New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

“It’s a second version of a companion app, but specifically for presenters,” said Never.no’s Scott Davies, who showed us how it works. Using Never.no’s current products, producers can curate social media in real-time, picking the tweets and Facebook updates they want to appear on air. At the same time, they can choose which of those social updates to push to the Prompter iPad app — and they appear instantly in easy-to-read type. If the talent begins to read a tweet, producers can immediately punch up the social update on the screen, making the conversation more spontaneous and less scripted.

In a separate version of Prompter, the talent can push social updates to air directly from the iPad. But as you might imagine, most producers wouldn’t want to activate that feature.

Prompter also works with real-time polls, so talent can track how the results are trending without having to wait for a script with the final results. Again, that’s tied to on-air graphics, as well.

“If presenters are the heart of live TV, social media is the pulse, and it is incredibly important for broadcasters to be in touch with their audience,” said Never.no Director of Marketing, James A. Neufeld. “Prompter helps facilities meet that critical need by putting the viewers directly in touch with local hosts and national presenters alike.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

“By building these technologies into the TV production workflow, Engage gives artists and producers the means to take content such as Twitter feeds, polls, text messages, and other viewer-generated data to air within their live broadcasts,” explains Michael Wellesley-Wesley, president and CEO at Chyron.

To bring it all together, Chyron said it’s partnered with ConnecTV for its companion app polling technology, Never.no for its social TV platform, Mass Relevance for its real-time curation and Vibes for its text, Twitter and web voting technology.

Earlier this month, Never.no teamed up with TV graphics firm Vizrt to incorporate social media and audience participation into on-air graphics. It’s safe to predict these partnership deals will spur more social media integration in live newscasts and sporting events, especially at the local market level.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

At a panel at SXSW, Olivier Delfosse, VP of Interactive at FremantleMedia, explained how TV producers are often hesitant to integrate social TV out of fear it won’t fit with the show. “They’re very visual, he said. “What is the right visual that matches it with the show design, and how they’re telling the story.” Beyond just broadcast, Vizrt also has design solutions for mobile that carry the same TV graphics package into the second-screen.

An early example of Never.no and Vizrt’s collaboration was last year’s Tour de France companion app for Norway’s TV2. This demo (above) is worth watching, even just for the sychronization features (when the director highlighted a particular rider on screen, the rider’s bio popped up on the companion app).

Vizrt is also well-known provider of 3D virtual sets, which could have some amazing integrations with social TV. (Here’s a demo video from Vizrt’s site).

“Both companies have a well-established international footprint, and by being able to integrate each other’s products, we can offer broadcasters an unprecedented social TV and graphics infrastructure,” said Vizrt CTO Petter Ole Jakobsen. “Television producers using the combined system can reach out to their audiences via social media or companion apps triggered by actions originating from within the Vizrt tools. This means complex workflows become streamlined, and fewer operators are required. And simple elements like polls and voting results can now be displayed on live TV with beautiful real-time graphics.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.