The Internet Will Save TV: Social TV

Instead of stealing viewers away, the social web is augmenting the experience of TV watching and making it much more social, leading to an uptick in viewing:

- Brian Stelter, Water-Cooler Effect: Internet Can Be TV’s Friend

Many television executives are crediting the Internet, in part, for the revival.

Blogs and social Web sites like Facebook and Twitter enable an online water-cooler conversation, encouraging people to split their time between the computer screen and the big-screen TV.

The Nielsen Company, which measures television viewership and Web traffic, noticed this month that one in seven people who were watching the Super Bowl and the Olympics opening ceremony were surfing the Web at the same time. [emphasis mine.]

“The Internet is our friend, not our enemy,” said Leslie Moonves, chief executive of the CBS Corporation, which broadcast both the Super Bowl and the Grammy Awards this year. “People want to be attached to each other.”

Seeking to capitalize on the online water-cooler effect, NBC showed the Golden Globes live on both coasts for the first time this year, and the network reportedly wants to do the same for the Emmy Awards this fall, so the entire country can watch (and chat online) simultaneously.

[…]

Media companies are starting to consider how to incorporate that water-cooler effect — and how to harness it for day-to-day TV shows, too. For the Olympics, NBC is promoting something called “You Be the Judge,” which lets viewers submit their own scores for figure skaters through a Web application and compare their scores to other viewers. The network’s Web site also features a gadget that tracks Twitter opinions about the Games.

Chloe Sladden, director of media partnerships for Twitter, said sites like Twitter let people feel plugged in to a real-time conversation.

“In the future, I can’t imagine a major event where the audience doesn’t become part of the story itself,” Ms. Sladden said.

Soon we will be seeing more TV where the premise of sociality is built-in to the experience: where it is expected that you will be online in parallel with watching a show. Social TV is here, and just in time to save TV.

I am looking forward to a more socilaized version of reading the paper, too.