Fusion a TV net­work start­ed by ABC and Uni­vi­sion is on its way to grow­ing in an unex­pect­ed out­let, that being Snapchat’s Dis­cov­er chan­nel. Since Jan­u­ary of 2015 they’ve been up to some inter­est­ing things and are now on to adding five more orig­i­nal shows exclu­sive­ly on the Snapchat Dis­cov­er chan­nel. They are try­ing to fig­ure out what peo­ple are inter­est­ed in and what they’d like to watch. Fig­ur­ing out on which media plat­forms, like TV, YouTube, Insta­gram or Snapchat is impor­tant to them. In Feb­ru­ary they had run a 7 episode show called Out­post which they’ve already picked up for a sec­ond sea­son start­ing on April 22.

For the new shows, they are aim­ing for unscript­ed and an inter­na­tion­al audi­ence, oh and did we men­tion the chan­nel isn’t avail­able here in the U.S. yet? The episodes run between 2–3 min­utes and will have at least 6 episodes to view. Fusion is def­i­nite­ly seek­ing spon­sors for these shows but isn’t mak­ing it a neces­si­ty to release the con­tent. Boris Gart­ner, strat­e­gy offi­cer for Fusion said, “One of the great things we’re doing with Snapchat is test­ing for­mats and types of content”.
One of these cool exper­i­ments is each of the shows will be shot ver­ti­cal­ly so that peo­ple can watch them with their phones in por­trait mode, talk about sep­a­rat­ing them­selves from the rest of the video community.

Snapchat execs have been empha­siz­ing full screen ver­ti­cal video as unique to the mobile mes­sag­ing app and a dif­fer­en­tia­tor from oth­er ser­vices like Face­book’s Insta­gram or Twit­ter’s Vine which play videos ver­ti­cal­ly but don’t take up the entire phone screen. Gart­ner states, he’s not sure when Fusion is going to include the U.S., but def­i­nite­ly plan on explor­ing ways for the shows to be seen after they hit the Snapchat Dis­cov­er chan­nel. So they are releas­ing Weird Threads – a show about eccen­tric fash­ions, Sci­ence Fiction/Science Fact – a com­par­i­son show about sci­en­tif­ic pre­dic­tions. The three oth­ers are The Arti­sans, Cap­i­tals, and Off The Record, which traces the source of a sam­ple used in today’s pop­u­lar music.

Beyond try­ing to solve the dis­tri­b­u­tion of the con­tent, they are also film­ing some of these shows in mul­ti­ple ways, so that an episode could pre­miere ver­ti­cal­ly on Snapchat but even­tu­al­ly air in widescreen on Fusion’s TV net­work or Apple TV app or so that dif­fer­ent episodes may air on dif­fer­ent dis­tri­b­u­tion out­lets. Gart­ner made it clear he would love to see one of their series being a full 12 episode, 30 minute series on their network.

CEO of Fusion, Isaac Lee states “We under­stand that mil­len­ni­als con­sume con­tent with­out bor­ders and Snapchat Dis­cov­er has been a crit­i­cal plat­form in the growth and devel­op­ment of Fusion’s glob­al audi­ence.” Hon­est­ly, with that said, shouldn’t any­one out in media land be con­sid­er­ing how do you take advan­tage of a thing like this? How about try­ing to get a foot in the door over at Fusion or Snapchat, NOW?