We wrote about Twitter’s collaboration with a startup called Snappy TV and Turner Broadcasting that allowed the NCAA to tweet out highlight clips from March Madness throughout the annual college basketball tournament, with the clips sponsored by AT&T and Coke Zero, and a Twitter spokesperson confirmed Monday that the ESPN clips will appear in a similar manner inside Twitter Cards. The report indicated that Twitter will be selling advertising specifically around the sports clips that are tweeted out.

The company announced major updates to its Cards technology in early April that allowed for more types of content to appear in the tweets and more app promotion for third-party apps cross-posting to Twitter. The key to Cards is that a user never has to leave Twitter to view the content the Cards contain — everything is viewable directly in stream, which encourages users to stay on Twitter’s website.

My colleague Mathew Ingram and I have written about Twitter’s transformation over the past year or so to become more of a media company, and Twitter’s partnerships with television, music and video outlets are numerous. There were rumors of deals with Viacom and NBC, a partnership with Nielson to measure user activity around television, the launch of the Twitter #music app and following music entertainment show.

For Twitter, all of this content could make tweets more engaging for users who become captive audience members participating in live events. But perhaps more importantly for the company, if it’s gearing up for the IPO everyone expects, video provides an excellent platform for advertising and big brand partnerships that could make Twitter a lot of money.

To provide some background context, recall the popular news site launched an online TV network in August that streams 12 hours of live footage a day from New York and L.A. It’s a big investment, but the company is hoping its hyper-engaged user community will follow the brand into the video space, and that all that footage will produce buckets of viral content clips to spray across HuffPo and AOL web sites.

So what is the significance of the iPad app in all this? At first glance, not much. The app is simply another way for a user to watch the live stream — which features both ordinary people and celebrity guests like Bill Maher — while reading and adding comments, and sharing shows to Twitter or Facebook. Here are a couple of screenshots that show how comments can appear either stacked or tiled:

On its own, the HuffPo Live app is not extraordinary. Where it could be a real game changer, however, is the fact that the app can be slung onto a TV set using Apple TV. This means that Huffington Post has a chance to control not just a living room’s second screens but also the primary one as well.

In practice, this could occur if groups of friends watch the presidential elections on HuffPo Live and share comments in real time via their iPad — comments that would appear on their TV. If this comes to pass, HuffPo Live will have created what amounts to a walled garden extraordinaire in living rooms across the land.

But could HuffPo actually pull this off? In the short term, the answer is no, as the commenting system is too rudimentary. It allows users to like or flag a given comment but does not let users create a limited community like the ones they know on Facebook or Twitter. A company spokesperson says improved commenting features are coming soon (a Reddit-style up-or-down voting system might be one idea).

Meanwhile, bandwidth will provide another obstacle to HuffPo Live as most houses don’t have the capacity to enjoy an uninterrupted live stream on several devices at once. (Although, as Om’s recent account shows, things are improving quickly).

Still, the future prospects of a living room with a single media source dominating all devices is intriguing from both a user and marketing perspective. Will we one day see other content makers like the NFL or BuzzFeed try to do the same thing?

But where is the real value in the hot new idea that many in broadcasting are still beginning to explore?

“There’s no difference in the creative at all,” Neil Mortensen, research director of the UK TV umbrella and traditional-advertising champion Thinkbox, told a Royal Television Society seminar on the topic on Tuesday. ”It all revolves around extensions of (viewers’) current behaviour.”

Today, aggregated online discussion of on-screen TV shows is a second-screen quick win – prescribing hashtags is easy. Broadcasters and producers are also concocting engagement propositions like voting apps and game show participation. But these are mostly accompaniments to content that is still conceived for a linear TV screen.

“People have always been doing something else, like doing the ironing, while TV is on,” Juliette Otterburn-Hall, digital director of UK independent TV producer Shed Media, told Tuesday’s seminar.

She cited extra production costs and uncertainty over whether networks or producers own the accompanying products as potential issues around second-screen development. But Otterburn-Hall said issues could be ironed out as the matters get thrashed out:  ”We’re used to making programmes that you sell, distributing it; we understand it. This adds a whole myriad of complexity. We can overcome these things – it just means more jobs and lawyers.”

Mortensen added: ”It improves (viewers’) enjoyment of the TV-viewing experience. A lot of people now say they won’t view the show unless they can interact with it. The fact you are multi-screen and connected is driving more people to watch (TV).”

Zeebox has gained more plaudits than many for testing the second-screen waters. Its app includes social discussion of TV shows, a channel-changing EPG, live information about on-screen dialogue, e-commerce links and a HTML framework with which broadcasters or producers can create their own in-app viewer engagement modules for use during their shows.

Having clocked 1.5 million downloads and 300,000 to 400,000 monthly uniques since launching in the UK last year, Zeebox will likely launch in the US next week, co-founder Anthony Rose told Tuesday’s Royal Television Society seminar.

That launch will be alongside “a very big US partnership”. And it will come with an app upgrade packing a stream of friends’ viewing activity and reminder bookings. It will place Zeebox head-to-head with Intonow, the similar companion app that is now under Yahoo’s ownership.

In the UK, Zeebox quickly earned a double-digit-million investment from News Corp’s BSkyB, for a 10 percent stake, that sees Sky’s sales unit selling ads in to the app and will, in the next couple of months, see a subset of Zeebox’s features integrated in to Sky’s own Sky+ PVR remote control and recording apps.

Together with significant US carriage, the tens of thousands of Sky+ users who will soon see Zeebox’s social TV streams could help popularise the concept, which has so far been adopted well by the early crowd, for a more mainstream audience.

If that becomes the case, where will the money be?

“Advertising will ultimately fuel this whole business,” said Rose, whose app takes brands’ display sponsorships and affiliate links for products mentioned in shows. “Advertising is a $70 billion industry in the US - there’s the potential to have a reinvention of the ad industry – personalised, targeted.”

But Thinkbox’s Mortensen said conventional TV ad sales already allow advertisers to target consumers using demographic and ratings data well. Mortensen said he sees the second-screen opportunity as “chat”, “play” and “buy”.

Sky product development director Gareth Capon disagreed: “New platforms always give you new advertising and commercial opportunities. If you don’t have great user experience, you won’t have anything to commercialise.”

Capon cited Sky Sports F1′s live in-race camera selector for iPad: “You couldn’t do that without being on someone’s lap.”

Please note: This article contains MASSIVE spoilers for the 5th season of “Breaking Bad.” You’ve been warned.

For the past two months, AMC has prefaced each new episode of the critically-acclaimed drama Breaking Bad by alerting viewers to the existence of BreakingBadStorySync.com: A second-screen experience for each episode, timed to update with the show if you skipped the DVR and watched live.

Second screen experiences are nothing new, but they’re something I’ve always primarily associated with award shows and lighter fare. I was curious as to what a second-screen experience for a gritty cable drama like Breaking Bad would be like. So for the 2012 finale, I made sure I was home in time, with my laptop on the couch with me.

Powered by the real-time web platform Echo (whose website was down as of writing — Google cache here), Breaking Bad Story Sync proved to be a relatively entertaining mix of photos, video, polls and flashbacks, cleverly tied to the on-screen action — a great way to engage fans. But it was also, at times, a crass effort to get people watching ads — while watching ads, on top of ads.

The episode, “Gliding Over All,” began with anti-hero Walter White (Bryan Cranston) gazing intently at a fly — Story Sync began by reminding us about the 3rd season episode where Walt was super-obsessed with a fly in the lab…

…before moving on, a few minutes later, to poll viewers on whether or not the shocking murder which ended last week’s episode was necessary.

(For not the last time, the poll showed that an overwhelming majority of people are no longer rooting for Walt.)

One more poll popped up before we reached the first commercial break of the episode, at which point I expected to see some bonus content to keep those normally used to a DVR experience from getting twitchy. Instead, we got this:

Yeah, that’s a banner ad right above another ad.

There were three more ads for the SRT over the course of the Story Sync experience, turning my two-screen viewing experience into two screens of commercials. In addition, when I clicked to watch a video replay of a violent prisoner-shanking montage (which was the StorySync update immediately following that montage airing on TV), the video began with a 30-second pre-roll ad — for Breaking Bad.

Yo dawg, I heard you like “Breaking Bad” so I put an ad for “Breaking Bad” in your “Breaking Bad” Story Sync experience.

Overall, the technology powering the service performed well — there were no lags in updates, no loading issues, and the interactive elements were glitch-free. I also liked the subtle “tock” noise which indicated an update — just enough to alert you without being distracting.

Beyond the technology, though, watching with Story Sync had two strong benefits: First, the polls and quizzes, which at times lacked subtlety:

But did offer some fun interactivity:

Second: The flashbacks and reminders of past episodes, which were timed perfectly with the on-screen action. If you’ve never watched Breaking Bad, know that it’s a show which loves thematic callbacks and inside jokes, a fact which Story Sync celebrated all episode long:

The biggest drawback to a second-screen experience on a drama like Breaking Bad is that like many sophisticated dramas, there are often big moments that are played quietly. Which is to say that I was looking at my stupid computer when, on screen, it was revealed that Walt had brought along his trusty vial of ricin poison to his meeting with a potentially expendable contact — a big character and plot moment, and one that I completely missed.

In fact, I didn’t learn about it until the next day, when I read one of the many blog recaps of the episode. Instead, I thought that the Story Sync update which followed that scene was foreshadowing ricin’s appearance.

Despite that unfortunate glitch, I overall found the whole experience intriguing, especially those moments which proved that whoever was behind the experience had some snark in them:

Second-screen viewing is definitely not a fad, and leaning into the curve of distracted audiences isn’t a bad strategy, especially when you can also simultaneously encourage real-time engagement. And given that Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan has said he’s worried about how DVRing affects the current TV business model, it’s hardly a surprise that this show is one of the first to play with this combination of elements.

The next time we might see Story Sync again will be when The Walking Dead returns for Season 3 this October (it originally launched during Dead‘s second season last spring). But while my first experience was interesting, I’m not sure it was compelling enough to make me forego using my DVR for future AMC programming — especially given the additional ads that came with it.

Perhaps it’s enough to just watch a TV show — especially when it’s one of the best shows on television. Perhaps I’m more old-fashioned than I thought.

Its existing Sky+ iPad app already let its 4.3 million Sky+HD subscribers schedule set top box recordings over the cloud from any location via its on-screen EPG.

Now an updated version of the app released on Wednesday adds same-room TV control including pause, rewind and fast-forward of the Sky+HD set top box; channel changing and recording management.

This is just an increment in Sky’s second-screen developments. In a few months’ time, the app will be injected with social TV functionality from Zeebox, the promising startup in which BSkyB invested this January.

The interesting remote UI introduction today is that the majority of those new features involve not on-screen virtual buttons or sliders but simple finger swiping across an otherwise blank iPad screen.

This may make it easier for some folk who don’t comprehend a wealth of interface options, but the lack of interaction prompts may also pose a challenge.

The main technical challenge, however, is that both the iPad and the Sky+HD box must be on the same broadband network. Sky’s TV boxes are Ethernet- but not WiFi-enabled. Marrying the devices requires an additional £60 Wireless Connector bridge to the TV box, or some homeplugs.

BSkyB rival Virgin Media has taken almost two years so far in developing the iPad remote control app for its TiVo set top box. paidContent reported in March that the app was essentially ready but Virgin feared consumer network confusion – its TiVo boxes also do not have the necessary WiFi functionality.

Announcement.