But there will be no smoky comedy clubs. No lone microphones and stools positioned on stage. No two-drink minimum.
The festival will take place almost entirely on Twitter, with comedians posting video snippets of routines and roundtables and posting jokes using the hashtag #ComedyFest.
The partnership between Comedy Central, a cable cannel owned by Viacom, and Twitter represents the evolving relationship between television and social media. Twitter is often incorporated into programming with viewers using the site as a second screen while watching live television. But slowly, Twitter is becoming an outlet on which to watch video.
In January, Twitter introduced Vine, a video-sharing service that lets users post six-second clips — brevity that matches Twitter’s model of 140-character messages.
On Tuesday, as part of the festival, the comedian Steve Agee will host a “Vine Dining” party, telling stories in six-second videos. The cast of HBO’s “Veep” shares “vines” from the set, as does the cast of ABC’s hit “Scandal.” AE puts 30-second videos of “Duck Dynasty” on Twitter and the entire third season of Fox’s “Raising Hope” had its debut on the site.
“It’s not just hashtags appearing on your TV screen, but TV content appearing in your Twitter feed,” said Debra Aho Williamson, a social media analyst at eMarketer.
For Comedy Central, the Twitter partnership is a small part of a larger strategy to become a branded entertainment company that does not rely just on nightly television viewing. In a changing media landscape, the channel’s series like “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” and “South Park,” and their young, mostly male audiences have led the shift to online video viewing.
As early as next month, Comedy Central will introduce a free, ad-supported app, called CC: Stand-Up. Designed to look and feel like a cable channel devoted to stand-up, the app will offer videos of comedians performing routines.
A recommendation algorithm (similar to the one used by Amazon) will allow users to discover new comedians. If you watched Jeff Ross, for example, a web of other comics would pop up based on routines with similar topics (like mass transit), style (like dark humor) or other relationships (both like marshmallows).
“One of these days we will be ambivalent about where people watch Comedy Central,” said Steve Grimes, the channel’s senior vice president for programming and multiplatform strategy.
At least for now Viacom makes the vast majority of its revenue from cable subscribers who watch television the old-fashioned way and the advertisers who pay to reach them there. The company must adapt to the changing ways viewers watch video, but they must also preserve profits.
Last year, Nickelodeon’s ratings dropped, partly because shows like “Dora the Explorer” and “SpongeBob SquarePants” had been too readily available on streaming platforms like Netflix.
Nickelodeon’s predicament has served as a cautionary tale for Comedy Central as it extends its programming onto other devices. Comedy Central’s total prime-time audience has fallen to a nightly average of 816,000 viewers in the current season to date, from 1.1 million in 2008, according to Nielsen.
Of those viewers, 258,000 are men ages 18 to 34, a demographic that disproportionately uses social media while watching television. In a study conducted by Nielsen in September and titled “How Chatter Matters in TV Viewing,” 54 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds said they had started watching a TV show because of Facebook, and 21 percent credited Twitter.
Fred Graver, head of TV at Twitter, said partnering with Comedy Central and others was not about turning the service into a television distribution platform, but developing deeper relationships with programmers that eventually lead to more people joining Twitter. The relationship, he said, can be mutually beneficial.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/22/business/comedy-central-to-host-comedy-festival-on-twitter.html?partner=rss&emc=rss