Vevo is launching a live talk show format that streams across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vevo.com and Vevo’s mobile apps. Vevo Live includes artist interviews, a studio audience, and interaction with streaming viewers via text chat. The concept evolved from the Vevo Party app, developed during an internal company hackathon last year to enable users to chat while watching the same videos, and eventually became Watch Party. After initial success with its audience, and interest by artists who began hosting their own Watch Parties, the company created Vevo Live. Last week, a Fifth Harmony Vevo Live show attracted more than 3 million viewers across social platforms. Continue reading Vevo Brings New Live Talk Show Format to Social Platforms

Facebook is ramping up its social VR efforts through live video streaming. “Users of Facebook Spaces, the social hangout in virtual reality that the company launched earlier this year, can now broadcast via Facebook Live,” reports Variety. “The new feature essentially allows Spaces users to host a kind of virtual reality talk show, and stream it to all of their followers, even if those audiences are tuning in with a mobile phone or a desktop browser.” Slate will be the first to use the new feature to produce a weekly live show. Continue reading Facebook Introduces Live Video Broadcasting to Social VR

The number of scripted television shows is growing with a total of 409 different shows this year available on broadcast, cable and online services. By comparison, there were 376 scripted shows in 2014. This was the third consecutive year that scripted TV has grown across all three platforms, according to FX Networks’ research department. Basic cable had the biggest gain, with 174 percent more scripted shows since 2009. Some executives debate whether scripted TV has grown too much.

Continue reading There Was a Record Number of Scripted TV Series in 2015

Comedy Central just hired Baratunde Thurston as a supervising producer of “The Daily Show” to oversee expansion of digital content. As Trevor Noah replaces original host Jon Stewart, “The Daily Show” is poised to deliver expanded content across a wide range of digital platforms. Thurston, humorist and author of “How To Be Black,” was formerly director of digital for The Onion. Online virality has become increasingly important for late night shows such as NBC’s “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” Continue reading “The Daily Show” Builds Out Digital Brand Beyond Cable TV

This past year, Mozilla announced plans to develop a website that could support virtual reality. In June, it released an update with an experimental design for Firefox and the Oculus Rift. And earlier this week, to help celebrate Firefox’s 10th anniversary, Mozilla launched MozVR.com, a site featuring virtual demos, website blueprints, source code and guided tutorials to propel the growth of VR online. For now, the experience is only possible with the support of Firefox’s VR-enabled feature and an Oculus Rift headset. Continue reading Mozilla Launches First of its Kind Native VR Web Experience

The growing popularity of streaming services such as Netflix, Roku and Apple TV have led to older audiences becoming more comfortable with the on-demand approach to viewing traditional television content on devices other than their TV sets. As a result, producers of Web-based programming are hoping that inexpensive Internet talk shows will help with this online transition for new viewers as well as consumer-brand advertisers. Continue reading Talk Shows are Making the Transition to Mobile Programming

YouTube announced that it will now offer its live streaming to any channel owner with at least 1,000 subscribers. This is the next step in the site’s efforts to make live online video more robust and attractive. Last year, YouTube offered select publishers the ability to charge for live streams, and earlier this year it introduced a new live video platform that features DVR and real-time auto-transcoding functionality. Continue reading YouTube Opens Live Streaming to More Channels this Week