Trendrr has rolled out a new product called Curatorr that enables its clients to roll out real-time Twitter experiences on TV, mobile apps and other digital screens. Curatorr also joins Twitter’s “certified products” list, which includes services like Mass Relevance, Crimson Hexagon and Radian6. In fact, Curatorr is positioned to compete with Mass Relevance, which has been growing leaps and bounds as media companies and brands alike expand their real-time products.

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For decades the television industry has dreamed about the Holy Grail of interactive advertising: commercials that enable viewers to pick up their remotes to get a coupon, book a test drive or enter a contest. While there have been many successful experiments so far, none of them has scaled. As we wrote two months ago, Twitter was poised to crack the code. And today, it looks like they did just that.

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On the VC panel at the Lost Remote Show, Chris Fralic, partner at First Round Capital, praised Twitter’s approach to building a standalone music app that ties to external services like Spotify. He raised the idea that Twitter could do the same for TV, which certainly sounds plausible, especially as Twitter #Music continues to ride high on the App Store charts.

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While the nation was riveted on the Boston bombings manhunt, BBC America announced in a tweet that it had inked a deal with Twitter to offer the “first in-tweet branded video synced to an entertainment TV series.” Twitter has yet to elaborate, but the announcement follows a report this week that the social network is courting major media companies for partnerships that would “let Twitter stream videos on its site and split the resulting ad revenue with the networks.”

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The Weather Company, the parent company The Weather Channel, is partnering with Twitter to enhance its presence on the platform. Weather Channel content will now be embedded within tweets through Twitter’s “card” technology, and marketers can use the data from the two companies to target messages to specific people in specific regions.

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Twitter has already played home to some original series, but this afternoon the social network will be adding another first: the first live baseball game streamed through the service. Starting at 2 PM ET, MLB will be streaming the New York Yankees/Washington Nationals game.
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March Madness is now underway, and if you’re following @MarchMadness on Twitter, you’ll discover a steady stream of “real time highlights” from games as they air. Expand one of these tweets, and you’ll see an embedded video player — displayed as a “Twitter card” — that automatically plays a quick pre-roll ad followed by a short highlight from the game. How real-time? As quickly as 20 seconds after it airs.

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The worlds of television, videogames and social media will once again collide on the ESPN2 series “SportsNation” today. EA Sports, which produces the “Madden NFL” football game franchise, is looking for an athlete to grace the cover of this year’s game, which happens to be the 25th in the franchise. To help pick the cover-athlete, EA is relying on users voting for their favorite on ESPN.com and on Twitter.

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Facebook is planning to add hashtags “as a way to group conversations,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “Facebook is testing whether to follow Twitter’s lead and allow users to click on a hashtag to pull up all posts about similar topics or events so it can quickly index conversations around trending topics and build those conversations up,” the paper reported, pointing out that Facebook’s Instagram already uses hashtags.

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For two decades now, interactive TV advertising has been an albatross. Dozens of companies with hundreds of millions of dollars have failed to create a true, scalable interactive TV adverting platform. Then social TV emerged, combining the scale of the second screen with the popularity of social media. With the recent purchase of Bluefin Labs, a ratings deal with Nielsen and the release of its advertising API, Twitter is clearly the most serious new player to pursue the Holy Grail of interactive television ads.

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