The future of TV: 800K watch a watermelon explode

Source: Buzzfeed. Buzzfeed was able to capture the attention of more than 485,000 social media savvy individuals thanks to some rubber bands and a piece of fruit.·CNBC
Michelle Castillo
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While everyone tries to get millennials to pay attention to live television, BuzzFeed was able to captivate more than 800,000 people at once thanks to some rubber bands and a piece of fruit.

On Friday, the media company used Facebook Live to livestream its employees putting rubber bands around a watermelon with the goal of making it explode, which it ultimately did with an Internet-satisfying burst.

There were more than 800,000 live viewers at the time of the explosion, and the video — a simple affair with a melon, a table and two people in lab coats — was watched more than 2.9 million times in total at the time of publication, according to Facebook.

It had more than 318,000 comments and more than 8,400 shares by the time BuzzFeed turned off the show.

"This far outperformed anything I'd previously thought possible," Jeremy Briggs, head of Buzzfeed Video in New York, told CNBC. "It had a lot of elements I was eager to test, but nobody saw this level of popularity coming. It's very exciting."

Still, the feed was not able to capture the honor for most-watched livestream in Facebook (FB) history; the company told CNBC that a stream from actor Vin Diesel had once topped 1 million live viewers.

Soon after, other media outlets attempted to replicate BuzzFeed's success, including a Fortune editor who calculatingly stapled an orange.

Below is a collect of tweets from users losing their collective minds over the juicy video.

(Disclosure: CNBC parent NBC Universal is an investor in BuzzFeed.)



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