Phil DeFranco Tapped to Host Discovery Channel’s Shark Week

Discovery Channel acquired Revision 3 back in May, 2012. And when the biggest non-fiction television company (that’s the distributor of such hit properties as Mythbusters, Dirty Jobs, and Man vs. Wild) bought and brought on the board the team and talent at the biggest non-fiction web original video company (that’s a distributor of and agent for such hit properties and personalities as The Totally Rad Show, Tekzilla, TechnoBuffalo, and Epic Meal Time), I made some educated guesses as to ways in which the two entertainment entities would soon collaborate.

I noted how a Shark Week / Epic Meal Time collaboration could lead to a program so popular that no Nielsen rating would be able to accurately define its reach. Turns out, my collaboration hypothesis wasn’t too far off to what the powers that be at Discovery and Revision3 were actually thinking.

Phil DeFranco will host a number of special programming events for Discovery Channel’s Shark Week. The online video superstar behind YouTube sensations The Phil DeFranco Show and SourceFed will appear on your television sets between never-before-seen programs with names like Air Jaws Apocalypse, Sharkzilla, and other titles conceived by combining famous sports slogans, world-ending events, and fictional monsters of mass destruction.

DeFranco’s role will be to emcee an interactive survey dubbed Sharkweek Chompdown, in which fans will be able to Tweet and Facebook their votes to determine what object a massive mechanical megalodon shark (a 52-foot long, 100,000-pound animal with 250 teeth from Earth’s earlier days) will crush “with its huge hydraulic jaws.”

In addition to the Chompdown, DeFranco will host Shark Week’s 25 Best Bites (in honor of this year being Shark Week’s 25th Anniversary). The one-hour program will air on Thursday, August 16th at 10PM E/P and is described with at least one poignant pun in the press release as “a jaw-dropping look back at the greatest breaches, bites, and brushes with the ocean’s apex predator.”

Defranco broke the Shark Week news to his fans via a recent YouTube vlog, in which his excitement for the gig is palpable. He told Tubefilter why he’s so jazzed:

I get to not only work with a channel I love to watch, on my favorite thing that they produce, but I get to be the part that integrates the internet into all of it.  Also I get to crush the hell out of things with a GIANT FRICKIN SHARK!!!! Are you kidding me? This is awesome.

Be sure to stay tuned.