The Season 11 Finale episode of American Idol set an all-time record in social TV with 1.2M social media comments.
In fact, this wasn’t just the most social finale episode, it was the most social TV series episode ever. (TV series, meaning that sporting events and special events are not counted here.)
Details in the infographic below.
Sitting on the couch merely watching TV is so last year.
How about playing along with “Glee” on your tablet when, poof, the commercial appears and up pops a deep-discount Pizza Hut coupon? Or watching “Real Housewives” and, pow, a friend sends a slide show to your phone showing where you can buy the outfits they’re wearing on the show?
Turning television into an interactive experience across the couches of America, the nascent world of “Social TV” links the big screen and the small. It is helping determine which shows prosper and giving viewers a reason to watch television live again — as a shared experience — rather than via DVR.
“There’s suddenly this whole range of different types of experiences where people can do more than just view TV,” said David Markowitz, vice president of marketing at SecondScreen Networks, which builds interactive tablet ads for shows.
TV fans’ new best friend could be a collection of apps to help them jump into a show’s action. Start-ups such as Viggle, GetGlue, Shazam and Miso — and the channels themselves, USA, SyFy and HBO — to name a few.
Small as they are now, these projects have potential to turn the TV industry inside out — and give viewers dramatic new ways to enjoy their shows more.
SecondScreen Networks of New York built a system for the USA Network’s Character Chatter app. When a TV ad appeared during the sports drama “Necessary Roughness” touting the new Lincoln MKX, the system pushed out a special ad on tablets asking questions such as which character drove the sport utility vehicle in the show.
Twenty-three percent of people who had the app clicked on the ad to participate. “That’s off the charts compared to even a typical online ad interaction,” Markowitz said. “Then we did another with Toyota, and it was higher than that.”
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The San Francisco-based Miso start-up built the app SideShow to help networks and viewers create their own multimedia projects for following along with TV shows — scrolling jokes, photos and posts, for example — then sharing them so the projects appear on phones and tablets of friends through Facebook.
A teacher and actor in St. Louis, Sarajane Alverson has made a dozen SideShows for her favorite shows. During one scene when Howard of “Big Bang Theory” lays out all his belt buckles on the bed for his friend to polish, her slide popped up: “Just how many belt buckles DOES Howard have?…. approximately 80. … (yes, I counted). That’s one belt buckle for every 1.3875 episodes.”
“We have one big fan of the show ‘Archer’ on FX,” said Shay Fan, a marketing executive with Miso. “During key moments, his SideShow pops up things that are really funny. It’s a real second-screen experience. … Even when you’re watching alone, you can share things with your friends and fans of the show.”
Miso has attracted more than 330,000 users and investments from Google Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Hearst Interactive Media.
Twitter hashtags are familiar to TV viewers, but not like this: Marketers for the movie “Prometheus” ran ads in the United Kingdom promoting the tag #areyouseeingthis. The second time the ad ran, it displayed tweets the previous ad elicited from viewers. At one point, the hashtag was Twitter’s No. 2 trending topic in the U.K.
A slew of other start-ups are jumping into the mix.
GetGlue and Viggle, both from New York, developed systems similar to the popular Foursquare, with discounts and perks for people who check in with specific shows. IntoNow, backed by Yahoo, has apps that listen to TV audio, recognize a show and produce social media pages where fans chat via Twitter and read actors’ tweets.
Shazam, once just a music ID gizmo, is reaching deep into the biggest shows on television and has grown to more than 200 million users in more than 200 countries. The 2012 Super Bowl was “Shazamable,” so viewers could scan commercials for perks.
Channels such as Bravo, USA and SyFy use Shazam to bridge TV with the tablet and phone. Shazaming “Covert Affairs” on USA, for instance, produces a playlist of the show’s music and behind-the-scenes features on the show’s stars.
To keep track of all this, the new site Fans.TV lets viewers set watch lists of favorite shows and share lists with friends so they can all jump into social TV networks at the same time.
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Advertisers, television networks and investors have reason to get into social TV.
Tablet sales topped 81.6 million last year and could hit 424.9 million in 2017, according to DisplaySearch. A whopping 85 percent of tablet owners use them while watching television, according to Nielsen, and tablet owners spend one-third of their tablet time in front of the TV.
Meanwhile, more TV shows are shifting to digital formats and away from TV altogether.
Amazon last week announced a plan to have producers of comedy and TV shows create programming for online streaming and tablets in return for a $55,000 upfront payment and a portion of revenue from toys and T-shirts.
Such social TV initiatives target a fast-developing frontier in technology. Many experts think Facebook already has won the battle to map people’s social relationships, said Ashwin Navin, co-founder of Flingo, which makes social apps for TV sets.
The next battleground is mapping people’s personal interests more deeply, spurring investors into projects that link people’s tastes in the vast TV entertainment market.
The need to measure the new interactions is giving rise to new businesses, too.
SocialGuide, based in Brooklyn, developed ways to scour the Internet for tweets, Facebook posts and other check-ins to compile a top 10 list of shows based on buzz.
On cable recently, that was the New York Rangers and Washington Capitals hockey match, with more than 121,000 comments and posts, followed by the NBA playoff between the Los Angeles Clippers and the Memphis Grizzlies with 102,000 mentions online.
“Sports turns out to be unbelievably social,” said Erika Faust, senior vice president of business development at SocialGuide. Sports accounts for a small share of all TV programming, but it generates more than half the online buzz while games are live.
“It gives producers a sense of the social conversation happening out there,” Faust said. “That can drive media spending” and determine which shows and actors prosper.
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Coming full circle, you have Flingo building these kinds of social tools inside smart TVs from Samsung, LG, Vizio and others. It has placed its software in more than 8 million TVs. One new investor is Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and a pioneer in streaming video and high-definition TV distribution.
“Say you’re watching ‘Modern Family’ or ‘Storage Wars’ and there’s a moment you think is great,” Navin said. “With one click on your remote, you can post on Facebook or Twitter that you’re watching it.”
Things are still shaking out in the nascent social TV industry, but one prospect is especially encouraging to cable and network channels: There’s a new appetite for live television with its commercials that viewers can’t skip past.
And that can mean more advertiser revenue.
Most social TV systems work best when viewers are playing along with their friends at the same time. Live TV rather than DVR maximizes this select audience and ensures no one learns too much from all the online chatter about a game or episode they missed.
“That risk of a spoiler from spotting a tweet,” Navin said, “is the visceral motivation to get back into live TV.”
Lots of music celebrities were tweeting during The Voice the two-night Season Finale so were lots of other people…
While Justin Bieber drove a huge spike in social chatter, the announcement of The Voice‘s Season 2 winner drove the biggest reaction in social TV. Congrats to winner Jermaine Paul (@JermainePaul) and too The Voice for another great season.
Social activity surrounding broadcast primetime TV in April 2012 increased by 194% over April 2011, according to the latest research from Trendrr.TV. In terms of monthly data, of the top five broadcast networks, FOX had the highest increase in broadcast social share, up 10% in April 2012 from March 2012.
Overall, broadcast was more socially active per telecast than cable was. On the cable front, ESPN edged out Nickelodeon as the top social cable network with 13% cable social share. Other data from the report finds that the NCAA Championship Game, WrestleMania, Bad Girls Club, the NBA Playoffs, and the Billboard Latin Music Awsards were the most social telecasts throughout the month. And in terms of genre, reality TV generated the most social buzz at 36%.
Back before remote controls, watching TV was just that – watching the television. These days, it’s so much more.
Now we’re Tweeting and Facebooking up a storm all while keeping one eye on our favourite TV shows and while we’re online, we’re talking about what we’re watching.
Reality TV programs receive the highest mentions, understandably, since they inspire debate among viewers.
Twitter seems to have the most TV junkies of all the Social Media platforms.
Whether we’re Tweeting while watching, having our say post-viewing, discussing a show with friends, or Tweeting the show or its stars – we love Twitter TV talk.
Here are some stats on Social TV viewing…
55% are female
45% are male
Winning, voting and judging are the top subjects, which helps explain why reality TV programs are such a hot topic of Tweets and Updates.
72% Tweet pre-viewing
69% Tweet during the show
47% Tweet after viewing
77% Tweet so friends and followers know what they’re watching
68% Tweet to keep their favourite shows on air
These days, it’s to be expected that at least one or two TV programs will feature in Twitter’s trending topics at any given time.
The ubiquity of the Internet and the normalization of device-based connectivity in all aspects of American life have been chipping away at the old presumption that younger demos were the most feverishly connected.
You can put aside most notions of age, gender and Internet use when it comes to tablets. According to Nielsen’s latest data drop from its State of the Media survey, the demographics of tablet use while watching TV are remarkably even. Overall, Nielsen finds that 69% of tablet owners are using their device with the TV on at least several times a week, with 45% working the two screens at once every day.
Email checking generally on tablets during TV time (61%) is the prevalent activity, but for the 35- to-54-year-old and 55+ segments it spikes to 65%. Sports score lookups (34% of all tablet owners) were also popular, with 44% of males and only 24% of females checking on games.
Nielsen’s stats suggest that the connection between tablet activity and the content on the TV screen is encouraging for programmers and advertisers. They found 22% of tablet users looking up coupons or deals they had seen on TV, with the highest amount of that activity (29%) occurring among the 18-34 segment.
The good news for advertisers is that 27% of tablet owners say they have looked up product information for an ad they saw on TV. Indeed, that behavior is higher (27%-29%) among the 13-54 range, falling off only among 55+ users (22%). Women are slightly more likely to do product look-ups than men (28% vs. 25%).
The prospects for tandem programming seem bright as well, with 37% saying they had looked up information related to the TV program they were watching. In fact, the second-screen experience was engaged evenly across demographics, with all of the age demos and both genders within four or five percentage points of one another. It seems that as of now at least TV programmer can count on more than a third of their target audience with tablets being willing to make the TV-to-tablet connection.
Finally, the energy around so-called “social TV” may not be undeserved. Aside from email checks, accessing the social network (47%) is almost a majority activity among dual-screen users. And here is where the demographic differences do still show. While 62% of the 13-17 segment check their social nets with the TV on, that drops dramatically to 50% of 18- to-34-year-olds and 47% of 35- to-54-year-olds. If TV networks and marketers want to reach audiences on the second screen during prime time, the social networks may be the most direct route.
Perhaps even more dramatically than we saw the smartphone disrupt the retail space last year, tablets and smartphones will fundamentally alter the way we think about the TV experience this year. The rapid adoption of mobile technology is something we have become accustomed to seeing in recent years. What is especially impressive about the tablet/TV combination is just how rapidly the tablet device has settled into a kind of ritualistic use during prime time.
For most tablet owners, prime time is tablet time. This is important because it opens up for programmers and advertisers the expectation of a live and interested audience on this second screen with the same kind of regularity that traditionally they expect from a prime-time audience.
While obviously the tablet is an interactive and highly personalized experience, it seems to me there must be opportunities to think about something like “appointment content” on this device in a way you can’t on smartphones or even the Web. Whether as a complement to the main TV screen or simply as a portable TV itself, this may be the interactive TV (ITV) everyone has been pursuing for decades.
The full Nielsen breakdown of tablet and TV tandem activity is in its new report.
davidgriffith.blog 