MTV’s ‘The Real World’ is coming to Facebook Watch

The
31st season of the show “The Real World: Go Big or Go
Home.”
Viacom

• Viacom’s MTV Studios and Bunim/Murray Productions are
  co-producing three seasons of Real World specifically for
  Facebook Watch.
• The Real World’s last season aired on TV between 2016 and
  2017.
• The Facebook Watch seasons will be created specifically for
  the US, Mexico, and Thailand.
• Weekly 30-minute episodes of the show will drop on the
  platform in spring and include voting capabilities allowing users
  to pick the cast.

MTV wants to introduce a new generation of viewers to its
long-running reality hit, “The Real World,” so it’s creating
three seasons of the show exclusively for Facebook Watch.

Viacom’s MTV Studios is co-producing the series with Bunim/Murray
Productions (BMP) for Facebook Watch. It will roll out in the
spring of 2019. There are three seasons of the show that are
localized to the US, Mexico, and Thailand markets, and each
weekly episode will be 30 minutes long.

“The Real World”
logo
Viacom

“The Real World” is one of MTV’s longest-running and most
successful series, spanning 32 seasons beginning in 1992. Under
the deal with Facebook Watch, the new seasons will not air on TV.
The last season of the show to air on TV was “Real
World Seattle: Bad Blood” that ran between 2016 and 2017.

The new seasons will solely be distributed on Facebook Watch and
include interactive and social tools. One is voting, which lets
viewers vote on one housemate to appear on the show before it
airs, according to Viacom. Viacom also plans to use several of
Facebook’s features like Facebook Live, Watch Party, and
Premieres, and will post daily scenes of the show.

“By partnering with Facebook Watch and BMP, we have the
opportunity to impact culture and create a new genre of
television all over again, while engaging the next generation of
content consumers around the world,” MTV president Chris McCarthy
said in a statement.

Facebook’s content ambitions continue to grow

Facebook is on a mission to turn its Watch tab into a standalone
video hub for long-form video, and has courted a number of
publishers to crank out ‘shows’ for the platform.

Over the past year, the Watch section has expanded to include
both shows and shorter video clips from creators.
According to Facebook, 50 million people in the US go to the
Watch tab once a month to watch at least one minute of video.

Most recently, Facebook
opened up reserved buying for pre-roll and mid-roll ads that
appear in premium Watch videos, which is similar to how TV ad
buyers buy shows. The idea is that advertisers will have more
assurance that their ads will only appear alongside premium video
content using Nielsen’s Target Rating Points (or TRPs).

“It’s intended to be the most engaging, highest-quality content
that we have and we look at a number of signals when we think
about inclusion for publishers and creators — popularity, how
many people are watching intentionally, how loyal are they,” Kate
Orseth, Facebook’s media monetization product marketing director,
told Business Insider recently.