One of the biggest trends is focused on making it easy for producers to integrate social content on-air. Until now, displaying a tweet or a poll has been extremely labor-intensive (put poll on website, tease website from on-air, refresh poll results, create graphic of results, write them into script, drop it into the rundown.) But new partnerships are automating the entire process, tying it to social curation and the second screen.

For example, the TV graphics firm Chyron demonstrated its new Engage platform (which we reported earlier). It interfaces with partners Mass Relevance, ConnecTV, Never.no and Vibes to display live social content on air. In one demonstration (above), Chyron displayed a real-time Mass Relevance Twitter widget that tracked how many #NAB tweets featured the words “social” vs. the word “3D.” (Social was winning, two to one.) Producers could use the same arrangement for real-time hashtag voting over Twitter.

Great recap of this SXSW panel.  And YouTube will be live streaming ALL of the Olympic Events… Wow.

imedia365:

This panel discussed what the plan is to make this summer’s Olympics as social and interactive as possible. Here’s a take-away of what was discussed.

First of all, Youtube will be live streaming the Olympics! All of the Olympics, every minute, so prepare to procrastinate and watch equestrian and…

Big and bold move by ESPN… will be interesting to see how this experiment goes.  I agree with their VP’s quote, “We see this as a big opportunity. You fish where the fish are.” 

In a first for the sports network, ESPN will stream live NCAA basketball games on Facebook. It’s an extension of ESPN3′s distribution, so that means users will have to be qualified (via an affiliated internet provider) to watch ESPN3 in the first place. And ESPN3 won’t stream the tournament — just the 225 men’s and women’s Championship Week games, which get underway on Thursday. Still, it’s a big move to bring live, valuable video to Facebook.

Beyond ESPN’s own Facebook pages, the ESPN3 player will also appear on team and conference Facebook pages, greatly increasing distribution. “(It’s) another front door to our content,” explains ESPN3 vice president Damon Phillips in an interview with USA Today. “We see this as a big opportunity. You fish where the fish are.”  

TV brands have been reticent to offer their core content to Facebook. Undoubtedly, this is a bit of an experiment for ESPN, and it wouldn’t be a surprised if see more ESPN3 content there in the future.