MoneyWatch Tech

Twitter's Real TV Hit

By Erik Sherman

Updated on: May 30, 2009 / 3:11 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

The news of Twitter in discussions with Hollywood for a Twitter-inspired TV show seems like the silly type of thing you'd have heard during the dot com boom. It seems to be reality show meets fad. But let's assume for a moment that the people involved are not nuts. I started thinking about this and realized that Twitter could -- and, more importantly, already does -- provide interactivity the broadcast industry has craved for years.

Given the brief description of the deal, pretend for a moment that it isn't what you immediately dreaded on first hearing the news: some dopy situation where people are sending 140-character messages to each other on the show. Instead, it becomes a way of connecting actors, characters, and audiences together in a way television has been unable to do before. Consider some of the evidence:

ITV, the UK's oldest commercial television network, is using Twitter as a backchannel, so people can comment to each other on what is happening.
Verizon has in trials a service that displays in realtime tweets related to a given TV show on the television screen as people watch the show.
Some fans of the show Mad Men created their own sensation by tweeting as their favorite characters.
As I checked Twitter's trending topics as I wrote this, five of the leading terms referred to the show Britain's Got Talent.

As I've seen on a number of online discussion forums over the years, people love to talk about their favorite televisions shows. Now they could have a chance to do that with an officially-sponsored discussion channel, perhaps. Or perhaps interested Twitter users could sign up to receive promotional messages. Or, just perhaps, reality shows could use Twitter as a high recognition way to take in votes to see who is sent away from the island/stage/volcano/house/planet/what have you.

Now also remember all the companies with lots of money that want to own the home entertainment crown. For example, Microsoft has its specialized version of Windows as well as the Xbox, Apple has Apple TV, and Cisco is one of the big producers of set-top boxes, and at least two of the three have a strong interest in keeping Google, with the new Wave product, from getting enough toe hold. So why not buy Twitter and integrate it in to the television, as well as on computers and mobile phones, so that people could literally sit at their televisions and read and write tweets as they watch shows? And then the programming companies, paying Tweeter for the privilege, could watch what was going on in the discussions, analyze it for further program development, and also put the data together for advertisers, wooing companies to re-up at a premium price. Many in the industry may be laughing about a Twitter TV show now, but watch the smiles vanish as they begin to realize how effective and profitable the combination could be.

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