Neat summary of Diffusion PR's Social TV event last night, from Reputation Online.
Just come across this piece via James Warren. As James says, it's a fantastic perspective on the current and likely future state of Social TV. Well worth a read if you're interested in the subject. Kudos to Tom at Monterosa (which is clearly all over the subject).
There has been lots said in the past few weeks about Social TV. The concept is simple and potentially very powerful. In a nutshell, it describes the mass online collaborative experiences that occur in real time during TV broadcasts, extending the viewing experience beyond the goggle box and towards interaction within social media (the google box, if you will). The opportunities for brands (and media companies) are huge.
Simple activations include brands associated with sport sponsorship enabling pundits to provide commentary live during games, allowing fans to interact with them and each other. During %u2018reality%u2019 TV shows brands should enable celebrities to critique (Twitique?) what%u2019s on screen, via the brand%u2019s Twitter handle. Similarly, on platforms like Facebook an opportunity exists to create a non ad break, activated during the live commercial break showing video or content directly related to the show being broadcast, but providing interaction/adding depth/commentary etc. When the show recommences, the content ends (but the opportunity to discuss it/share it persists).
Where things begin to get really interesting is around the concept of live DVD extra-like commentary and interaction (enabled for you by brand X). So hypothetically, during the broadcast of the latest Bond film on national TV, Omega (or Aston Martin or any of the franchise%u2019s many commercial partners) would bring you the opportunity to Tweet directly with Daniel Craig and the film%u2019s director. So the audience can interact with the people behind the content as it plays out in front of them, adding depth and flavour.
From a very simple PR perspective, social TV can be used by brands to ensure that spokespeople/employees are active on social media platforms when that brand is going to be featured, especially on short format shows like news bulletins when the opportunity to get the brand message across is short and the positioning potentially hostile. That way, as long as you let people know about it in advance, they can ask for more detail and brand ambassadors can direct interested parties to more information.
UPDATE: No sooner do I post this than I see this. Orange is sponsoring comedian Peter Serafinowicz to commentate on the BAFTAs via Twitter this weekend. Smart.
Came to this last night from Phil Nash via Ben's re-tweet .
It's Football3s: real-time in-game fantasy football. Basically, it works like this. Before a game being shown live on TV (like last night's FA Cup replay between Liverpool and Reading) you sign up to Football3s and select three players from the 22 playing in the match. You get points for different player activity (scoring, assisting, tackling, saves, completed passes, shots, etc etc) and you can make three substitutions during the game. Your game screen shows you others that are also playing and you can chat with them live. The highest points scorer at the end of the match wins £100. Simple, and genius. Social TV. It's easy to see how online gambling could become a core part of the commercial face of social TV. We're already seeing virtually real-time odds being given during the half-time commercial breaks of live TV football matches and companies such as Betfair promote fan-to-fan betting exchanges which cut out the bookies. It's not a great leap to see real-time in-game sports betting taking place not just about the final result, but what's going on at the time. Penalty gets awarded...within seconds I've found someone who'll give me odds on it being missed, or which way the keeper will dive. It's not just football of course, and live sport (or live event) could become a huge real-time betting exchange (general election night could be huge). It's a massive potential revenue-generator and, as we all know, it's often gambling (or porn) which drives development of online innovations.
Well would you believe it. Rory from the Beeb thinks that Boxee - the gadget that allows you to bring the internet to your telly - was the highlight of CES (or at least the best from the Last Gadget Standing bit of CES).
He said of Boxee:"...a device that could do what few in the tech industry have managed - make Apple's rival product look distinctively second best. The Boxee Box does something that is going to be a big obsession in 2010 - it takes the internet and puts it in your telly. There are plenty of other ways of getting internet content onto TV but they are either hopelessly complicated or, in the case of Apple TV, much too restricted. The Boxee Box lets you take all sorts of good web video stuff - from YouTube to the BBC iPlayer - and view it on your television using an interface that, in the words of the firm's marketing man Andrew Kippen "even a zebra could use." Plus there's a remote with a full keyboard if you really want to do your e-mail from the TV. He told me afterwards that the device was going to launch at $199 in the US in the first half of the year. But when would it come to Britain?"We see all the developments that are going on in the UK and the movement of media online in that country makes it easy for Boxee to work there and we're eager to get there and start selling devices soon."
Pop over to the Microsoft Blog for its take on the future of TV (which is obviously very much in line with the capabilities of Microsoft Mediaroom 2.0, as unveiled by Steve Ballmer at CES this week).
Essentially the vision is the TV you want, when you want it, wherever you want it (i.e. on any device - TV, PC, mobile, etc). Makes a huge amount of sense, obviously. It does seem a bit crazy that our current television viewing is largely tied to the box in the corner of the lounge. And often specific TVs - in my house, we only have Sky+ in one room so that's where we have to watch anything we've recorded. Seems a bit daft. Of course there's the brilliant iPlayer, but the idea that you should be able to get all the TV you want across all devices whenever seems the obvious next step. Given the focus of this little project, I got all excited when I read this bit..."consumers will be able to enjoy TV experiences that combine traditional TV content with rich entertainment experiences, drawing on content sources from a variety of places including the Internet." Ah, yes...the social media/telly mash-up...my real-time Twitter stream integrated into a sidebar while live cricket plays on the screen...that sort of thing. And then, this: "Examples could include outtakes, social commentary, behind-the-scenes interviews and much more. "Social commentary"...now that's what we're talking about.
In relation to my little post below, I notice on Neville's posterous that it's not quite as exciting a social TV development as it at first seemed:
"A TV program will stop playing once a Skype call is made or answered; TV processors are not yet powerful enough to allow people to chat while they watch a show, the companies say."Booo...
'Social TV' (as I'm sort of talking about it) is currently a two-screen affair (at least). Watching the telly with a laptop on your knees or a mobile in your hand. One of the interesting things for me this year will be to see the impact that Internet-enabled TVs have, effectively allowing more people to integrate social media with their TV watching on the same screen.
And then this story pops up from CES: Skype will be available on Panasonic and LG internet-connected TVs. Cool.
Last night Channel4 in the UK started screening the last series of Celebrity Big Brother - the reality TV show where a series of C and Z listers get locked up for a few weeks in the hope that they will start tearing each others hair out within days. US representatives include a worse for wear looking ex-Hollywood Madam Heidi Fleiss and Alec Baldwin 's right-wing brother Stephen. The chart above from Trendistic again shows how Twitter makes live TV a shared experience, not only with your own Twitter friends, but with hundreds of thousands of people if you choose to subscribe to the general stream of comments around the programme. At about 9:20pm GMT, the CBB7 hash tag was in one in fifty tweets. That's noteworthy as the UK only accounts for around 8% of all tweeple. The US accounts for 60%+ and it being Sunday afternoon on the US East Coast, there were plenty of US users online. It's a good example of how Twitter makes live TV events a shared experience. Just as it did with ITV's reality show X-Factor before Xmas and with the US Presidential elections more than a year ago. Speaking from personal experience, knowing that you can contribute to a running commentary makes it more likely that you'll tune in when the programme is actually on, rather than recording it on your PVR. The Trendistic chart also shows the short lifespan of a lot of Twitter trends, by 11pm UK time chatter had subsided to almost zero as people moved on. 
