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Chronicles

The story behind the story

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Snapchat will launch Bitmoji TV, a personalized cartoon show featuring a user's avatar and their friends in regularly-scheduled adventures, starting in February

Josh Constine / TechCrunch :

TechCrunch Josh Constine

Context & Ripple Effects

Bitmoji TV is the latest move in Snap's multi-year campaign to turn its avatar from a sticker into an operating layer for the app. The company already put Bitmoji on the iOS Today screen and Android homescreen via widget chat shortcuts in 2017, opened it to third parties through the Bitmoji For Games SDK in April 2019, and began testing Cameos, which swaps selfie faces into short looping videos, just three weeks before this announcement.

First-order effects

  • From February, Snapchat users get regularly-scheduled four-minute cartoon adventures starring their own avatar and their friends', giving Snap's Show page a subscription-with-notifications hook that keeps viewers returning on a schedule rather than opening ad hoc.

Second-order effects

  • The show reuses the 3D Bitmoji animation pipeline Snap's animators built for AR camera overlays, so each new surface — games skins, Cameos, now episodic TV — lowers the marginal cost of the next one and makes the avatar library harder for rivals to replicate.

Third-order effects

  • If the pattern holds, Snap is positioning the avatar as portable identity infrastructure: whoever owns the character representation owns the personalization layer across chat, gaming, camera, and now broadcast-style content.

The trend: Avatars are evolving from static stickers into a programmable identity layer that Snap is extending across every content surface it operates.

Related: Bitmoji TV · Snapchat launches Bitmoji TV cartoons · Snapchat tests Cameos · Bitmoji For Games SDK · Snapchat

Related Coverage

Discussion

  • @mattnavarra Matt Navarra on x
    If this is executed well, Snapchat could be on to something here https://techcrunch.com/...
  • @markupgrade @markupgrade on x
    Snapchat will launch a cartoon series based on its customizable avatar feature called Bitmoji TV in February 2020. Bitmoji's are the next big thing, so it's great to see that @Snapchat has secured a strong web presence with the domain name Bitmoji(.com). https://techcrunch.com/..…
  • @counternotions Kontra on x
    And they said Chapsnat couldn't, you know, innovate and social media was trivializing the aspirations of Millennials and Gen Z! https://twitter.com/...
  • @mattlynley Matthew Lynley on x
    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/...
  • @joshconstine Josh Constine on x
    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/...
  • @joshconstine Josh Constine on x
    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/...