Twitter and Viacom have announced a partnership that signals another step in the social media platform’s embrace of television and new advertising opportunities. The deal will allow some of Viacom’s most-popular channels — like MTV, VH1, CMT, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central — to have highlights from shows tweeted out to viewers and combined with real-time advertising.
The deal with Viacom will debut at the MTV Music Awards on Aug. 25, where highlights from the show will be tweeted out to viewers along with accompanying advertisements. The Viacom deal is part of Twitter’s new Amplify program, announced in March, that allows companies like Conde Nast, New York Media (owner of New York Magazine) and Discovery to reach viewers simultaneously on live television and a second screen.
The Viacom deal was previously reported by Bloomberg back in April, and we wrote about why the deal would make sense considering Twitter’s current television ambitions. While companies like Facebook are looking to expand real-time options and capture the conversation around breaking news and television, it’s still an area where Twitter excels, as we’ve written before.
