Snapchat’s Bitmoji TV Goes Live
Snapchats's Bitmoji TV premiered last week, allowing users to create 4-minute cartoons of their avatars.
With this feature, your Snapchat avatar is going to become a star character in a cartoon series that is called Bitmoji TV. Each cartoon avatar will take part in regularly scheduled adventures.
Snapchat says 70% of its daily active users, or 147 million of its 210 million, have made themselves a Bitmoji. Snapchat bought Bitmoji’s parent company Bitstrips in 2016 for a steal at $62.5 million.
These short bits of content will help Snapchat stand out among other video platforms such as YouTube and the growing Tik Tok.
Bitmoji TV has its own Snapchat Show page where users can subscribe to get notifications and see new episodes on the Discover Page. Users can visit this page on mobile or tap and hold on the Snapcode below while pointing at it with the Snapchat camera to open Bitmoji TV.
Your co-star in these segments is the Bitmoji of whichever person you last interacted with on Snapchat. That lets you control whether you want your best friend, your significant other or some rando alongside you.
Bitmoji TV has not any advertisements, at least for the initial 10-episode season. But that does seem to be the plan.
Bitmoji TV looks rather engaging compared to the originals on Facebook Watch. Facebook copied Snapchat’s augmented reality selfie filters and several other trends that made the platform unique. However, the Bitmoji project could be Snapchat’s opportunity to outgrow the competition.