The Music Contest App, Chosen, Launches Ellen Degeneres’ Dance Off

By Josh Constine for TechCrunch

Having all your content on TV is a bit like having all your money in oil: it’s still popular, but the next thing is coming and you better diversify. That’s why it’s so smart that talk show host Ellen DeGeneres set up her own Ellen Digital Ventures firm to bring her content and capital to new mediums beyond television.

Today, Ellen Digital Ventures announced that musician competition app Chosen will be its latest investment and partnership. Chosen will now feature Ellen’s Dance Off, a new contest where people can submit videos of themselves dancing and use Tinder-esque swipes to vote on who else is the best dancer.

“We recognize people are consuming content on smaller and smaller screens and we want to be part of that”, says The Ellen DeGeneres Show producer Andy Lassner. Rather than sticking with its demographic of 25-54 year old women watching TV, Ellen Digital Ventures is helping the celebrities build a younger audience on the next medium: mobile. Producer Mary Connelly explains “The digital landscape is a new digital playground for our wildly creative staff.”

Chosen is Ellen Digital Ventures’ fourth big project. It launched the family-friendly YouTube alternative EllenTube last year to feature clips from her TV show plus exclusive content. And in October, Ellen launched Psych!, a party game where friends sit around trying to trick each other with fake trivia answers. Ellen first dove into mobile with her own game Heads Up! where players try guess the word on their own phone held against their head.

The investment of undisclosed size adds to the $6.5 million raised by Chosen from DCM, Rhodium, and CrunchFund [Disclosure: CrunchFund was started by TechCrunch’s founder].

The Ellen DeGeneres Show producer Ed Glavin concludes, “The crazier this world gets and the harder it is to turn on your TV and see something pleasant, the more important it is for us to be an escape.”

This is an excerpt. Click here to view the full article at TechCrunch.