Twitter May Launch Reality TV Shows

The popular microblogging site Twitter has decided to step in the TV industry. According to reliable sources, Twitter is closely working with several Hollywood producers, advertisers and networks to unveil various different original TV shows on their platform.

“One project in particular could debut this year, potentially as early as the fall, said sources with knowledge of the discussions. Twitter, they said, has been actively pitching a select group of advertisers on a video series that would live on Twitter and enable users to participate in real time in some fashion,” Sources said.

Twitter did not respond or comment on the current situation.

The theme of the shows is likely to be the same like other reality shows featured on MTV such as ‘The Hills’ and ‘The Real World’.  Sources said one of the producers of the ‘The Hills’ is also involved in this project.

It is also expected that a show might run on a separate Twitter page, or the series could be featured within tweets, and when users click on the tweets, an extended video player will be displayed on their screen.

Last week, Twitter CEO Costolo did mention his interest in the digital media space and said that Twitter is a “technology company in the media business.” Besides that, some recent initiatives by the company have also pointed out that Twitter is coming to media industry. The company has just announced its partnership with NBC Sports on an Olympics event page that will offer latest updates of the most popular posts from the games. This year in May, Twitter also worked with ESPN for producing custom ad programs to cover major sports shows and partnered with NASCAR for live events.

It seems like an interesting move by the microblogging site, especially as it is one of the few social networking platforms that haven’t gone public yet. Consequently, it is not answerable to shareholders who used to scrutinize every move of the company they have invested in.