ITV and Entertainment Formats Dominate SocialTV in the UK

SocialTV take-up by UK broadcasters is behind Europe in some respects, but ITV dominates the British market with the most engaging entertainment formats. Carl Richter analyses the week's Twitter figures.

On Saturday night, France's most successful socialTV event of the year ("The NRJ Music Awards") drew a record-breaking 2.3million in-show Tweets for TF1, peaking at 17,000 Tweets per minute. This, on the heels of the previous week's "Miss France" contest, also on TF1, which polled 1.1million in-show Tweets from an audience of 8.2million TV viewers.

The state of French socialTV is incredibly healthy. And despite deep recession across Southern Europe, Spanish and Italian socialTV numbers are also doing well. But, how do the UK's socialTV statistics compare?

Figures from the past 7 days are dominated by ITV's "The X Factor", which leads the week by a staggering 375,000 Tweets from its nearest rival ("I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here", also on ITV).

Taking both "X Factor" and "I'm A Celebrity" episodes together, they outperform all nearest rivals across the week put together, with Saturday night's "X Factor" almost reaching TF1's peak of 17,000 Tweets per minute. 

What is most interesting, looking at these figures, is the distance between the top- and nearest-performing shows, which is considerable, both in numbers and by channel.

ITV clearly leads the way, with the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd-performing shows, with Channel 4 managing 4th ("Made In Chelsea") and 5th ("Home Alone", the first non-format).

After sports show "Match of The Day", the BBC's best-performing format is "Strictly Come Dancing", directly opposite ITV's "X Factor", but managing only 1/25th of the Tweets.

While (90-minute) films, (half-hour) soaps, sports and live debate shows are fairly well-represented further down the leader board, with steady if modest socialTV engagement, the UK's weekly figures demonstrate that it is primetime format entertainment which dominates.

Will ITV continue to lead the way in 2014, or can the other channels capitalise on their primetime format investments by converting them into more socially-engaging experiences?

If socialTV was an Olympic event, it would perhaps be the 10,000m, where ITV has an astonishing lead. But we all know the pacemaker doesn't always eventually win the race.

With the right primetime entertainment formats - those essentially which put social media at their heart, rather than simply bolting on Twitter feeds and Facebook/Smartphone apps as afterthoughts - the distance can be closed by ITV's competitors.

But to do this effectively on Twitter means Tweets are going to have to mean something. The action is still on TV, and a Twitter conversation is great, but as both TF1 and ITV know, Twitter participation is better.

Carl Richter

Co-Founder

Spacecraft TV  |  @spacecraftTV

contact@spacecrafttv.com
www.spacecraft.tv

[The remaining graphics follow: source SecondSync]

TV's Transformation of the Tweet

When is a Tweet not a Tweet? When it's a dollar, or a free lunch, or a gameshow prize. Carl Richter reflects on some of the different ways Twitter will be used to redefine socialTV in 2014.

On Saturday night, France registered its third-largest socialTV audience of the year, with the Miss France competition on TF1. Above it in the socialTV charts, two more live events: France-Ukraine and the NRJ Music Awards.

As Marc Lindner wrote on his socialtv.fr blog, centrepiece live events are really the proving ground of socialTV at the moment. The whole secondscreen scene is buzzing with the numbers (almost 1.1million Tweets for Miss France from an audience of 8.2million TV viewers: TF1 are hoping to beat the yearly record of 1.9 million Tweets with the next NRJ Awards). But away from the shiny floors and SuperBowls, the important question concerning real growth is whether or not these number ratios can be matched further down the grid?

To compete with the pulling power of live centrepieces, there has to be innovation. In an interview with the UK's Channel 4 News to coincide with Playstation 4's release, Charlie Brooker observed that indie games available from the Apps Store not only cost a fraction of their console counterparts, but are generally more interesting to play. Lacking the big budgets necessary to paper over any cracks, indie developers live or die by the boundary-pushing nature of their content, and it is surely by virtue of creativity that we will be engaging in the next socialTV breakout hit.

Slowly, we're gravitating towards a 2014 where socialTV is not so much part of the media landscape as part of the furniture, and this means that while fully-live centrepieces will remain highlights and rating-toppers (as they always have been), not every successful socialTV show will have to be fully "live". In fact, there's added value to this "with live elements" model. After all, given a printout of the 1.1million MissFrance Tweets, which broke down into 3 clear types - "encouragement, mockery, and sex appeal" - who would actually want to spend time reading them all? Better, surely, to give Tweets time between "live elements" to percolate and mature into something with real and longer-lasting engagement.

As I've written elsewhere, one example of how Tweets can be transformed is by monetising them, which is what happens in the forthcoming socialTV format "The Cloud", now in pre-production in the US.  Billed as a madeover competitor to "Dragon's Den"/"Shark Tank", we developed "The Cloud" along a simple premise: it's all very well to watch successful entrepreneurs invest in startup projects, but would you actually buy the finished product or service yourself? Airing with weekly and series-wide "live elements", the way in which "The Cloud" listens to its audience's "chatter" (where every Tweet is worth an investment dollar) makes it extremely cost effective to film, even though the stakes are high.

More radically, perhaps, stripped food format "Out To Lunch" pushes the boundaries of producibility to achieve its instantaneous effects. Every day, two restaurants must provide set menus for 50 diners on a fixed budget. The locations are secret, until posted on Twitter, when locals have the chance to win a free lunch and participate as competition judges. The show is recorded and edited in the afternoon, then sent out live from the featured locations in the evening, so participants sourced from the cloud can watch themselves on TV during access or primetime that same night.

Similarly, gameshows - big event-type gameshows such as "Windfall", but even half-hour, pre-taped gameshows in Daytime and Access sections of the grid - can engage their audiences with SocialTV innovation. "2against1" is a classic studio gameshow from Spacecraft, which the audience can play along with at home, but also participate in (and win cash prizes) via Twitter. Again, because up to four episodes have been pre-taped in a single day in the studio before-hand, production costs are low, with the "live elements" onscreen window adding huge interactive possibility at very little additional expense.

As the furniture beds in, 2014 will no doubt see many more substantial creative innovations, across all program genres, timeslots and terrains. The key to success, surely, will be that participation means something to the viewer: that it has a consequence, that it matches the way TV itself is being transformed.

Carl Richter

Co-Founder

Spacecraft TV  |  @spacecraftTV

contact@spacecraft.tv
www.spacecraft.tv

Tweets as TV Currency: Making the Micropayment Model Work for FreeToAir

Making micropayments in the TV-On-Demand world is becoming commonplace, but can a model which has its roots in online gaming be adapted for Free-To-Air? Carl Richter, Co-Founder of Spacecraft TV, talks about "The Cloud".

Last week, British newspapers were full of the story of the Welshman who lost £4m in Bitcoins by throwing out his old PC. To read the story in the online editions of The Sun or Financial Times, though, you'd have had to micropay. As virtual currencies and virtual paywalls increasingly impact the availability of content, is it possible to imagine anything other than freefall for Free-To-Air?

Clearly, the micropayment model can't function on channels where the viewer isn't required to pay. Yet while the topic's trending, there's nothing stopping the principle being adapted in pseudo-commercial and innovative ways.

Imagine - just for the 43.5 seconds that it took Monty Python tickets to sell out last week - that a Tweet on a Free-To-Air platform (Twitter) had a commercial value. Imagine a Tweet was worth $1. But a non-US dollar in a currency that hadn't been invented yet.

Now let's say there was a TV show which invented a virtual currency that could scoop up all those Tweets and monetize them. What would that TV show be?

When we developed this concept we called it "The Cloud". We thought of the micropayments (Tweets) as droplets of water. We imagined each droplet of water being scooped up into The Cloud, monetized, and then raining down.

But The Cloud wasn't really made of water, or Tweets: it was made of people. In fact it was made of viewers. It was the collective TV audience, who instead of using Tweets to vote or say #hello were doing something much more interesting: they were crowdfunding startup projects by the power of #secondscreen.

Each virtual dollar that was being Tweeted, by the magic of TV was converted into a real business dollar, matched in Greenbacks from the investment funds of real entrepreneurs. The studio had become a kind of Kickstarter, but with broader popularity and a much shorter attention span.

After Monty Python sold out their reunion in 43.5 seconds, they added another 4 nights to the bill. Tickets for these, in turn, sold out within the hour.

This won't take another hour, let alone four nights to finish. Free-To-Air platforms (TV and Twitter) are in a kind of freefall, but not in the sense of "rapid uncontrolled decline". There are clouds and parachutes up there in the sky as well. It just takes a little creativity and a lot of courage to get up there in the plane and jump.

"The Cloud" format has been picked up in the US for 2014 tx.

Carl Richter

Co-Founder

Spacecraft TV  |  @spacecraftTV

contact@spacecraft.tv
www.spacecraft.tv

Social TV: What Will Really Change?

2014 is being hailed as the Year of Social TV, but will our programming really change? Carl Richter, Co-Founder of Spacecraft TV, thinks it will in 3 key ways.

For a long time now, Facebook apps and Twitter feeds have been bolted onto TV shows, pretty much as afterthoughts, demonstrating that broadcasters have an awareness of social media, but without dramatically shaping or influencing the core content itself. Sure, sometimes these add-ons have unlocked extra webisodes or spin-off games, but in very few cases have they enabled viewers to participate in and help build the actual show. On three ever-more-impactful levels, this is where the grid is going to change.

While there have been great "fully interactive" TV pitches in the past, if these ideas have made it off paper and onto the screen then they've all been all watered down. Now, the full convergence of TV and social media is happening and resistance is almost gone. Rather than social media content being seen as "add-on", it's now being viewed as central, which means the most forward-thinking and innovative TV shows are being created the other way around.

What's really changed is that broadcasters have had to overcome their fear of the "live". When the first wave of "participation" TV shows was being pitched, they were telephony- and web-based, which severely limited their interactive impact since both mechanisms depended on the insertion of "live" content into traditional (mostly pre-taped) TV packages. So, at the lower end of the schedule, a viewer could SMS a number advertised on a pre-taped gameshow, for example, and win a daily prize, with their name appearing on a superimposed graphic at the end. And even at the higher unscripted end, in the "live" primetime versions of these formats, there was still massive reserve on the broadcaster's part in enabling too much interaction, too many variables, too much "live".

Now, because social media networks are always "live", always on-air, things have inevitably had to give at the broadcast end of the convergence. Of course, no major channel is seriously going to consider rolling, unplanned, "anything goes" TV, but the structure of primetime TV formats is changing, and will continue to do so, due to input from the social media side of the equation.

The first thing we're already seeing happening (and will see a whole lot more of) is Sourcing replacing traditional Casting methods. Instead of social media like Twitter being used to post calls for contestants on a reality gameshow, say, which isn't much different to placing a classified ad, we're going to see more and more unscripted shows Sourcing their participants from targeted social media clouds. Take Spacecraft's own format Out To Lunch, for example, which has been billed as social TV's "Come Dine With Me".

Every day, two restaurants must provide set menus for 50 diners on a fixed budget. The locations are secret, until posted on Twitter, when locals have the chance to win a free lunch and participate as competition judges. The show is recorded and edited in the afternoon, then sent out live from the featured locations in the evening, so Sourced participants can watch themselves on TV during access or primetime that same night.

Which leads into the second big step-change: Sharing. In its first-wave incarnation this used to be similar to posting recommendations on a forum, but if Sourcing is going to replace Casting, then Sharing is going to change Consumption. We're becoming accustomed to Tweet tickers and hashtags in the corner of the screen, but this is just the start. Sharing is going to explode through the cyber ceiling of your Follower count and directly influence what huge audiences see on their TVs.

Windfall  is  an  example of a live, primetime entertainment format, which not only Sources contestants but creates a second wave of in-show participants through massive Sharing. To build pre-show momentum, a transparent box filled with cash has been suspended in a public building for 7 days. As time counts down, viewers share content for an opportunity to be in the audience when a trapdoor in the box is opened and cash rains down. But there's a twist to the format mechanic that comes into effect on-air, allowing the entire social cloud to participate right up to the money-shot at the end. Sharing achieves a true integration of first and second screens.

The third, and perhaps most impactful change, though, is that a whole swathe of Socialites are going to be the new Celebrities (see how I've been using those social "S"s to replace closed-off "C"s?). We´ll always have and need well-known faces as anchors, but recent phenomena ("Red Tie Guy", Charles Ramsey's "Dead Giveaway" meme, "Zero-Distancing") have illustrated huge audience desire to discover "ordinary" - meaning extraordinary - stars. Not stars for a lifetime, perhaps, but that isn't what social TV is about. It's about the moment, and the moment is always changing, and all the TV channels out there that don't carry rolling news are having to catch up.

To wrap, social media is the new way into TV through Sourcing, will shape what we see on TV through Sharing, and will be sustained by a rolling wave of Socialites-turned-Celebrities which everyone can surf. And some people think Social TV is just about advertising, Twitter ratings and heightened brand exposure: without great content none of these things mean much.

Carl Richter

Co-Founder

Spacecraft TV  |  @spacecraftTV

contact@spacecraft.tv
www.spacecraft.tv

Spacecraft Launches New Format Catalogue

Spacecraft TV launches on 01 November, with a catalogue of 14 original television formats across the genres of Reality, Gameshow, Event and Factual programming. Based in London, the company will focus on distributing its content to the international TV market, and working with partner producers and broadcasters in developing bespoke multiplatform IP worldwide.

To mark its launch, Spacecraft is running a competition on its website spacecraft.tv based on the mechanic from its original gameshow Either/Or. The competition is open to anyone working in the TV/entertainment industry, with the prizes being: (1) a six-month Option on any format in the Spacecraft catalogue; and (2) a six-month First-Look Deal comprising all existing and new Spacecraft formats. Winners will be announced on 08 December.

Co-founder Carl Richter said: "Because of our backgrounds in social media and gaming, we're approaching the TV content market from a slightly different angle. Rather than bolting on social media applications to existing TV concepts, we've been concentrating on building our IP the other way around."

One illustration of this can be seen in the stripped food format Out To Lunch, a restaurant competition harnessing the full power of social media. Every day, two restaurants must provide set menus for 50 diners on a fixed budget. The locations are secret, until posted on Twitter, when locals have the chance to win a free lunch and participate as competition judges.

Similarly, Either/Or is a gameshow that was developed first as a smartphone and social media application. "Successful apps must have strong and simple visual concepts", Richter adds. "They're also much cheaper to test and develop than traditional TV pilots. Our philosophy is that once we've got the application working, it becomes the heart of a much bigger concept for TV."

Following preliminary meetings at MIPCOM, Spacecraft will be announcing its first deals soon.

Carl Richter

Co-Founder

Spacecraft TV  |  @spacecraftTV

contact@spacecraft.tv
www.spacecraft.tv