Mobile and tablet app organises your chatter around shows.
Yesterday, Twitter's director of media partnerships Chloe Sladden talked at MIPTV about how Twitter is changing the way people watch TV.
Today, a startup called Starling has unveiled a new service that aims to build on that.
Starling is described as a social TV platform built around the notion of 'co-viewing' - people gathering online to chat about what they're watching with their friends and other fans of the shows.
Right now, much of that activity is happening on Twitter, but Starling's aim is to help people make sense of it.
Its app presents streams of comments from a user's friends and the wider community around any given show, but also lets users 'star' comments that they like, voting them up. It's a bit Digg-like in that regard.
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Here's a screenshot:
Users also get badges for watching shows and points if their comments are voted up - shades of Foursquare here. And Starling's big idea is that it will then allow broadcasters to tap into this data in real-time, and incorporate it into their shows.
The company already has endorsements from producer FremantleMedia and advertising firm JWT, who have joined its Early Access Program, which kicks off today as Starling emerges from stealth mode.
ME sat down with president Kevin Slavin, CEO Declan Caufield and General Manager of Starling Americas Kenny Miller yesterday at MIPTV to chat about the new service.
"If Foursquare standardises the conversation around places, Starling standardises the conversations around media," says Slavin. "We want to be a global backchannel for all television everywhere."
Starling has its roots in projects at Area/Code, the cross-media firm co-founded by Slavin. It worked with MTV on something called Backchannel, which offered 'competitive chat' around reality show The Hills. Fans posted comments on the official website while watching live, and voted up the best ones - with those comments then integrated into repeats of the show.
"The issue was that it was a walled garden - you had to join the MTV social network," says Slavin. "People would be like 'Where's all my friends?'. You don't want to be so overstructured that you can't include everybody in the conversation, but at the same time you don't want it to be completely unstructured."
Starling is very much a mobile service, because as Caufield points out, it's now common for people to be using their phones while watching TV - he cites an Ofcom stat suggesting that 90% of Brits do this.
"The audience is inherently isolated with the device that they're watching TV on though," he says. "Big production shows have been very successful in bringing the family back to the sofa, but we want to be a real-time watercooler."
Starling showed ME the app running on both an iPhone and iPad. The initial interface looks like an Electronic Programme Guide, with scrolling lists of shows and channels - customised according to your country and TV provider.
You can then see at a glance which shows are on, and how many of your friends are logged in to Starling as watching them. Once into the individual show page, you get the three streams of content referred to earlier: friends' comments, everybody's comments, and the most popular comments according to votes.
Which is where the broadcasters and production companies come in. "We're giving them free tools - a black box that will go into their control room, and receive all of the top comments currently coming in, time-synchronised," says Caufield.
"Broadcasters really enjoy the organic nature of it. They can crowdsource comments, and they have a data trail."
For recorded shows like The Hills, the top comments can then be splashed on the screen in future repeats. However, Caufield says Starling could also be used during live shows, citing the example of big political interviews.
Starling's consumer apps won't be available until Autumn this year - its early access programme is designed to let broadcasters and production companies get their heads around the technology and its potential.
In time, there may also be an API, allowing broadcasters to integrate Starling into their own live or on-demand TV mobile apps.
Starling's app will be free to use, and there'll be an advertising element, which may be tied to existing ads airing around a particular show. "We see it as tying the broadcast spend and social media spend together," says Slavin.
Starling's apps will connect with existing social networks, particularly Facebook and Twitter, with users able to push their comments out to those services.
"We have the iPhone version in Alpha today, and there's an iPad version," says Caufield. "We'll also be doing an Android version, and a mobile website so that it will work on all modern mobile phones. Plus we'll be on the web, for people sitting on their sofas with netbooks."
Starling is hugely interesting, although the key will be getting millions of people to start using the service, pulling their friends along with them.
It's part of a wider trend around social TV and mobile, to which you can add Fuugo - a live TV client that will tie in social recommendations - and also Miso, which is taking Foursquare's check-in model and applying it to TV, albeit not at the level of Starling.
It may be new tech, but the company says it's rooted in well-established TV activities.
"Laugh tracks have always been about emulating the idea that you're watching a show with other people," says Miller. "We're coming back to where a lot of this stuff comes from."
