In a bid to retain its role as a pop culture staple, MTV has announced plans to a launch a show that taps into the power of social media, tightly integrating with Facebook and Twitter to maximize fan interaction. The show will be hosted by British celebrity and model Alexa Chun and begin airing this summer, with plans to move it to the network’s coveted after-school timeslot depending on its performance.
Back in the late 90’s, an MTV show called Total Request Live was a staple in dictating what was hot in popular music. That show gradually lost steam over time (it was finally canceled in late 2008) and while MTV has maintained some succcessful properties, it’s lacking a flagship show that its audience tunes into on a daily basis. According to this AP report, viewership is down 18% for the first three months of this year.
The new show will include MTV’s standard variety of celebrities and musical performances, but will also include real-time conversations taken from Facebook and Twitter, allowing users to interact with the show as it airs. According to this report, beyond basic interaction on Facebook and Twitter users will be able to upload their favorite videos (including those they’ve filmed themselves) through a RockYou application.
Audience interaction isn’t anything new to MTV – even in the TRL days it often featured messages sent in by fans, and the videos that appeared on the show were dictated by audience voting via phone and online. But Twitter and Facebook offer the network a way to stay directly connected with fans day and night, broadcasting frequent updates even when the show isn’t on the air. And it’s likely an approach that will play extremely well to MTV’s core demographic.
Below, a video of Alexa Chung doing an interview totally unrelated to the MTV show.
Owen works his magic again!
Still anybody watches tv?
You know, I have to tell you, I really enjoy this blog.
Surprised it’s taken a TV show so long to ulitise twitter! Not surprising it’s MTV – look forward to it with interest!
Did Jimmy Fallon do this first? Like crowdsourcing questions in realtime for guest Cameron Diaz?
http://pulse2.c...diaz-questions/
This development would be interesting…How about doing this for VH1 and international affiliates of MTV?
i can’t imagine the number on the check when someone buys twitter.
As more and more of these services and companies make use of twitter surely we are getting closer to @ev and @biz finding a way of monetizing the service. These are multi-million dollar companies using twitter, for free! I am sure they wouldnt mind paying a premium for using twitter in this way.
As for Facebook, they are rolling in it anyway, although payment for companies using that service is surely not far behind.
Monetization is simple for something like this, Twitter offers backend access so that no down time occurs at a per episode price equivalent to 5 writers under wga rules.
Twitter also gets the rights to sell advertising tweets during a right margin live twitter fall duing the shows say 3-5 companies per episode. So the viewer will see tweets about the music selection intermixed with ads every 20 tweets or so
So this will be pretty much TRL, but with a different name? So they add interaction with Twitter & Facebook, so what? The show will still be the worst of what the music industry has to offer.
beatiful Alexa,woww
GREAT! Now my stream will be full of “i vote taylor swift!!!! #mtv”
Twitter is becoming less and less useful.
I think I’ll hold judgment until I see how exactly MTV executes on this one. But it’s interesting to see new uses for Twitter.
One really creative use is that of tweeting historical events with historical figures talking back and forth to each other (using their real words via journals, etc.). For more details, see here:
http://bobcaswe...ry-vs-mtv-show/
I love the concept. It’s great to see MTV embracing Facebook and Twitter, I agree with @bobcaswell, I’m very interested to see how this is executed.
I’m surprised that shows like American Idol or Dancing with the Stars haven’t thought to integrate these services into their shows. On the evenings that they air I see a lot of buzz in my Twitter stream about what is happening on the shows.
I hope it fails, just like the TV drone-enhanced “music” TV
Twitter = myspace lite… (not parallel in functionality but in over hype and eventual spam rate)…
I really love to watch the mtv it is great channel there are many program on this channel except songs program The idle and dance program beat every channel my space and twitter is nothing in front of mtv
So stupid they’re not using MySpace as well. Sometimes it’s incredible what followers the brains behind these things are… I can see the middle-aged fat exec at MTV. “Well Twitter’s the new thing by golly! Don’t pay attention to the fact that MySpace’s audience dwarves it, Twitter is the new trend! We gotta stay hip or the kids will think we’re light in our loafers!”
That mean now we can see live show while using facebook
It was innevitable that the likes of MTV would see the potential and reach provided by social media.
It’s all about Alexa Chung, I wouldn’t mind updating her status….
MTV is a joke………
Oh well, lets see where this goes. Could be good.
This will certainly reshape the landscape of social web sites. This is the first time a social networking site will share ad revenues generated from the broadcast of the show with a major content provider instead of just receiving exposure for the site. This venture will certainly lead to other social web sites to demand the same content sharing deal from large corporations looking to take advantage of the new up and coming social networking sites. Left out of this equation is Myspace. It will be interesting to see how NewsCorps Rupert Murdoch markets the second largest social web site with its 130 million members worldwide.
This will certainly reshape the landscape of social web sites. This is the first time a social networking site will share ad revenues generated from the broadcast of the show with a major content provider instead of just receiving exposure for the site. This venture will certainly lead to other social web sites to demand the same content sharing deal from large corporations looking to take advantage of the new up and coming social networking sites. Left out of this equation is Myspace. It will be interesting to see how NewsCorps Rupert Murdoch markets the second largest social web site with its 130 million members worldwide.