Comedy Central to use Twitter to host a comedy festival

Next week, Comedy Central will host a five-day comedy festival that includes a lineup of legends like Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner alongside popular young comics like Amy Schumer and the director Paul Feig.

But there will be no smoky comedy clubs. No lone microphones and stools positioned on stage. No two-drink minimum.

The festival will take place almost entirely on Twitter, with comedians posting video snippets of routines and round-tables and posting jokes using the hashtag (HASHTAG)ComedyFest.

The partnership between Comedy Central, a cable channel owned by Viacom, and Twitter represents the evolving relationship between television and social media. Twitter is often incorporated into programming with viewers using the site as a second screen while watching live television. But slowly, Twitter is becoming an outlet on which to watch video.

In January, Twitter introduced Vine, a video-sharing service that lets users post six-second clips - brevity that matches Twitter's model of 140-character messages.

On Tuesday, as part of the festival, the comedian Steve Agee will host a "Vine Dining" party, telling stories in six-second videos. The cast of HBO's "Veep" shares "vines" from the set, as does the cast of ABC's hit "Scandal." A&E puts 30-second videos of "Duck Dynasty" on Twitter and the entire third season of Fox's "Raising Hope" had its debut on the site.

"It's not just hashtags appearing on your TV screen, but TV content appearing in your Twitter feed," said Debra Aho Williamson, a social media analyst at eMarketer.

For Comedy Central, the Twitter partnership is a small part of a larger strategy to become a branded entertainment company that does not rely just on nightly television viewing. In a changing media landscape, the channel's series like "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart," and "South Park," and their young, mostly male audiences have led the shift to online video viewing.

As early as next month, Comedy Central will introduce a free, ad-supported app, called CC: Stand-Up. Designed to look and feel like a cable channel devoted to standup comedy, the app will offer videos of comedians performing routines.

A recommendation algorithm (similar to the one used by Amazon) will allow users to discover new comedians. If you watched Jeff Ross, for example, a web of other comics would pop up based on routines with similar topics (like mass transit), style (like dark humor) or other relationships (both like marshmallows).

"One of these days we will be ambivalent about where people watch Comedy Central," said Steve Grimes, the channel's senior vice president for programming and multiplatform strategy.

At least for now Viacom makes the vast majority of its revenue from cable subscribers who watch television the old-fashioned way and the advertisers who pay to reach them there. The company must adapt to the changing ways viewers watch video, but they must also preserve profits.

Last year, Nickelodeon's ratings dropped, partly because shows like "Dora the Explorer" and "SpongeBob SquarePants" had been too readily available on streaming platforms like Netflix.

Nickelodeon's predicament has served as a cautionary tale for Comedy Central as it extends its programming onto other devices Comedy Central's total prime-time audience has fallen to a nightly average of 816,000 viewers in the current season to date, from 1.1 million in 2008, according to Nielsen.

Of those viewers, 258,000 are men ages 18-34, a demographic that disproportionately uses social media while watching television. In a study conducted by Nielsen in September and titled "How Chatter Matters in TV Viewing," 54 percent of viewers 18-34 said they had started watching a TV show because of Facebook, and 21 percent credited Twitter.

Fred Graver, head of TV at Twitter, said partnering with Comedy Central and others was not about turning the service into a television distribution platform, but developing deeper relationships with programmers that eventually lead to more people joining Twitter. The relationship, he said, can be mutually beneficial.

"What we spend a lot of time talking to networks and show runners about is, 'What do you put onto Twitter that will get people to change the channel or alert them to another way of enjoying the show?"' Graver said.

For now, Comedy Central looks at the Twitter partnership as a marketing strategy. In the future, the channel could work with a sponsor to bring in ad revenue. "It's the same way we'd market our comedy through a billboard a few years ago," said Michele Ganeless, president of Comedy Central.

Ganeless has overseen Comedy Central's push into other expansions of the brand, including consumer products like DVDs, T-shirts and coffee mugs related to its shows and comedians.

Comedians have been particularly ahead of the curve in embracing new ways to distribute standup acts that used to rely on cable television.

Last year, Louis C.K. sold a "Live at the Beacon Theater" special directly through his website and made $1 million in less than two weeks. That partly inspired Comedy Central to develop a website that lets comedians sell their standup specials directly to consumers (with the channel getting a cut). Customers can buy a standup special starting at $5 and stream it onto their television screens or mobile devices.

It remains to be seen how all these add-ons will ultimately affect Comedy Central's audience and, in turn, its revenue.

"I don't think anybody is moving forward in the TV business or the brand business without finding ways to develop a true dialogue with consumers," said Doug Herzog, president of Viacom Entertainment Group, which includes Comedy Central, Spike and TV Land. "What we're still discovering and what will take a while is what exactly does that mean and what exactly does it add up to and how do you quantify it?"

On Monday, Twitter will live stream the only (HASHTAG)ComedyFest event that will take place with an actual audience, at the Paley Center for Media in Los Angeles. The panel discussion will include Brooks, Reiner and Judd Apatow, who will be the host. Reiner and Apatow will try to persuade the technology-averse Brooks to join Twitter. He has previously resisted, telling friends that it could not possibly capture his "impish" quality.

Reiner, meanwhile, has more than 20,400 Twitter followers. During the Oscars this year, he posted, "I was so excited to discover I was not in the in memoriam!"

In an interview, Reiner took a break from writing a book, "I Just Remembered," ("because it's about all the things I forgot to put in the first book") to discuss social media and comedy.

Of Brooks, his longtime friend and partner in "The 2,000 Year Old Man" comedy skit, Reiner said: "We'll see if we can get the old man to talk" on Twitter.

© 2013, The New York Times News Service