Goodman is no neophyte when it comes to launching programming on new digital platforms; he brought YouTube its first high-profile branded entertainment play in 2008, with "Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy." Since starting Believe, he's continued to be a pioneer programmer for the platform, backing projects with LeBron James and Tiesto, an EDM star who once broadcast a concert entirely on Twitter, which sparked the idea for trying a series set within the platform.

@EpicEDM represents the first studio-based programming effort on Twitter, though some marketers made branded-entertainment content native to the platform last year, including a Pepsi concert series via Elisabeth Murdoch's Shine, and a Verizon-backed effort, #StraysTakes featuring jock-turned-broadcaster Michael Strahan.


Another pioneer in Twitter-native programming is the Chernin Group, which launched @Summerbreak in June, the same week @EpicEDM publicized its own launch. @SummerBreak also has an MTV influence, but it's less "Yo! MTV Raps" than "The Hills": It's an unscripted narrative that follows the lives of absurdly attractive high school graduates over the summer before they go off to college. @SummerBreak counts AT&T as a sponsor and primary funder.


There are some interesting contrasts between the two projects: While @SummerBreak gambles on the fresh-faced appeal of unknown teenagers, @EpicEDM leverages the reputations of famous DJs who are well entrenched on Twitter. That said, the DJs aren't active participants in @EpicEDM, while @SummerBreak is able to mine the lives of its principals on a near 24/7 basis.

Another key difference: While @EpicEDM is largely contained to Twitter -- although YouTube is the one hosting the videos -- @SummerBreak is a more multifaceted approach that seems to rely on Instagram as much as it does Twitter. YouTube and Tumblr are also incorporated. Time will tell whether restricting content to Twitter reduces the complexity of the presentation or if spreading the content across multiple platforms is a better fit for being everywhere the young target audience is.

At this beta stage, neither property has particularly sizable audiences. But with further experimentation, it's easy to see how they could pave the way for a new breed of content so starkly different than what TV or film offers that its potential is worth noting.

Typical entertainment distribution involves a one-to-many model that exists in a linear format at a particular time. Twittervision explodes that storytelling convention, splintering narrative across multiple feeds on multiple platforms -- as @Summerbreak does -- that users can navigate as they choose when they choose. Video can be intertwined with photos and text. It's not entirely different from the model of so-called alternative reality games, but it is rooted on the social network instead of an array of websites.

"I call it 'disembodied media,'â€‰" said Mark Ghuneim, founder and CEO of social media tracking service Trendrr. "It's a disembodied TV show taking place in disparate parts, times, and sources. It's crazy in a great way."


Goodman sees @EpicEDM evolving beyond its current format to incorporate content from users themselves, like offering an EDM concert in which part of the event would be streaming from cameras in the audience. "Consumers will help steer the ship," he said. "The last thing we'll do is step in between them and the content."

Interactive or participatory TV has been on the margins of the business for so long that it seems like it's never going to happen. But Twitter may be just the soil where a long-delayed germination could actually take root. Let's not forget that the average member of any audience has a device in their pocket capable of transmitting quality video -- how can that not disrupt the traditional understanding of what programming is?


"Whether it's 'Trending 10,' @Summerbreak or @EpicEDM, all of these examples are great ways of gathering data from the community and updating in real time," said Bain.


Cue the is-it-a-media-company-or-technology-company debate that seems irrelevantly academic at this point, exhausted already perhaps by Google, which toed that blurred line for so long. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is occasionally caught playing the same coy semantic game Google's Eric Schmidt used to play on this front, and no one seems to care anymore.

But as Twitter becomes more videocentric on its own platform, its ability to drive traffic to TV is going to make less sense when the company can concentrate that promotional firepower on itself with a new style of programming that old media can't execute. Why be a companion to broadcasters when you can be a broadcaster yourself?

Nevertheless, Bain dismissed such ambition, also nixing the notion that Twitter's ultimate goal is to keep users on any platform for as long as possible. "It's absolutely not our model," he said. "That's an old way of monetizing properties."
