NBC is bringing its top shows to Snapchat (kinda)

Today, NBCUniversal signed a multi-year deal to bring some of its top shows — like ‘Saturday Night Live,’ ‘The Voice,’ and ‘The Tonight Show’ — to Snapchat. Well, mostly.

What the programming looks like remains to be seen, but the deal states the network will work with the platform to create new “shows” while using some of its most popular programming as a starting point. Speculatively, it seems this could translate into Snapchat clips from The Voice, or shorts from SNL, but at this point we really don’t know. After a report in The Wall Street Journal reported NBCU wouldn’t simply disseminate repurposed clips to Snapchat, this seems to be the logical choice.

After all, it’s not as simple as cropping a 16:9 video into a square space and calling it a day.

The deal doesn’t call for exclusivity, however. “If the content works in other places, we’ll put it there,” Ron Lamprecht, executive vice president of business development and digital distribution at NBCUniversal explains.

NBCU also plans to sell ads for the shows, a move worth keeping an eye on as Snapchat has been noticeably absent of ads since its inception. Reaching out to the lost TV generation on the platforms they’re already using is a great idea, but one can’t help but wonder if the advertising approach kills the appeal of it all. After all, these are 10 second videos, so what length of advertisement could you possibly add to a short video without making it feel like you spend as much time on ads as you do the content itself?

This remains to be seen, but I, for one, can’t wait to see SNL in my Snapchat Stories.