the future is coming

They Are Serious About Making iPhone Apps Into TV Shows Now

Turning Twitter accounts into TV shows (see: Shit My Dad Says, Shh … Don’t Tell Steve) is so earlier this year. Apparently, all you need for a production deal these days is a successful smartphone app. Foursquare CEO and co-founder Dennis Crowley has inked a development deal with Endemol USA to create a television series in which the app, which lets users check in from different locations, is “meaningfully integrated.” Hear that, product-placement-averse viewers? Integration is about to get meaningful. Since Endemol produces shows like Deal or No Deal and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, it will probably look something like an Amazing Race but where they have to “check in” from remote locations around the globe instead. Or, if Foursquare wanted to be more blatant about advertising, just some kind of Home Shopping Network hybrid where smartphone users run around trying to score the best deals by becoming mayor of their local supermarket or something. That’s what the Home Shopping Network is, right? Just people running around shopping? Yeah, we thought so.

Then again, Endemol could opt to focus on the co-founders themselves. We could picture a Social Network–like origination myth about the company’s founding. Instead of Harvard’s debaucherous final club parties, they could sex it up with the “hook-up” badge Crowley & Co. first designed especially for South by Southwest. Some kind of twentysomething ensemble cast about being the breakout entrepreneurs in New York City’s hot new tech scene also sounds moderately watchable.

But seriously, if this whole app-to-TV show thing actually catches on, may we suggest going through with the Angry Birds proposal? Those hateful pigs are just begging for a backstory.

Foursquare in Deal to Create TV Series Based on It [NYT]

They Are Serious About Making iPhone Apps Into TV Shows Now