At The Intersection of TV and Digital Media

At Franklin Street, we love making new friends. Smart, funny, creative friends. Our newest BFF? Rise, a digital media marketing agency based in Orlando, FL.  These interactive Floridian mavericks are on the cutting edge of digital design and creative. With clients ranging from Grant Hill to an Orlando tattoo parlor, it’d be an understatement to call them edgy. Plus, they put out a really great blog. The article below caught our attention so we thought we’d share with you! Enjoy.

Like most other Americans, I grew up fascinated by stories and information piped through the television and have watched over the last couple of decades the development of different platforms designed for entertainment and knowledge-sharing.The exciting phase we are in now is all about integration, so I’d like to highlight some of the neatest ways I think TV and digital media are shaking hands and enriching the experiences of audiences and tech users!

Influencing the Show

One of the first successful shows where digital media was integrated with television on a mass scale was American Idol, where viewers could text their vote to producers who would then dismiss performers on the next episode if their fans didn’t give them enough votes.

One of the newest incarnations of this type of interaction is used in a show called New York Goes to Work. Show producers give the television audience three choices of what work Tiffany “New York” Pollard (she received the nickname from Flavor Flav!) will do in the next episode. Viewers text in their vote and the occupation with the most votes wins!

Co-Viewing

Do you remember MTV’s Pop Up Video? The idea was to present music videos with little bubbles that popped onscreen with additional information about the artist or song currently playing. That was just the beginning!

The newest rendition of that is done digitally, where show producers design digital augmentation apps that you can download and participate in from digital devices while simultaneously watching the broadcast on TV. A terrific recent example of this type of intersection I loved was this year’s Shark Week Live app from The Discovery Channel!

Sharing the Stage

The third major way that viewers are experiencing television through digital media is probably the most rich – when shows broadcast the digital interaction of cast members and viewers. A great example is when MTV interviews famous artists, they’ll invite television viewers to use Skype, a digital video and voice service, to speak to the artist and ask them questions, which other viewers get to witness on TV.

Another example of this type of interaction can be seen on news programs. News casts from outlets like CNN and FOX invite users to send comments through Twitter to be addressed by visiting political pundits, share their thoughts on topics through social media sites like Facebook, and even upload home videos of breaking news to broadcast to other viewers. It’s so exciting to be interactive with current events and see them from different peoples’ points of view!

Gaming

TV shows like Lost and The Walking Dead really took the concept of story interaction between television and digital media to a fun and exciting level for viewers. Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) transport players from their console into a story, in these cases inviting you to frolic in the fictional worlds created by television writers. This branch of interaction allows players to be immersed in the mystery, mythology, and puzzles introduced in the shows.

Interactive Characters

For viewers who get the most kicks out of character, How I Met Your Mother has a great strategy to enrich your viewing experience! Barney Stinson, the show’s womanizing goofball played by Neil Patrick Harris, often talks about what he says or is going to post on his blog – which viewers can actually find online! Many other characters from TV shows also have blogs online, including the audience favorite Hiro Nakamura fromHeroes.

Deeper Connections

There is a more interesting and deeper connection that happens when fans influence show writers through digital media. For example, viewers often create forums and fan fiction to talk about and expand upon the stories they love from TV. Writers are people, too, and often check out what their fans are buzzing about online. Sometimes they will give a nod to their fans by incorporating thoughts and ideas from the forums and fan-created content to enrich the show writing on next episodes or seasons!

Knowing Your Audience

Integration is still experimental at this point, so we’re all still learning how far we can push the envelope and still entertain a general audience. Bar Karma was an online TV show that went as far as to let viewers create the show by helping do tasks like writing a plot line and developing set designs. It was an amazing idea! But it also asked a lot of the audience if they wanted to fully experience every aspect of the show. Some players love that kind of power, but mainstream audiences, for right now at least, need an easier way to play. The question storytellers have to ask themselves is which audience they want to cater to. As an interactive storyteller myself, I have high hopes for extreme interaction in the future.

As technology advances, creative producers and writers are stepping up their game across the board to make use of them to give their television audiences new and more interesting ways to interact with their programming in the digital realm. You can fully expect more exciting developments from this sector of entertainment!

We’d love to hear from you. Do you tweet about your favorite show? Read reality TV blogs? Share your thoughts on Facebook?