disney-ABC Television Group has agreed to produce original series for social-media platform Snapchat, the company said Thursday.
The series will live as Snapchat Stories, and the first show to debut will be a recap of ABC’s The Bachelor called Watch Party: The Bachelor on Tuesday, Jan. 3.
The new Snapchat show will be ten episodes long, with “celebrities, comedians, super fans and infamous Bachelors and Bachelorettes getting together each week to watch each episode,” according to a statement from Disney-ABC Television.
Both scripted and non-scripted series will be made for Snapchat in 2017. As Variety reports, Disney and Snapchat joined forces earlier this year to make a Live Story of the Academy Awards.
“Earlier this year, we worked closely with Snap on a very successful The Oscars Live Story, and we look forward to building on that relationship and providing Snapchat’s mobile-centric users with a unique, immersive experience around our shows and brands,” said John Frelinghuysen, executive vice president at Disney-ABC Television Group, in a statement. “With the upcoming Watch Party: The Bachelor we look forward to working together with Snapchat to not only reach Bachelor fans in an entirely new way, but to also provide our advertising partners with even more opportunities.”
Snapchat’s deal with Disney differs from its partnerships with other companies in that Disney will control all the ads that appear in its shows, Variety reports.
The network is angling to spur interest in shows such as The Bachelor as well as make money from ads sold against original content pumped into Snapchat’s video engine.
For the near term, Snap is focused on bringing out a small number of high-profile original shows that can become tentpoles.
“We believe in scarcity,” Sean Mills, Snap’s head of original content, told Variety. “If you curate a select amount of premium content, you can bring a huge audience to that.”
Mills describes Snapchat Shows as character- or format-driven single-narrative video productions. The initiative represents the third pillar of Snap Inc.’s media strategy. Snapchat Discover, first launched in January 2015, to date has centered on magazine-like Editions, comprising photos, animations, text, video and other content produced by outside editorial partners including BuzzFeed, CNN and ESPN. Then there are Live Stories, which are collections of Snaps submitted by users in specific locations that are edited and curated by Snapchat producers.
For instance, all Snapchat Shows are produced with vertical video, because completion rates for that orientation are nine times what they are for horizontal video, according to Mills. Snapchat also generally breaks shows up into 20-second chapters, allowing users to flip forward and backward through the videos. The originals team also has learned that shooting a hosted show with someone seated across a desk doesn’t work; instead, the shot has to be pulled in close, as if the subject were creating a selfie Snap.
“We’ve been trying to be thoughtful about how it should work,” said Mills. “How long should an episode of mobile television be? What are the rules of storytelling in that environment? You have a viewer with a thumb hovering over the screen essentially, so you have to grab them right away.”
ABC, in a separate digital promo for the next season of “The Bachelor,” this week launched a fantasy league for “The Bachelor” in partnership with ESPN, with a sweepstakes awarding prizes to the players who make the most accurate predictions as season 21 unfolds.
READ MORE: Variety
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