THE HOME OF SOCIAL TV

Why TV sites and apps should turn into second screens

When network and cable TV sites first appeared on the web, they existed for one reason: to promote their shows. In the last five years, they’ve also become entertainment hubs, offering shows on demand. And recently, many have added second-screen features that serve up related content and conversations that tie to shows on the air.

With just about anything new, it starts in the shadows, growing momentum in sideline experiments before taking center stage. Over the last several months, broadcast and cable nets have rolled out second-screen apps — from ABC to NBC — but they’ve kept them separate from their core TV apps. And there are a ton of co-viewing and social media features on TV websites, but they’re usually sub-sections of the shows themselves….

‘Arrested Development’ returning with new episodes on Netflix

Wow, big news for Arrested Development fans (including myself). The show is coming back with new episodes, but not on a TV network: Netflix has ponied up the cash to bring the show back, starting in 2013.

MTV Iggy taps social media to push global music envelope

You might think Jersey Shore, Teen Mom and their siblings are the future of the “Music TV” Network. Often times we wonder where music videos fit into the MTV picture in a world of YouTube, Vevo and more. You’ll definitely see the top pop-sensations each year at the VMAs, but when you truly think about where the top innovations in the music world are coming from — you don’t always think MTV.

Amazon inks licensing deal with Viacom to add streaming TV shows

Disney, Univision in talks on English-language cable news channel

Advertisers' free ride may end on Facebook soon

Regis’ farewell sets social high bar for morning TV

Regis Philbin’s farewell from morning television today — which was well-attended by many Twitter-enabled stars in the audience — was the “#1 social TV telecast among all morning talk shows year to date,” Bluefin Labs concluded today. Many stars (and even John McCain) tweeted their well-wishes, from Howie Mandel and Piers Morgan to Rachael Ray. That all added up to a surge of social comments. Here’s BlueFin Lab’s infographic on it all:

What you may have missed at the Social TV Summit

Top execs from the social TV industry gathered at NYC’s Capitale (a beautiful venue resembling Gringotts Bank) on Wednesday to discuss the state and future of the social TV industry. The summit kicked off with co-host Jack Myers predicting that the social TV business would grow to $30 billion by 2020. Facebook and Twitter both keynoted the event: Facebook said it was “pretty confident” it was driving incremental ratings, and Twitter said the connection between social and ratings is growing clearer.

Should TV stations promote talent’s personal social accounts?

As local news organizations begin to define the “value” of social media, many newsroom executives wonder what these accounts are actually worth to the station. And if they’re truly valuable, then who is the rightful owner: the reporter who populates the account or the newsroom that promotes it?

Tech reporter Noah Kravitz and his former employer, PhoneDog are hung up in a lawsuit to answer that very question. Kravitz changed his account name from @phonedog_noah to @noahkravitz when he left PhoneDog to work for a competitor. PhoneDog currently has no access to the account or its 21,000 followers.

Twitter says TV ratings connection is becoming clearer

Twitter’s Chloe Sladden (@chloes) spoke at yesterday’s Social TV Summit, and one of the highlights is her discussion around social media’s impact on TV ratings — one of the most popular topics at the event.

Just as Facebook is working with Nielsen, Sladden said Twitter recently shared a bunch of data with the ratings company. She shared an early glimpse into the results…

BreakingNews takes its first international leap into UK

This is one of those blog posts where I write about my own role at BreakingNews, so full disclosure up front. But since BreakingNews is now one of the largest (if not the largest) social teams in journalism, I hope you’ll find the occasional post about our exploits interesting: in this case, our first international expansion.

New Chill.com creates shared viewing around Hulu clips

Even with the advent of social media, the old-fashioned world of shared experiences around TV shows has eroded over the years with on-demand, non-linear video. With Hulu, for example, you can jump in and watch (most) of your favorite TV shows whenever you want.

Chill.com has launched a new experience that aims to bring back that shared experience.

A sneak peek at USA Network’s Anywhere iPad app

First on Lost Remote: Last night at the Social TV Summit press and VIP event Jesse Redniss, the VP of Digital for USA Network shared a sneak peak of their new second screen app that will be powered by yap.tv. The app isn’t live yet but will be coming soon. Based on his presentation and some direct testing of the app itself, it appears that yap.tv’s beautiful display, live chat, polls, pics, vids, and social chatter streaming are translating well in their branded “USA Anywhere” version of the app.

Tweets magnify Weather.com’s engagement

The Weather Channel’s Weather.com rolled out an extensive integration with Twitter over the summer, powered by Trendrr, that displays weather-related tweets at the local market level in real time. In a presentation today at the Social TV Summit, Trendrr CEO Mark Ghuneim said it’s been big success, boosting engagement across Weather.com pages with social integration.

Second-screen click rates top 10 percent, says TVPlus

Sure, lots of people use their mobile phones and tablets in front of TV — 80% in fact — but how do second-screen apps perform? TVPlus revealed today at the Social TV Summit that it’s seeing click-through rates of companion TV content on its iPad app “north of 10 percent.”

That’s an impressive number. By companion content, TVPlus defines it as “unique pieces of related content delivered synchronously on a second screen while users watch a broadcast.” The key word here, synchronously.

Facebook: ‘Pretty confident’ we can help drive TV ratings

Facebook’s Andy Mitchell told the audience at the Social TV Summit on Wednesday that he’s “pretty confident” that his company’s integration with USA Network helped drive incremental ratings for the show Psych. He provided some impressive numbers from Facebook’s partnership with Nielsen to help back it up.

Watch a live stream of the Social TV Summit

The Social TV Summit is underway (Wednesday), and you can watch a live stream here on Lost Remote of the all-day conference from NYC. The stream is powered by Watchitoo, and in true social TV form, it includes a real-time social stream alongside the player — complete with video chat.

We’re also live-tweeting the event on @lostremote. Here’s a summarized version of the day’s agenda:

Clipsync enables movie fans to share favorite video moments

The social TV startup Clipsync has debuted “Moments,” a new application that lets users clip-and-share the best moments from an online movie, instead of sharing the entire video. Today it’s announcing a partnership with Epix, the joint venture between Paramount, MGM and Lionsgate, to enable users to share and talk about their favorite moments via social media.

“ClipSync Moments is fixing today’s broken conversation around digital video,” said Itzik Cohen, CEO and co-founder of ClipSync…

Inside look at A&E’s new social game for ‘Storage Wars’

Social games, specifically on Facebook, continue to help TV networks engage with fans and tap into a network of often private conversations. A&E’s number one show, Storage Wars released a social game today on Facebook in honor of the premiere of its new season. The show “follows teams of bidders looking to score it big in the high stakes world of storage auctions” when someone defaults on their payments. The series averaged 2.8 million viewers per episode and peaked at 3.8 million last season.

TV station giving away a car in Facebook contest

We’ve written lots of stories on Lost Remote about TV stations throwing Facebook contests to drive new likes — giving away iPads, concert tickets and donations to charities — but WFSB-TV in Hartford, Conn. is holding a contest with the biggest prize we’ve seen to date: a brand new 2011 Nissan Maxima. The contest, timed with sweeps, has four days remaining, and the station has already shot up to 76K fans, up from 58K fans a month ago.

Watch Facebook, Twitter and YouTube at the Social TV Summit

The second Social TV Summit, organized by Andy Batkin, kicks off tomorrow (Wednesday) in NYC. Lost Remote (myself) will be there covering the event, and we will be streaming the live conference here on LostRemote.com like we did for the sold-out event this past summer in LA (this one’s also sold out).