Exclusive: How a tweet gets on TV by Mass Relevance

By Natan Edelsburg 

We’ve written about Mass Relevance around NBC’s The Voice, the BET Awards and they’ve even inked a cross-brand partnership with MTV. Mass Relevance CEO Sam Decker has share a detailed infographic with Lost Remote detailing how “the best tweets get from Twitter to TV”. “We created this because there’s a lot of confusion and fear of how this works,” explained Decker. “We often have to do this discussion with TV execs to get the point across of how it works to get clean content and publish it to TV.” Here’s the infographic followed by a detailed explanation and interview with Decker.


(Click for larger view)

Lost Remote: Can you give us a summary of the graphic?
Sam Decker: This is a behind-the-scenes flow of how tweets get on TV, which has been done for shows such as NBC The Voice, CNN, MSNBC, and many awards shows by Mass Relevance. To get Tweets on TV requires Mass Relevance technology of real-time sourcing, rules, moderation and API or hosted visualization that convert into TV broadcast. Mass Relevance has worked with graphics systems from Avid, Ross, Chyron, Miranda, Orad and Harris. Or they have hosted web-based visualizations that convert to TV through CSI Scan Do or Folsom.

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LR: Why did you create this graphic?
SD: We found ourselves in conversations with stakeholders from different backgrounds, including producers, network executives, digital teams, and graphics teams. Each of them wondered ‘how it worked’. This graphic provides an overview that allows us to walk anyone through the execution possibilities and help reduce anxiety that we can work with almost any set up. This could be for different kind of on-air visualizations, such as counters, lower third tweet, streams, and data visualizations. There’s a separate conversation (and graphic coming) for the different creative executions possible for TV and events depending on the type of show and editorial objective.

LR: How do you use it with potential clients?
SD: I think this is something we can use to walk the steps through with any function, but moreover, something the ‘digital champions’ can use with executives and technical colleagues to show the degree of flexibility possible. Hopefully this will open up or accelerate opportunities to integrate social content into TV broadcasts, which could be for a live TV show or layering live social content over taped shows.

LR: What are the most difficult parts to explain?
SD: The handoff of digital to TV seems to be the most mysterious to folks, perhaps because most use of most TV graphics systems has been direct input of content as opposed to outside, digital sources of data or content. But the conversations lead to unique opportunities. For example, for NBC’s The Voice, Ross Video built a unique Xpressions module to smoothly integrate with our live data. It worked out well in the control room and on screen.

The second most difficult part to explain is exactly how our platform filters through thousands of tweets per minute to help producers find (or we can moderate) the best tweets to show, and how to avoid anything that shouldn’t go on TV (standards and practices). In this graphic it’s only represented as a box. Better to explain these questions with a demo of our platform!

LR: What are the easiest parts to explain?
SD: Depends on who you’re talking to! To the digital team, they get how an API would output the data in a flexible way. To the graphics team, they understand once they get the data how to put it on screen. Now we just need everyone to understand the whole process, as today (and more in the future) it’s all connected.

Lost Remote: Anything else?
SD: Certainly this isn’t all technology. There’s a level of curation strategy, design, moderation and live support necessary to make this happen. We’ve been the in-studio support team for many live broadcasts now, and we are privileged to work along side digital and TV graphics team to pull this off. Once a production team experiences this flow first hand, we’ve found it becomes a new core competency for the broadcaster and then they can get more creative on the execution. Like most things new, with experience comes wisdom!

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