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While the social element of television is not new, Social TV is a relatively new concept used to describe the emerging generation of television services that integrate with other communication platforms like voice, chat and social media on the web.  Social TV leverages the power of social networks to create a new type of highly interactive user experience.

According to a report from Nielsen, 86 percent of U.S. smartphone owners and 88 percent of tablet owners use their devices to watch TV.  Moreover, about 69 percent of tablet owners use two screens regularly each week, and more than 26 percent use single screens several times a day.

Social activity growth in conversation and check-ins on TV programming has increased to about 91 percent year over year, according to a study by social TV tracking service Trendrr.TV.

Adding to the emergence of Social TV, another report says about 72 percent of respondents used Twitter, Facebook or a mobile app to comment on shows. The recent study from marketing agency Digital Clarity found that use the devices to communicate with friends while watching TV.

“TV shows with small audiences can generate enormous traffic on Twitter,” said Digital Clarity’s founder, Reggie James. “Social TV is a new platform for engaging with a TV show and has turned TV programs into online events.”

February’s social TV mega event- the Super Bowl – was the latest example where saw the trend of ad spending on national network and cable TV. Advertising time during the Super Bowl this year was estimated to cost $3.5 million per minute.

Social TV Content Providers

Media companies are now developing new ways to take advantage of Social TV trends that have heightened the level of commitment among loyal viewers.

The online gaming platform TwitchTV announced the launch of its live tournament applications for mobile users across iOS and Android. The main functionality of the TwitchTV mobile application is the ability to view all available streaming content on the web in high definition and in full screen mode.  It also includes a search engine and easy navigation between the different game platforms.

Users can follow their favorite channels directly from the video stream and see a list of channels that are broadcast live. They can also chat with other users while viewing the videos.

TweePLayer, dubbed the first DVR for social media, provides social media content associated with TV shows, advertisements, conferences, films, political events and more. The platform uses social TV data to stream time-shifted context for video players like Hulu, so you can see tweets about a program when you watch the replay online.

As TweePlayer expands to include social content beyond Twitter, it’s rebranded itself with a new name: Tomorrowish.

“Fans post millions of social media messages about their favorite TV shows every day, and we’re bringing those conversations together in context to make it easy to find the best posts,” said Tomorrowish CEO Mick Darling. “Live TV and social media content is a great combination. Time-shifted TV viewed with the curated content of Tomorrowish’s time-shifted Social TV makes this combination even more powerful and fun.”

Tomorrowish is a system designed to retrieve past conversations from Twitter to sync with any program that we are seeing, regardless of the time. The company’s Machine Curation tool helps content providers engage their audiences and their social networks by displays the most relevant posts.

Social TV is also a Great Marketing Platform

Social TV is also a great marketing opportunity, providing a new way to approach potential customers and build relationships based on affinity, and the value of sharing, participation and exchange.

Companies can access personal user preferences to improve television advertising. In addition, companies can determine the best strategy to approach marketing via connected TVs, use social ratings analytics tools to find and target lean-forward audiences and leverage the second screen to drive synched, deeper brand engagement.

Darling recognizes social media’s impact on TV, and hopes to differentiate his startup by following the viewers.  Instead of leveraging social TV to keep people glued to the TV in real time, he wants to bring the conversation to the content, no matter when or where that content’s being consumed.  As a result, Tomorrowish is also able to infer a great deal more data about consumer viewing patterns, like when they pause and resume playback, which parts of a program are most or least likely to get paused, and what context emerges from viewer responses at any given part of the program.

Building a market around that data is an important next step for Tomorrowish, as they determine the best way to make the leap from startup to full-blown revenue.  In the short-term Darling’s company is focused on TV, creating an experience that doesn’t force viewers to disengage from the social scene if they miss 5 or 50 minutes of a real-time program.

“Long term I’d like to see Tomorrowish be the default place where people go to have watercooler conversations about all media content,” Darling says.   “We’re great for TV but we’re good for conferences, political events, education, government meetings and everything in between.  If there’s media and a discussion, we can be the thing that ties those two together.”

See below for the full rebranding press release:

Social TV company TweePLayer rebrands as Tomorrowish

April 3rd, 2012 - Cambridge, MA - TweePLayer, the first DVR for social media, announced today that the product has rebranded to its parent company’s name Tomorrowish. The rebranding comes as the company develops partnership with content companies, broadcast channels, events and news sites. Tomorrowish offers viewers the opportunity to watch time-shifted programs along with the social commentary from when the program first aired and not miss out on the real time conversation and viewer engagement. 

 

“Fans post millions of social media messages about their favorite TV shows every day, and we’re bringing those conversations together in context to make it easy to find the best posts,” said Tomorrowish CEO Mick Darling. “Live TV and social media content is a great combination. Time-shifted TV viewed with the curated content of Tomorrowish’s time-shifted Social TV makes this combination even more powerful and fun.”

 

Tomorrowish offers services for content providers and viewers. The service helps content providers engage their audiences and their social networks by using the Tomorrowish Machine Curation tool, which displays the most relevant posts. Tomorrowish uses rules-based filtering of posts to fine tune the curation down to individual posts, unique to the Tomorrowish platform. The service can be white-labeled and embedded seamlessly on broadcast websites and mobile properties.

 

For viewers, the service curates new and archived posts about the video stream in sync with the original content, whether they were posted live, three hours, or three months later. Conversations from multiple airings, East Coast to West Coast, or later can be synced and merged together.

 

Tomorrowish is actively seeking partnerships with content companies and broadcasters and welcomes TV fans to use the service at tomorrowish.tv.

 

About Tomorrowish:

Tomorrowish LLC is an Angel-funded startup company headquartered in Cambridge, MA founded in 2008 to work on multiple products. The Social TV product, Tomorrowish, has been under major development since 2010. Tomorrowish curates the social media content associated with TV shows, advertisements, conferences, films, political events and more. Tomorrowish.tv allows for viewing premium TV content synchronized with the original social media conversations about those shows. Content providers should visit Tomorrowish.com for white-labeled tools and services.

 

For media inquiries please contact Mick Darling

Mick@Tomorrowish.com : 774.567.0001

http://tomorrowish.tv | http://tomorrowish.com

http://twitter.com/tomorrowish | https://www.facebook.com/Tomorrowish

2011 was a busy year for TweePLayer.

Spring 2011

We launched our first public Alpha in March at SXSW getting our name up in lights with the public launch of LaunchRock.

We got some fantastic press attention a few weeks later from Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, The Huffington Post, not to mention @TwitterMedia with a favorite Tweet of mine “It had to happen: time-shifted Tweets!”

Summer 2011

We got lots of interest and feedback, made a ton of changes, diving back into development of our key features of Machine Curation, content filtering, and syncing to multiple video players and made partnerships with Hulu as a Hulu distribution partner so we could display premium Hulu content on our site.

Fall 2011

We relaunched the site with a completely new design, and really built out the core functionality. We now have elevated access to the Twitter streaming API and can capture, filter and display Tweets for all primetime TV shows without breaking a sweat. We now can capture content from Facebook fan pages and post to Facebook as well as Twitter.

Today

Just in the past couple months, we launched our 1.0 Public Beta, Presented TweePLayer at the SocialTV Summit in NYC and [The SocialTV Event], and had an awesome Podcast interview with The Bella Buzz.

Tomorrowish

We will be doing a big launch showing off new features and lots of new content on our main site, and soon we’ll get to show off some awesome content and integration for a national cable network.

2012 is going to be a big year for SocialTV and us and with all the changes we will be rebranding to focus on the bigger things we are doing in the future.

Back in October I went down to Atlanta for the "Social TV Event" held by @UserInsight a pretty cool research group that does user testing for Apps and websites among others.  Over the past year they have been doing a $500,000 research project into how social media affects consumer TV consumption.  

For this event they presented a lot of their data about the demographics of TV and SocialTV.  They dug into their data about which viewers are more likely to watch TV live, or time-shifted. They split up their demographics into personality types for people who chat on Twitter to friends, random strangers, or no one at all in particular.  For the "Social TV Event" they had guest speakers from several older and new companies in the SocialTV space including yours truly.

Some of the cool tech companies included at the event:

• Yahoo's IntoNow product that listens to the audio "fingerprint" of a TV show to find the moment in a show someone is watching.  
• SnappyTV which lets viewers take "clips" of the last several seconds of a show to share out to their social network.
• Watchitoo: Which tries to make live online viewing of events and meetings more interactive.
• Clearleap: Which enables video applications for multi-channel video programming distributors. 
• And of course TweePLayer.  

We all got to show off some of our the cool things our products do, but what was even more interesting were the panel discussions about how we all are addressing the SocialTV marketplace from vastly different angles.

You can see one of the panels below with the TweePLayer curated social conversation right there ready for you to add your own comments, or you can go to our Social TV Event page for any of the panels.

 

 

 

 

TweePLayer with Youtube and a Publicly Broadcast Event

For this second TweePLayer Showcase we wanted to show use in the realm of politics. There are several other political events that we will be doing a longer post about later.  

We have been getting requests to show how Tweeplayer integrates with YouTube and collecting Tweets for a higher bandwidth Twitter conversation from a broadcast event. 

The video below is President Obama's speech to the University of Maryland from July 22nd as the debt ceiling debate was nearing the deadline and can also be seen on our main site.

Hey All, I have some exciting news!  We just launched http://tweeplayer.com yesterday.  The simplest description is we are TiVO for Twitter.  Tweeplayer saves Twitter conversations about events for playback later.  We sync video of the events to the Twitter conversations, so you never have to miss a cool conversation and can watch a show or event anytime raking part in the dicussion just like you were seeing it live We need your help! We are competing in the http://discover.launchrock.com SXSW Startup competition, and every person who signs up helps us get closer to the $5000 prize.  Please help us by signing up here xxx, and spread the invitations out to your social networks using the tools on the Launchrock site.   Here’s a bit more about TweePlayer… We have over 7 million tweets from over 5000 events including TV episodes, sporting events, conferences and more.  We are adding more content every day, and if you are at SXSW this year we are harvesting the online conversations of dozens of sessions. We have dozens of new features like integration with Facebook, Hulu, GoogleTV, iPad, iPhone and Android apps.  With your help we can get the attention of people who can help us grow and bring some awesome tools so you will never again miss a great conversation online.