Snap, Inc’s ambitions to do more with original, produced video in its Snapchat app are well known. Last night, the company unveiled its first slate of ‘Snap Originals’ shows, which it has commissioned from a group of production partners.
The shows will be available on Snapchat’s ‘Discover’ page to users across the world, rather than being geo-blocked to the US only. The shows will also have their own profile pages on Snapchat listing all their available episodes, which will average five minutes in length each.
Snap will be selling six-second, non-skippable ads to run within the shows, as its way of making money from them. There will also be ‘portal lenses’ for the shows “enabling users to swipe up from an episode of the show and literally walk into a scene and interact with the objects and characters to deepen their experience”, as well as ‘reaction lenses’ based on specific scenes to spark viewers’ own snaps.
Music isn’t (yet) a part of the Snap Originals slate: among the first six shows to be announced are dramas aimed at (and starring) college-age people, as well as a docuseries exploring life at modelling agency Wilhelmina, and another called Endless Summer (“Influencers Summer McKeen and Dylan Jordan try to balance love, friends, family, and fame in this intimate snapshot of their lives in Laguna Beach, California”). And while we can [EYEROLL EMOJI] at that merrily, if the shows do well, there could and should be scope for some formats focusing on music and artists on Snapchat in the future.
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