New social media app for TV shows – Starling

Rating: Could provide useful link between TV and mobile

A new social network called Starling is aimed at integrating TV show audiences with both mobile and web surfers. The real hook for this new system, Starling hopes, is a means of enabling broadcasters and production companies to tap into social media advertising spend.
The aim with Starling is to put all the comments which the web 2.0 generation normally puts on disparate social networks into one place.

Given that the app won’t be available until September 2010, it’s hard to gauge how readily it can displace the likes of Facebook and Twitter.

Kevin Slavin, president of Starling, argues that, “Within social media, the conversations around broadcast entertainment are some of the loudest and broadest we experience.

Starling provides a structure for these conversations. Following years of development in network television, we can now offer everyone the opportunity to interact and comment in real time.”

The hope is that the whole broadcasting industry will buy into Starling to provide a standard method of interaction.

At present most TV shows offer different ways of participation such as – text us on this number; find us on Facebook; follow us on Twitter, and so on.

To try to encourage ‘audience participation’, there’s a scoring facility built into the system so that other networks can vote one particular individual’s comment to the top – with the possibility that the comment will appear live on the TV show.

The executive team behind Starling come from game development, advertising, broadcast and production – with the hope that they’ve thought of every angle with this system.

This comment from the company shows the way it is trying to pitch Starling to advertisiers … “Brands have displaced their ad spends into social media, but are wasting money building bespoke efforts for everything they do.

Starling provides a way for brands to enter social media with standardised inventory.”

There’s also a chance – if the TV industry really does buy into the Starling system – that it will provide really useful analytics to broadcasters.

They will be able to go onto the system and not only judge how well their shows are doing but discover which rival shows are creaming them in the number of comments.

Starling didn’t say exactly which mobile OS’s it will support initially but the comment that it intends to “launch as a mobile app for a wide range of devices” hopefully means it won’t just be aimed at iPhone and Android owners.