Facebook is
starting production on high-quality television series and gaming shows to be
broadcast on its platform, one of the social media giant’s executives said on
Monday.
The online
platform, which has around two billion monthly users worldwide, is working on
the project with a small group of partners and hopes to start putting out
episodes of its forthcoming series by the end of the summer, Nick Grudin, the
vice president for media partnerships, said in a statement to AFP, confirming a
report in the Wall Street Journal.
“Our goal is
to make Facebook a place where people can come together around video,” Grudin
said, noting that Facebook and its collaborators would “experiment with the
kinds of shows you can build a community around — from sports to comedy to
reality to gaming.”
Facebook is
funding the shows on its own at first, he said, “but over time we want to help
lots of creators make videos funded through revenue sharing products like Ad
Break,” a software tool that allows adverts to be directly inserted into
Facebook’s online content.
Facebook did
not identify its content-production partners, but the Wall Street Journal said
they include Hollywood studios and agencies representing actors and other
creative talent from the film and television industries.
Facebook is
ready to spend up to $3 million per episode, a budget which puts it at the
upscale end of television production in the United States. In doing so, it is a
following a trend set by other internet giants that were once satisfied with
allowing their platforms to be used for distribution by other producers.
Netflix,
Amazon and the online television platform Hulu — a joint venture by Disney,
Comcast, 21st Century and Time Warner — have thrown themselves into content
production, as have YouTube and Apple, although on a more modest scale.
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