Yahoo’s ongoing revamp continued with its recent announcement of Yahoo Screen, an iOS app that compiles all of its entertainment content for streaming. The library includes an extensive Saturday Night Live archive and select Comedy Central programming including the Colbert Report and the Daily Show. More than 1,000 hours of comedy programming is currently available to stream on the service. Other content comes from ABC News, GQ, Wired, Major League Baseball, UFC, among others. The app is designed to be highly gesture based, with swipes playing a key role. With more and more companies entering the streaming space, are we about to see a leap of innovation in web based multimedia programming?
Tag: Comedy Central
Amazon Streams Viacom’s Kids Shows
After a deal between Netflix and Viacom expired last month, Amazon swept in to clean up the scraps, which included Viacom’s children’s programs like Dora the Explorer and Comedy Central shows like Key and Peele. Amazon made the announcement that it will be streaming these shows through Prime Instant Video this morning, and claimed that they’ll be adding more than 3,900 episodes of TV to their streaming program. This, in combination with Amazon’s announcement that they will film five new original series shows, puts them directly at odds with Netfilx, their main competitor.
Comedy Central’s Social Media Comedy Festival
As television and social media become ever more intertwined, new uses of Twitter and Facebook for broadcast are frequently pioneered, but rarely as a primary distribution platform. Next week, Comedy Central will be hosting a five day comedy festival entirely on Twitter and Vine, completely removing its traditional broadcast element from the equation, and effectively testing an entirely new format for mainstream media distribution sanctioned by a company as large as Comedy Central’s owner, Viacom. Only one event for the festival (a panel discussion between Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, and Judd Apatow) will take place before a live audience, and it will be broadcast via Twitter exclusively. Events like Comedy Central’s social media comedy festival could be a valid solution to the question: how do we engage mass audiences in real time in an on-demand world?
