During Wild ‘n Out episodes, cast members will don merch that viewers can order at first sight, thanks to a Shopify interlay. It is now working on advancements in e-commerce. Stage Ten turned heads last year when the company orchestrated Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP” music video premiere. With Wild ‘n Out, they already have to ad lib and move with things, so this is a really easy way to insert the audience.” It could be messy, but that’s sort of the point. That means it’s moving, it’s changing, it’s evolving. With alive content, the point isn’t to dominate your point of view on things. They try really hard to not break, and the audience sits in to watch the risk of that happening, waiting for them to mess up. Gaston says: “When I was younger and sitcoms would do their live episodes, the whole point was that no one fucks up. “We understand the difference between live content and alive content,” says Michael Gaston, who left his CEO position at Cut.com, a company he founded, to join Stage Ten as its president last year. The Stage Ten team, however, comprises multiple employees with backgrounds in TV. “We talked to other people that we really liked, but it wasn’t the right marriage of creative and tech,” Neumeyer says. So what is their expectation of the future?” Neumeyer says the MTV group “can’t be left behind”: “Just because we grew up watching one flat screen with pixels, we can’t assume that’s what they want.”īecause of the improvisational nature and established fanbase of Wild ‘n Out, it seemed like the perfect guinea pig - as long as it could get the ideal tech partner. Remember we own two brands, Nickelodeon and MTV, with very young consumers. We just don’t make a lot of noise about it. “We have budgets for exploring how entertainment is moving into the future. “Other options of entertainment, like gaming and VR are moving exponentially forward to create environments wherein people are not only watching, they’re participating - and, at Viacom, we have a whole team that’s looking at all these things,” she says.
Neumeyer, although obliged to follow age-old corporate protocol, says she refuses to stand idly by.
MTV WILD N OUT SEASON 8 TV
Many cable TV gatekeepers have been slow to adapt, digging their heels in the sand and letting platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon eat their lunch. So what is their expectation of the future?” “We own two brands, Nickelodeon and MTV, with very young consumers. For the networks, commanding modern audiences was already tough enough before an always-accessible smartphone app mesmerized a burgeoning generation with magnetic stare-and-scroll entertainment.
four years ago, in 2017 - right as MTV, VH1, and cable TV channels in general were drawing particularly dismal viewership.
Coincidentally or not, TikTok also launched in the U.S. In the last four years, Neumeyer’s team met with a plethora of tech companies and virtual platforms. “As we’ve learned from gaming and even TikTok, interactivity and being able to be immersed in making decisions while you’re watching content is very important,” Lily Neumeyer, EVP and head of development at ViacomCBS’ MTV Entertainment Group, tells Rolling Stone, adding that she’s been fascinated by non-linear storytelling methods for a while. Since the average attention span has only plummeted in the multi-screen lifestyle era, it was perhaps only a matter of time before this storytelling technique was modernized to fit within the digital world. The ability to captivate kids with underdeveloped attention spans was what made those choose-your-path Goosebumps plots so incredibly successful and helped create a multi-billion-dollar franchise. The special - allowing fans to vote in real-time, send lyrical suggestions, and choose games for the participants to play - was created in partnership with tech company Stage Ten, which designed the globally interactive video players. ET, preceding the official premiere of the 16th season. Later today, Wild ‘n Out‘s parent companies MTV Entertainment Group and ViacomCBS will announce an hour-long, interactive special for the show, which will start at 4:00 p.m.