Group items tagged

ost people currently prefer to watch “must-see TV” at the time of broadcast, the signs are that this will soon change.

But there are strong pointers to a not-too-distant future where time-shifting is the default behaviour for most viewers, most of the time, and live viewing is mainly reserved for event TV.

On-demand is seen more as a catch-up facility, with 70 per cent of on-demand users claiming they only use on-demand services to catch up on programmes they have missed. In addition, the availability of on-demand services on other screens is key to many, with 47 per cent of on-demand users stating that they often use on-demand services to watch programmes when they are not in front of a TV set.

Facebook today announced a partnership with UK-based social TV analytics company SecondSync.

The partnership is a big deal because it means Facebook’s social TV data will be made available outside the company for the first time. In two weeks, SecondSync plans to share initial results in a white paper titled “Watching with Friends” with a full analysis of how people are using Facebook to engage with TV.

A majority (58%) of heavy engagers -- i.e., consumers who share related thoughts via social networks at least 10 times a week -- report watching more live TV, according to an iModerate Research Technologies study.

Among some 150 males and females who engage in what Rossow calls “social TV” at least once a week, the emerging behavior has also made these viewers into more active consumers and influencers.

An increasing number of viewers also "love the social interaction and frequently add shows to their viewing lineup due to social chatter,” Rossow notes. “That adds up to more time spent on social networks and more hours watching television.”

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.

. 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.

traditional scheduled TV is limited by what he called the "tyranny of the grid," or the 21 hours of prime-time programming that get the most viewers. Anything that doesn't fit into that grid gets thrown out

In contrast, internet TV allows audiences to aggregate over time and space, and can afford to curate content that has smaller audiences at any one time.

Netflix originals don't need to be 48 minutes long to fit into a prime-time schedule, and don't need to force cliffhangers that keep viewers in suspense for the next episode, because viewers can "binge" into the next episode right away.

traditional TV viewing among 18-24-year-olds in Q2 2014 was down by 11.7% year-over-year. Between Q2 2011 and Q2 2014, weekly viewing fell by 21.7%, a sizable figure.

TV viewing by 18-24-year-olds; the weekly average has now dropped on a year-over-year basis for at least 10 consecutive quarters.

in the space of 3 years, Q2 TV viewing by 18-24-year-olds dropped by more than 5 hours per week. That’s a considerable amount, equivalent to roughly 45 minutes per day.

or all the video people watch on the web, it is still a tiny fraction of how much they watch on TV in terms of time spent. In a report put out yesterday on the State of the Media summarizing 2011 data, Nielsen estimates Americans spend an average of 32 hours and 47 minutes a week watching traditional TV. They only spend an average of 3 hours and 58 minutes a week on the Internet, and only 27 minutes a week watching video online. All those billions of videos watched online still only represent 1.4 percent of the time spent watching traditional TV.

Even on the web, there is a huge difference between the video sites which attract the biggest audiences and those which are the most engaging. The top 5 video sites by unique visitors are YouTube, Vevo, Yahoo, Facebook, and MSN. But the top 5 video sites by time spent are Netflix, YouTube, Tudou, Hulu, and Megavideo.

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.

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

Trendrr calls itself a real-time company that processes and tries to make sense out of the data surrounding television, media and brands. Trendrr’s products — Curatorr and Trendrr.TV

Having sat at this intersection of TV and social media for years, we’ve analyzed data from lots of platforms. What makes Twitter uniquely compelling among these platforms is its connection to the live moment — people sharing what’s happening, when it’s happening, to the world. We think we can help amplify even stronger the power of that connection to the moment inside of Twitter.

Twitter in May rolled out new products that let advertisers target people on Twitter who had just seen their ads on TV. The update was born out of Twitter’s acquisition of Bluefin Labs, another social TV tracker. The move wasn’t so much a boon for media companies as much as a display of how Twitter can work on a second screen alongside TV.

ccording to Nielsen’s SocialGuide service, the heaviest Twitter activity appears to be happening during real-time programming minutes and not commercial breaks. After analyzing data culled from 59 broadcast and cable programs, SocialGuide concluded that nearly three-quarters (70 percent) of all airtime tweets were sent during the actual content.

when the spot load is light, the share of tweets issued during the breaks is also light. By the same token, when the programming is weighed down by multiple spots, the volume of tweets sent in commercial time rises proportionately.   

in some of the more compelling programs there are spikes in Twitter activity that coincide with significant plot moments

Twitter's 49.2 million U.S. users generally skew younger and are disproportionately in cities, for example, according to marketers and media analysts.

marketers see potential value in knowing which shows have Twitter enthusiasts. For some, it is becoming a factor when they purchase TV time: The theory is that if fans are engaged on Twitter that "means the ads are also being paid attention to,"

The stakes are high for Twitter, which is under the spotlight of an initial public offering of stock and has identified TV-related ad spending as a crucial revenue driver.

The 2012 Emmys flopped on the social media front in comparison to this year’s other prominent awards shows. While the Grammys, Video Music Awards and the BET Awards set new records across Twitter, Facebook and assorted TV companion apps like GetGlue, the Grammys registered a stultifying 1.56 million interactions throughout the day,

This year’s Grammy Awards generated roughly seven times more social interaction than last year’s show, according to Trendrr. The Emmys? About one and a half times as much.

"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).

The Golden Triangle will one day soon engender a shared experience across the three screens, but for the meantime, a resurgence of crowd-powered demand for relevance and personalization is leading a groundswell of change and evolution within each medium.

The result of the social effect and the integrated social hooks inherent in today’s online networks will only inspire a genre of connectivity and interaction as programming will eventually feature creative triggers that engender desired responses and action. The same is true for any event, whether it’s on air, live, or on the big screen.

The water cooler or social effect is only one part of defining a more meaningful experience over time. It is culturally significant as it connects people around common interests in real-time all over the web using events as our participation hub and as our magnet for convergence.