Snapchat will launch Bitmoji TV, a personalized cartoon show featuring a user's avatar and their friends in regularly-scheduled adventures, starting in February
Snapchat's most popular yet under-exploited feature is finally getting the spotlight in 2020. Tweets: @counternotions , @mattlynley , @joshconstine , and @joshconstine Tweets: Kontra / @counternotions : And they said Chapsnat couldn't, you know, innovate and social media was trivializing the aspirations of Millennials and Gen Z! https://twitter.com/... Matthew Lynley / @mattlynley : Bitmoji is so undervalued and the scale of content that's available when you dig into it is astounding. This has shades of the Early Flash Cartoon Era in the late 90s/early 2000s which is going to be awesome. https://twitter.com/... Josh Constine / @joshconstine : Here's a look at the history of Bitmoji, Cameos, and why they're key to Snapchat's strategy to put your face at the center of every experience https://techcrunch.com/... Josh Constine / @joshconstine : Snapchat turned selfies into the future of communication. Its new Bitmoji TV could turn animated selfies into the future of content. https://techcrunch.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Bitmoji has been Snapchat's stickiest asset for years — first as chat stickers and homescreen widgets, then as a 3D asset when Snap built an animation pipeline to overlay avatars on the camera. What changed is that Snap stopped treating the avatar as decoration and started treating it as a content engine: December brought Cameos, which pastes user selfies into short looping videos, and now Bitmoji TV casts the avatar and friends' avatars as recurring characters in a scheduled show.
First-order effects
- Snapchat turns its most popular but under-monetized feature into original programming: from February, users get four-minute cartoons starring their own avatars, delivered through a dedicated Show page they can subscribe to for notifications.
- Snap's in-house animators shift from one-off AR overlays to serialized production, making the avatar library — which Matthew Lynley notes is vast once you dig into it — the raw material for ongoing content.
Second-order effects
- The avatar stops being a single-feature asset: with the Bitmoji For Games SDK already letting developers swap in 3D Bitmoji character skins, a show format gives game partners and future collaborators a reason to treat Snap's avatar as portable identity across formats.
- Rival platforms with their own selfie- or avatar-based features face pressure to match scheduled, personalized programming rather than one-off sticker gags — Cameos and Bitmoji TV together set the pace for what 'avatar content' means.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platforms compete on who can cast your likeness in the most contexts — games, camera, video, shows — which makes likeness governance (consent, control over how your avatar is used in scripted scenarios) a structural design question rather than a settings afterthought.
- Personalized scheduled media points toward identity-driven content pipelines where the user's data is the star, shifting value from distribution rights to whoever owns the avatar layer.
The trend: Social platforms are converting user identity assets like avatars from decorative stickers into programmable, cross-format content engines.