If you are unfamiliar, Musical.ly is an app for making and sharing personal music videos—think lip syncing. The app has taken off amongst the younger population and continues to experience rapid growth as it becomes more mainstream. Bloomberg reports that in an effort to continue that growth, Musical.ly is talking with Viacom and Comcast’s NBCUniversal about creating original programming for the service.
Musical.ly is looking to create original interactive content, as opposed to heavily produced shows, to stay in theme with their user-created content platform. Apparently, the company is scouting for ideas that can help Musical.ly branch out of simply music, into something like comedy or sports.
Musical.ly is not leading any kind of charge here by looking to invest in original content—that’s almost becoming a right of passage for social media channels. Twitter, SnapChat and Facebook are are heavily invested in original content. Twitter is actively working to broadcast original content every day in the near future.
While this is exciting news, it is far from fruition. Musical.ly has not publicly confirmed the Bloomberg report yet, though we can expect to see that in the near future. Before the platform unveils any original content, they will continue to follow in the footsteps of other successful social media channels by offering Snapchat-like filters. That feature, which Instagram also recently released, should be available within the next few days. Somewhat predictably, it’s rumored that the feature will be called Face.ly. Face.ly will initially live within the Musical.ly app, but will eventually work as a standalone service.
As it stands today, Musical.ly has managed to raise a little over $100 million and has a current valuation of about half a billion dollars. That valuation is a result of the basic features the service offers, if this original content is as successful as the company hopes, that number could begin to rise very quickly.
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