During the Interactive portion this year’s South By Southwest festival, Comedy Central’s @midnight engineered a fun experiment in live programming. The late-night series, in which host Chris Hardwick and a rotating panel of comedians use social media as the inspiration for their jokes, broadcast a full episode exclusively on live-streaming app Periscope on March 11th.
The Periscope version of @midnight featured Doug Benson, Chris Cubas, and Arden Myrin as its panelists and a handful of SXSW-related riffs during its broadcast. In the segment that most creatively made use of the Twitter-owned live-streaming platform, the show’s audience got a chance to participate in the game “Hashtag Wars,” which appears in every single TV episode of @midnight.
#SXSW in three words @midnight style! #AtMidnightLive https://t.co/latPBS2kVV
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— Twitter TV (@twittertv) March 12, 2016
@midnight’s Periscope broadcast won’t air on TV at all, serving instead as a treat for the show’s closest followers. The Comedy Central program has aired live-streaming content before; in 2015, it used Periscope for a “#MobyDickathon” — a 24-hour, live-streamed reading of Moby Dick.
For a show so focused on social media, a live Periscope episode is a brilliant idea, and @midnight’s experimental concept was well-executed. On Periscope’s side of things, partnerships like this one have helped it pull ahead of its competitors, particularly Meerkat. The Twitter-owned app just celebrated its first birthday, and it is looking as fit as ever.
