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.
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
