Social TV and Film

Tumblr stat is likely music to the ears of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer—who paid $1.1 billion for the social site to help her 19-year-old Internet company "get young." An emerging industry narrative involves teens and twentysomethings migrating in droves from Facebook to Tumblr

Twitter disputed Union Metrics' numbers, claiming to have had 3 million users who tweeted about the VMAs on Sunday

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.

While Intel has not said how much it plans to charge for its TV service, Intel Media head Erik Huggers has billed it as a premium product, with small bundles of channels and an attractive user interface rather than as a cut-rate option for consumers hoping to save money by canceling their cable subscriptions.

“Technology is creating new opportunities to engage with narratives—but it’s not just about accessing more content in more places; it’s about the opportunity to bring stories out of the screen and into our lives,”

“We found audiences are more ready than ever to embrace new tech-driven possibilities for stories to impact us more deeply: allowing us to see new points of view, inspiring us to live better, and even changing the ways we think about brands.”

78 percent of people want to “friend” a character digitally – meaning they would receive updates via platforms like Facebook or via SMS – and would like to be able to sway the outcome of a particular decision, as they would with real friends, perhaps.

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

In the face of customer losses, cable and satellite TV operators say they’re focusing on higher-value subscribers, willing to sacrifice bargain-hunting consumers who at satisfied with over-the-top video options like Netflix and free broadcast TV.

data clearly shows that cord-cutting is picking up the pace as the cost of cable and satellite TV service continues to climb skyward.

The owner of the nation’s largest cable operator has begun preliminary discussions with both film and TV studios and other leading Internet service providers about employing technology, according to sources, that would provide offending users with transactional opportunities to access legal versions of copyright-infringing videos as they’re being downloaded.

The new approach would be an alternative to the Copyright Alert System, a voluntary initiative many leading programmers and distributors like Comcast have been utilizing since February. Other CAS participants include AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner Cable and Cablevision, as well as all studios affiliated with MPAA.

Using pirated content as a platform to drive legal transactions reflects an alternate philosophy regarding copyright infringement, one that sees the illegal activity less as a crime that requires punishment and more as lead generation to a consumer whose behavior is borne out of inadequate legitimate digital content options.

Chromecast lets your stream online content to your TV and control it via your new Nexus 7 (also introduced today, along with Android 4.3) or any Android device running version 2.3 or later

Unlike Apple's AirPlay, which can stream content directly from mobile devices to Apple TV, Chromecast pulls content from the cloud. The benefit: If the person initiating the Chromecast leaves the house, someone else can continue controlling the viewing experience with a different Cast-enabled device. It also won't drain the battery of your device.

Like most Google TV devices, it comes with a separate and overly complex remote control. The remote control for Chromecast will be your favorite mobile device (yes, it even beats your iPhone). It's very un-remote like: No special interface or buttons. Since Chromecast revolves around apps, the app remains the interface. If you know Netflix, you know how to work Chromecast.

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.

Today, the dynamic between low-budget producer and content-hungry distributor has flipped. Netflix doesn’t just stream films—it wills them into existence. The composition of contemporary B movies is dictated by middlemen like Netflix and Redbox, international direct-to-DVD distributors, and cable networks like Syfy, all of which pad their offerings with Asylum originals tailored to their needs.

The nimble creative process is “cashing in on this shifting moment in film consumption between the demise of the video store and the rise of streaming,” says Davis.

Filtering in low-budget films with the high-budget versions “fuels this perception that there’s a wealth of new content.”

But negative comments about the feature continued. A more recent factor was the highly publicized revelations about surveillance activities by the National Security Agency. “What pushed me over the hump was the whole NSA sort of thing,” Huggers says. “I don’t want to go there.”

Not that Intel doesn’t plan to offer plenty of ways to personalize the TV-watching experience. For example, the company cites a Personal Profiles feature that helps switch between individuals using the device, so they have access to relevant content and recommendations. Another option lets users add favorites so they have access to recently watched shows, with the ability to instantly pick up in the program where they left off.

Still another feature, called Spotlight, integrates recommendations based on what’s trending in social media as well as curating content based on a user’s age, interest and time of watching, the company says.

With an Intel-designed set-top box, people won't have to own DVRs or even plan to record programs.

Negotiations with media companies for content rights could delay new services and limit some features, though Intel vows to enter some markets by the end of the year.

"I've never seen as much innovation in television as there is right now," says Ulf Ewaldsson, chief technology officer at Swedish telecom-equipment giant Ericsson, which plans to step up its own TV efforts

Apple TV is reportedly developing ad-skipping technology so owners of a set-top box can watch shows commercial-free. The propsed deal with cable companies would reimburse programmers for skipped ads.

Google is really just hoping to beat Apple to the punch, despite the fact that the company already has its Apple TV streaming product on the market, according to The New York Times "Apple’s thinking… is that any next-generation television service must be set up in partnership with existing distributors, in part for quality assurance reasons. A future Apple service could include a user-friendly interface layered on top of Time Warner Cable or Cablevision’s channel lineup."

Adoption from the major networks is "very unlikely to support any service with their linear feed that allows for commercial messages to be skipped even if they get some form of compensation," Rino Scanzoni, chief investment officer for WPP's GroupM, told AdAge. "This is not a viable economic model and subscribers to the system would not pay an adequate premium to compensate for it."