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sports (31%) and reality (17%) are the primary genres generating social TV buzz, combining to account for about half of social TV conversations between January 1 and November 30 2012.

The CTAM study also finds that viewers are more likely to talk about shows the next day or after (83%) or right after the show (75%). (The study was not limited to social media conversations.)

NBC was easily the most engaging network of the year, with the Olympics a big reason why.

ut Nascar's new page has a key new feature, which is the ability to pull in tweets related to a live event from a variety of sources. In the case of Nascar, tweets about Pocono 400 were being pulled in from drivers like Jeff Gordon as well as sports writers, and the curation was executed through an algorithm that searched for relevant content with the assistance of human editors, according to a Twitter blog post. It's further evidence of Twitter's desire to be the platform advertisers turn to when they're looking to execute promotions around major live events such as the Super Bowl or the Oscars. Last month, they announced a partnership with ESPN to create branded campaigns around tentpole sports events.

#Nascar page is the first of its kind and has a slightly different layout than the brand pages Twitter unveiled in December, which feature customizable header images and enable brands to keep a particular tweet -- often a photo or video that can auto-expand -- at the top,

"Instant replay plays to Twitter's strength of news in real time and on mobile," says Glenn Brown, director of promoted content and partnerships at Twitter, which is partnering with Turner Broadcasting. A third party, Silicon Valley-based SnappyTV, is supplying the underlying technology to deliver 15-second video highlights. Consumers can follow @marchmadness for video.

The "instant replay" concept, which Twitter introduced last year with ESPN for college bowl game highlights, offers Twitter a way to strike up advertising sponsorships. Also, it fortifies Twitter's format for brand names to embrace the microblogging service.

Eventually, eMarketer estimates Twitter will account for 13% of U.S. social-advertising revenue by 2014 ($807.5 million), compared with 5.5% last year ($288.3 million).

Social network users are 27.3% more likely to say that the sites are important for making entertainment-related decisions than not (56% vs. 44%),

Twitter users are more likely than Facebook users to follow actors and actresses (41% vs. 32%), sports figures (25% vs. 17%), reality TV stars (23% vs. 16%), and journalists and reporters (15% vs. 9%). By contrast, Facebook members are more likely to follow companies and brands (49% vs. 37%), sports teams (30% vs. 22%), TV shows (49% vs. 30%), and movies (43% vs. 25%).

Roughly 4 in 5 respondents said they always or sometimes visit Facebook while watching TV, while 41% reported tweeting about the show they are watching. In fact, of those posting about TV shows, roughly three-quarters did so while watching programs live, and 51% said they post while watching to feel connected to others who might be watching.

The vast majority of Americans – 95 percent – still watch television using traditional cable or satellite options, according to Nielsen. But the number of households that choose to opt out of cable or satellite TV is on the rise, from 2 million in 2007 to 5 million in 2013, Nielsen’s data show.

“This scares the bejesus out of the cable and satellite people,” said Jim Barry, a spokesman for the Consumer Electronics Association in Arlington, Va. “I think it’s going to change the business model.”

A main driver behind the high cost of cable and satellite in recent years is the expensive license fees networks pay sports leagues to broadcast their games. The cost gets passed on to consumers to pay for the “bundles” of channels they get with their cable satellite subscriptions, whether they plan to watch sports or not.

Almost three months after striking a deal to acquire second screen TV app specialist GetGlue, i.TV has "retired" the GetGlue brand while introducing a new brand and social TV app called "tvtag" that will enable users to share, comment on and react to what they’re watching.

Tvtag will aggregate the i.TV second screen audiences from GetGlue, DirecTV and Nintendo (via the Nintendo TVii feature that’s baked into the Wii U console and Wii U GamePad). i.TV CEO Brad Pelo said the move will give tvtag access to an aggregate, potential reach of about 10 million users.

The new app replaces the GetGlue platform with one that  lets users “tag” moments within individual TV shows and sporting events with comments, doodles and memes. Keeping some of the old GetGlue features in place, tvtag will still let users “check in” to a show to unlock digital stickers, while also integrating user polls tied to TV content and the ability to share show-related info on Twitter and Facebook.

or Internet-based TV to be a competitive option, it either needs to be cheaper than cable and satellite or it needs to provide the content that subscribers want in a better way.

For the companies still working on Web TV, it would mean charging less than traditional competitors for a service while paying more than traditional competitors to offer it.

for a Web TV offering to be truly Web TV, it would need to offer all the channels consumers want alongside the "over-the-top" video capabilities like Netflix and Hulu that they associate with Internet viewing.

A good chunk of the tournament’s 67 games will only be available to people who have access to Turner-owned cable channels TNT, TBS and TruTV. And for the first time ever, that includes the two semifinal games on Saturday, April 5: If you don’t have pay TV, or a friend who does, and you don’t want to watch the Final Four games at a bar, you’re going to be out of luck.

Big-time sports have been migrating from free broadcast channels to pay channels for some time.

SportStream, which is backed by Seattle Seahawks and Portland Trail Blazer owner Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital, aggregates social chatter about currently in-progress games with stats, scores, and rich data on what’s actually happening. The goal is a simple streaming second-screen experience: watch the game on the big screen, get involved in the dialog on the little screen.

The Talking Social TV study revealed that infrequent viewers are mainly influenced by off-line word-of-mouth, which can be five to ten times as effective as social media in reaching these potential viewers. Conversely, TV show promos were found potentially to be a distraction for regular viewers, repeaters in the nomenclature.

Fundamentally the CRE believed that demographics play a more important role than programme genre in explaining the role of social media on TV viewing. By genre, social media was found to play a stronger role for genres such as reality, sports and talk shows.

The survey also showed that for repeaters, the first encounters with offline word-of-mouth, or a one-to-one electronic communication such as an email or text, or a social-media communication, are related to higher viewing, while subsequent communications can have diminishing returns

Facebook has given Trendrr preliminary access to previously unanalyzed Facebook user engagement data on chatter relating to television content.

Our analysis reveals that there is a large amount of TV-related social activity on Facebook — in numbers approximately 5 times as large as that of all other social networks combined as measured by Trendrr.

Trendrr’s analysis of second-screen Facebook activity during one week in May** found that the volume of Facebook user engagement relating to television programming was 5 times as large as all other social networks combined. Activity related to broadcast television was 7 times as large, while activity linked to cable-television programming was 4.5 times as large as all other social networks combined. Second-screen activity levels on Facebook were particularly high among viewers of dramas and comedies.

It’s internally testing “Chronological By Actor,” a new way to display updates about live events so they appear in order from most recent to oldest, surrounded by feed posts ranked by its traditional relevance-sorting. It’s not ready yet, but the algorithm test denotes Facebook’s keen interest in stealing Twitter’s real-time social media crown.

It revealed it would start publicizing News Feed algorithm changes in blog posts, as well as two changes that have already been rolled out: “Story Bumping,” which bumps stories you haven’t seen yet to the top of the feed, and “Last Actor,” which shows you more feed stories about the people you’ve recently interacted with or viewed the profile of.

If you want up-to-the-second information about what’s transpiring in a sports event or breaking news story, Twitter wins. Y

A mélange of TV resource apps are getting together to help each other, and their users. Dijit, Thuuz, Tomorrowish, IVA and Simple.TV are partnering to integrate their products and services. The theory seems to be that they are stronger working together, rather than alone. Given the non-competitive positioning of each, this could be a boon for TV viewers. First a quick summary of what each of the companies does. Dijit’s NextGuide helps TV viewers discover new TV shows and remember to watch them. Thuuz provides real-time sports updates helping fans tune to the most interesting game on TV at any given time. Tomorrowish let’s viewers watching a show or event on-demand replay the social media buzz from the first broadcast. Internet Video Archive (IVA) specializes in providing show and movie trailers. Simple.TV provides live TV and network DVR services.

To its 200 million-plus active users, Twitter is many things: a social network, a short-form messaging service, a news wire, a tool for self-expression — even, some believe, a force for global political change. But the company itself seems far more keen to position itself among its users — and even better, potential users – as a TV companion, an indispensable tool to keep up with, discuss and even influence the outcomes of shows and live events like sporting contests and political debates.

The average price of an ad has been plummeting, down 46% in the most recent quarter.

Americans now comprise just one-fourth of Twitter’s participants.

. In keeping with the company’s emphasis on being the go-to platform to collectively share experiences in real time, Costolo hinted, at a recent appearance at the Brookings Institute in Washington D.C., that Twitter is testing a feature that would allow users to essentially “replay” live events and pinpoint peak moments that can be viewed if missed the first time around.

Yet another form of video that will be coming to more and more Twitter feeds is TV Ad Targeting, a clever tool the company took out of beta last week that identifies someone who tweets about a show as likely to have just seen a commercial, and streams to them an accompanying digital promotion.

Twitter is also looking a lot like a venue for programming: Several innovative new episodic shortform series have used Twitter as a distribution platform in recent months.

Twitter is specifically about what is happening right now,” says Ron Amram, senior media director of Heineken USA, adding that Amplify has become Twitter’s most promising ad tool. “To allow a brand to have real-time ownership of a video that says, ‘This is what you need to know right now’ is pretty powerful.”

To attract more social media attention, “marketers are taking moments that would have been talked about at the water cooler and are allowing them to unfold live,” says Adam Bain, Twitter’s president of global revenue.

A division of 30 employees works with media companies to ensure that networks and their actors tweet during broadcasts and that Twitter hashtags and user names appear on the screen

To its 200 million-plus active users, Twitter is many things: a social network, a short-form messaging service, a news wire, a tool for self-expression — even, some believe, a force for global political change. But the company itself seems far more keen to position itself among its users — and even better, potential users – as a TV companion, an indispensable tool to keep up with, discuss and even influence the outcomes of shows and live events like sporting contests and political debates.

This “second screen experience” turns TV into a participatory activity, allowing Twitter users to broadcast wisecracks, critiques and theories in real-time; the networks, in turn, share the behind-the-scenes worlds of writers’ rooms and dressing rooms, 140 characters at a time.

If done right, “casting” just might be the “killer” app the second screen world has been looking for.

The report pinpoints which apps are resonating with consumers (and why), and focuses on the new role “casting” content is playing in the second screen ecosystem.

“However, we also noted several apps — including Amazon Instant Video, M-Go, and several TV Everywhere services — that currently have no identifiable casting experience,” said Chuck Parker, chairman of the 2nd Screen Society.