Natively Social TV is here to stay.
Hey, you got your YouTube in my Instagram!
At VidCon last week, a founder I work with told me that Instagram was becoming YouTube, and that YouTube was becoming Instagram. The concept instantly resonated with me.
Instagram released IGTV to much fanfare, as it brings the 1 billion user behemoth into longform media for the first time. To state the obvious, IGTV is Instagram’s take on what TV would look like in a social context. The experience is at the same time foreign and familiar for Instagram users. The classic Instagram UX is a feed that encourages users to scroll infinitely through short pics and videos. IGTV is the opposite. The UX dumps you right into a channel, with minimal affordances to skip to the next show. The behavior is more akin to traditional TV in the sense that one show rolls into the other. The “programming” comes out of the box depending on who you follow on Instagram. That means a user doesn’t need to set up a bunch of new preferences. She simply leaps into IGTV after logging in and gets a pretty good experience. Although it’s a standalone app, IGTV does a good job leveraging the social graph of the main app to create a unique viewing experience.
Oppositely, YouTube’s product announcements were focused on connecting its “vibrant community.” On their surface, the features it announced are related to monetization, but that monetization comes from deeper engagement with fans. To date, most fans come to YouTube for the influencer herself. How can YouTube shift its product strategy, so that fans come for the larger community as well? The latter positioning has stronger network effects. Without a social network, broadcast media platforms are vulnerable to players like Patreon and Discord, who connect fans outside the platform. Therefore, YouTube must become more social to survive. While features like Superchats, Channel Memberships, and Premieres appear to be new monetization efforts aimed at influencers, they also support conversations between the more active members of the communities around those influencers. Enabling merchandise sales can also be viewed as a strategy to create a sense of community offline.
Natively social TV (NSTV) is what I’m going to call the content built for these hybrid broadcast/social media networks. Americans are already spending more time online than watching legacy TV, and the only people who watch more TV than they did 5 years ago are senior citizens. The concept of TV itself is changing as the medium is changing, and I have to believe that studios set up to produce NSTV for these platforms are going to build huge followings.
Few examples of NSTV exist in the wild. My favorite example is SKAM (translates into “Shame” in Norwegian). The New Yorker profiled this unique NSTV “show” (linked below), which posts installments solely on Facebook properties, often with events unfolding in real time:
If you follow the Instagram accounts of the characters, they will sometimes follow you back. With “skam,” you’re not only an integral part of the spectacle; you’re also a producer. The show’s creators monitor fan commentary and sometimes respond to it by changing plot details on the fly. Viewers, teased by Facebook and the creators into believing that they are being heard, and that what they’re seeing is true — or close enough — experience “skam” less as an alternative reality than as an extension of their own lives. By inserting a story so skillfully into our digital domains, and keeping us endlessly tethered to that story, “skam” may be the future of TV.
I’d like to think that SKAM is the first in a long line of NSTV concepts that will flourish on evolving media platforms like Instagram/IGTV and YouTube. I also think a few startups will grow to enable creators to reach audiences in new ways, as the medium itself evolves from its early days into maturity.
“‘SKAM,’ the radical teen drama that unfolds one post at a time.” (Link)
The fictional social media of “skam Austin” soon generated real social media — fervid discussion on everything from Tumblr to Twitter. For an obsessed viewer, there’s no limit to the amount of time that can be spent on “skam Austin” fan pages. The Internet, by leaving you feeling uniquely alone, paradoxically encourages human interaction. Megan and Marlon immediately became the cynosure of legions of online commenters, many of whom assessed the couple as if they were real. One poster wrote, “Not to get too deep and personal here, but I had an exchange with a friend who also happens to be an ex, and it made me think of Marlon and Meg, and I hadn’t realized it until today. It might be why I have such red flags about them.” She asked if anyone else felt the same way. Soon afterward, another poster wrote, “Relaaaaaaaaaaate.”
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