Twitter as the real time backpath to Broadcast TV

There has been a lot of ink spilled, pixels pointed and hot air raised about Twitter going into TV, and no one quite knows what its all about (TechCrunch sums it all up quite well).

However, despite all this hoo-ha, one thing we have noted in the last few weeks is that twitter is being used by communities to talk about broadcast TV shows on subjects ranging from heavy politics to light entertainment. In fact, you are now getting people starting to comment on the show-as-it-happens on Twitter and getting followers because of this.

When Joost started out, they were hoping to capture this conversation in the service, but I think the flexibility and independence of Twitter has made it the more universal framework.

Now that, as they say, is interesting. For 10 years Broadcasters have been thinking about how to use the backpath to get users more engaged - from mobile phone-in numbers to interactive TV, its been a ardy perennial of the broadcast industry.

The post on the Twitterblog on the subject is quite interesting:

Twitter is very open. As a result, thousands of different applications, web sites, and mobile interfaces have been created by developers. These different approaches add variety and relevance to Twitter and in general make the ecosystem more interesting. However, Twitter's openness is not limited to the web or even to mobile phones.

During the 2008 presidential elections, Hack The Debate showed us how Twitter could make television interactive and possibly even have a democratizing effect on the medium. The power of Twitter was harnessed to create new, compelling, and engaging programming. CNN was an early innovator with Twitter too. Our openness made it all possible.

Twitter's open approach might have the power to transform television—the dominant communications receiver worldwide. We're very excited to see where these experiments take us.

The reason, as we point out in our research on the Future of Video, is that it can potentially emerge as a "Good Enough" service that allows old time broadcast to be interactive enough for most users much of the time, and thus is a bulwark against the theoretical rush for the online, interactive TV experience.

That a unified comms chat service has taken up the mantle is both concerning (for Broadcasters) and fascinating (for Industry disruption). May well be worth the TV industry inventing its own microblogging system with benefits.....