If there was any lingering doubt that Viacom has dedicated itself to programming digital as aggressively as a traditional network does linear channels, the media giant has put it to rest with the release of its new VH1 app.

The app, currently available for iPhone and iPad with Android and Windows versions en route, sports the features we’ve come to expect from networks’ mobile experiences. An upgrade of VH1’s Co-Star, it incorporates that app’s slate of video extras, photos, behind-the-scenes facts, built-in social media interaction and other exclusive content with on-demand streaming of full broadcast episodes. Access to the good stuff is, naturally, available to subscribers of the major pay-TV distributors, including AT&T U-Verse, Cablevision, DIRECTV, Time Warner Cable and Verizon FiOS. What’s interesting about the VH1 app is its reflection of an ongoing shift in programming strategy. As online content options become increasingly varied and even Nielsen ratings evolve to incorporate online viewership, traditional networks are making deeper and deeper pushes into multiplatform content. Viacom knows better than anyone that comedy and music tend to travel especially well across linear, online and mobile, and has showcased this awareness on a major scale. On Monday, its Comedy Central merged its standalone digital unit into the larger corporate sphere, essentially putting content development across all the network’s platforms on the same level of strategic value. And with the release of the VH1 app on Wednesday, Viacom made it known that it has set aside an entirely new content division specifically geared for the mobile experience. VH1 Snack, as the name suggests, is a new-form content lab producing bite-sized nuggets of pop-culture-infused video to live exclusively on the new app. Users will be privy to new app-only series such as “I’m on the List,” which animates tales of backstage rock star antics as related by the women who knew them; “Super Hand Models,” an (amazing-sounding) soap opera set in a hand modeling agency, acted out by actual hands; and “Rock Stories,” an ongoing oral history set forth by journalist to the rock stars, Matt Pinfield. In a testament to its fervid marriage to original digital programming, Viacom will air its hot-ticket weekend biopic, “CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story,” on Monday on the new app, and make it available for free to all comers, subscribers or no.

Tags:


  Save as PDF