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The NBA's Nick Young is the first guest on House of Highlight's show.
- House of Highlights has more than 10 million Instagram followers and the brand has been actively looking to move into other platforms.
- The Turner-owned publisher is eyeing both YouTube and Twitter as platforms for growth but sees a particularly big opportunity in Twitter's sports fanatics.
- "The House of Highlights Show" is a new Twitter show that will live stream for 75 minutes once a month.
- McDonald's is the show's lead sponsor and will weave long-form, pre-taped segments into the show.
House of Highlights regularly racks up millions of views with short, punchy videos from NBA and sports games cut specifically for Instagram. Now, it's experimenting with going long with video through a new live show on Twitter.
The Turner-owned property is launching "The House of Highlights" show on Thursday night, which will air monthly with 75-minute episodes.
The show is hosted by House of Highlights founder Omar Raja and CJ Toledano, and two other House of Highlights staffers (Drew Corrigan and Jeffrey Wallace) will also be a part of the show. NBA player Nick Young is the program's first guest in this week's episode.
Each show follows the group while they watch games and highlights in real-time, and discuss the big sports news of the day. There will also be segments where the group will answer questions sent in via tweets from viewers and the show will use Twitter's polls and trending features to steer the direction of the program.
"It feels very loose and it's very natural," Raja said. "We're not trying to play characters and I think what we quickly learned was that if we'd just be ourselves and act how we normally act while watching games, the show is going to be great - over the past month and a half, we learned not to be so stiff and read off a monologue."
House of Highlights also hired two producers and built a studio within Bleacher Report's New York office to record the Twitter show.
Live sports is one area where Twitter's shift from text to video seems to be paying off. The company streamed 1,140 events in 2017 and the platform announced 30 live and original video content deals during the Digital Content NewFronts event in April.
At the same time, Twitter's also lost rights to some tentpole events, including the National Football League's broadcasts of Thursday Night Football, which went to Amazon. Meanwhile, Facebook snagged the rights to some Major League Baseball games.
House of Highlights needs to build a brand outside of Instagram
House of Highlights is most well-known for creating viral Instagram posts from NBA and sports games and the account has more than 10 million followers.
With that growth, House of Highlights is working to build a brand outside of the photo-sharing app and Twitter's rabid sports users are a key to doing so.
House of Highlights
"The House of Highlights Show" hosts CJ Toledano (left) and Omar Raja (right)
"We're looking to transition from an Instagram account into a media brand," said Doug Bernstein, House of Highlights general manager. "Now we're looking at Twitter as that next platform for us."
Twitter also expands the publisher's content ambitions to target a specific type of sports fan who follows every moment of a game in real time. House of Highlights has about 46,000 Twitter followers - a tiny fraction of its Instagram audience - but the publisher is hoping to latch onto some of the chatter that already happens on Twitter during sports games.
"NBA Twitter is huge and something that we're really excited to be a part of - whatever is happening in sports, a lot of conversation is happening on Twitter," Bernstein said.
YouTube is another part of House of Highlight's growth plans for longer-form videos, and the company's nine-month-old YouTube account has more than 370,000 subscribers.
The publisher is trying to make branded content that doesn't feel like an ad
Similar to House of Highlights' work with branded Instagram Stories, the publisher is slowly working ads into its content and already has a group of advertisers lined up for the new Twitter show.
McDonald's is the lead sponsor of the show and has purchased ads in all eight episodes. The deal was made through the combination of Twitter, House of Highlights, and sports sibling Bleacher Report's sales teams, though Bernstein declined to say if the sponsorship was a revenue-share program with Twitter.
McDonald's will be included in pre-taped segments that last for five to six minutes and appear during the show. The ad in the first episode focuses on the House of Highlights team going to a haunted house. They eat McDonald's beforehand.
There's also ads from Uber Eats and Venmo during the first two episodes of the show. Part of the show will feature Raja and Toledano ordering McDonald's from Uber Eats and paying for it via Venmo.
"It's not really meant to be a commercial," Raja said. "I have McDonald's - no lie - three or four times a week. They saw it right away and loved it. We're not putting on an act, we're just doing what we want to do."
This story was originally published by bleacher report.