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.

These deals reinforce something I tried to make clear in an earlier post about the company’s plans: namely, if you don’t like television then you’re probably not going to be very happy with the future of Twitter. The deal with BBC America — which is owned by BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the agency, and carries such popular shows as Doctor Who and Top Gear in the U.S. — will presumably see Twitter run clips from those shows inside its users’ streams, in much the same way it did with ESPN during March Madness.

.@Twitter and @BBCAmerica, home of #DoctorWho & #TopGear, ink deal to offer 1st in-Tweet branded video synced to entertainment TV series—
BBC AMERICA (@BBCAMERICA) April 18, 2013

TV shows inside your Twitter stream

There have been other such one-off deals — as well as arrangements like the one with the Weather Channel, which will bring weather clips into Twitter’s expanded tweets — but the BBC America partnership seems to be the first one that involves an entire channel and potentially all of their shows, and it could easily be the prototype for further such deals. But will users react positively or negatively to all of this real-time video showing up in their Twitter streams?

Meanwhile, Twitter is also launching a somewhat different project with the Comedy Central channel that illustrates just how much the company wants to bring video as an experience inside the stream: the network is launching what it calls a five-day “comedy festival,” but all of the content will appear within Twitter, and most of it will be either created or distributed via Twitter’s recent video acquisition, Vine — which is designed for video clips of six seconds or less.

According to a report in the New York Times about the arrangement, a number of comedians — including legends like Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner — will be posting video snippets of comedy routines as well as jokes using the hashtag #ComedyFest. On Tuesday, comedian Steve Agee will reportedly host a “Vine Dining” party as part of the festival, in which he and others will tell stories in six-second video clips that will be hosted and distributed by the Twitter network.

Video plus brands equals ad dollars

As my colleague Eliza Kern noted in her post last week about the rumors of deals with Viacom and NBC, these moves are just part of Twitter’s ongoing plans to not only host TV and video content on the network, but to monetize it (or help its creators monetize it) as well. In addition to Vine, one of the recent acquisitions that could help Twitter do that is Bluefin Labs, which specializes in tracking the real-time data about who is watching what show.

That kind of information — along with the data from Twitter’s partnership with Nielsen, announced last year — would in turn help Twitter appeal to advertisers who are looking for as much targeting information as they can get. And that appeal could be paying off already: according to a report from the Financial Times on Monday, Twitter has signed a major multi-year deal worth “hundreds of millions of dollars” with Starcom MediaVest Group, a large ad-buying firm that represents clients like Walmart and Coca-Cola.

Moves like these — and the launch of Twitter Music last week — reinforce just how much the company has evolved away from its original nature as a short-messaging service that gave you only 140 characters or less, and could be consumed quickly. Now, it is becoming a lot more like a broadcast network, or at least a willing handmaiden for broadcast networks, as CEO Dick Costolo predicted in a speech last year. But is that what users really want from Twitter?

This post was updated on April 24 to note that BBC America is a unit of BBC Worldwide and not a joint venture with Discovery Channel as was originally stated.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Dmitris K and Eva Blue

This week, news broke that the remaining eight episodes of the ABC sitcom Don’t Trust the B In Apartment 23, which was taken off the air in January, would be posted to ABC.com, Hulu and iTunes.

The announcement is a boon for fans of the show, but they shouldn’t get their hopes up that successful online distribution will mean another season of the show; much of the cast has already moved on to other projects.

However, another show may truly get a second life: Also this week, rumors spread that Microsoft is looking at rebooting NBC’s Heroes, which was canceled in 2010, for Xbox and MSN distribution.

As television continues its evolution from a single box that sits in your living room to a multi-platform experience across many devices, resurrections like these are increasingly common — though sometimes they’re less like Lazarus, and more like zombies.

Netflix is of course a front runner in the rebirth business, thanks to picking up Arrested Development (only one more month, Bluth fans!).

But there’s a deep history to this practice. For instance: In late 2009, producer Ashton Kutcher turned to YouTube to screen the unaired five episodes of model drama The Beautiful Life, which had just been canceled by The CW.

However, while the TBL channel is currently at over five million views, not one of the five episodes on it has surpassed a million views.

They’re all still online, along with a plea posted by Kutcher saying that they’d be able to produce more episodes if the channel’s subscriber count hit a certain, unspecified threshold.

Whatever that threshold was, it was greater than 35,000 subscribers — which is the channel’s current standing, four years later. But TBL does deserve credit for being an early example of a show realizing the potential power of digital distribution — arguably ahead of its time in that respect.

The key is transitioning from digital distribution to actually producing new episodes. The most daring and ultimately successful example of this isn’t necessarily Joss Whedon getting to make a feature film follow-up to Firefly or the return of Veronica Mars as a feature — the real kickoff of digital distribution having real meaning for canceled shows comes from the early 2000s, and DVDs.

The Fox animated series Family Guy first premiered in 1999, and was canceled in 2002. But thanks to blockbuster DVD sales of the first three seasons, it was brought back to the airwaves in 2005, and has remained a key part of Fox’s schedule ever since. Creator Seth MacFarlane has even gone on to create at least two other shows for the network.

(Personal anecdote: I was working as a clerk in a DVD store in 2003, and I keenly remember how we couldn’t keep Family Guy box sets on the shelves; they sold out like crazy.)

Sometimes, things need to end. Sometimes, shows don’t work or don’t connect with a wide audience, and those involved are ready to move on. The Onion satirized this beautifully in the aftermath of the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign with this piece headined “Stars Of Canceled Show Terrified Fans Will Raise Money For Movie,” centered around recently-terminated NBC sitcom Animal Practice.

The episodes of Animal Practice left unaired after its cancelation are currently available online, though it’s unlikely to come back — a zombie, for better or worse.

But as the industry figures out how to make original content on the web sustainable and profitable, we’ll see more and more examples of Lazarus.

The TV business is still based on an archaic business model that forces customers to buy arbitrary bundles of channels. Fans of arts programming, for instance, often have to shell out $5 a month for football shows — even if they hate football.

This isn’t a technology issue. It’s instead the problem of what media doyen Peter Kafka calls the “TV industrial complex” — a cabal of broadcasters and cable distributors that refuse to surrender their bundled TV business model.

That’s why upstart Aereo, which uses tiny antennas to stream TV signals to mobile devices, is so intriguing to watch. The company is offering a way for people to watch shows where and when they want — and has so far withstood the TV industry’s lawsuits. Yesterday, we showed off photos of Aereo’s tech. Today, we’re exploring the vision and strategy of the man who wants to kick in the door of the TV industrial complex once and for all.

The quest to end an “abusive” system

Chet Kanojia, who is speaking at paidContent Live in April, is a soft-spoken engineer who likes stylish shoes. At 43, he’s already built an advertising company, Navic Networks, and sold it to Microsoft — and presumably made himself a fortune. When we chatted at Aereo’s site in Brooklyn this week, the first thing I wanted to know is why he picked this fight. Why, that is, did he decide put so much energy into Aereo when the TV industry might crush the company in a second like it has done to others before?

“I had the option to be a VC, to do nothing or to do something really really meaningful,” said Kanojia. “In my heart of hearts, I belive that when businesses are created or preserved with analogue mentalities, they’re artificially constrained and ripe to to be recast in a different way.”

He adds that he loves TV content like 60 Minutes, Parenthood and Downton Abbey. But he is exasperated by the TV industry’s ossified pricing model.

“Why can’t there be a simple way to pay for this? It’s just irrational that it should cost hundreds of dollars a month. It’s an abusive system set up in an artificial way.”

Broadcasters like NBC and Fox, of course, would argue that we need a system that provides revenue to produce the content that people like so much. In recent years, these networks have been leaning on distributors to pay them for carrying over-the-air channels — and presumably think Aereo should too.

Kanojia is having none of it, saying the broadcasters are already making money from public spectrum through advertising and that it’s unreasonable for them to ask for more. Also, Aereo is not part of the regulatory regime that requires big TV companies to offer their channels for sale to cable and satellite distributors; this means that, for now, Aereo is unable to sell channels like ESPN (owned by ABC) to its customers.

Kanojia adds that pure “a la carte” TV is not the only solution to the TV muddle. He would also settle for “rational bundles.”

A high stakes bet

Aereo’s disruptive potential lies in the fact that, unlike other forms of pay TV, subscribers can add or drop it without the hassle of set-top boxes or contracts. For now, Aereo is available only in New York City but is about to roll out to 22 new markets across the country for the same price of $1 a day or $8 a month to watch and record shows. Kanojia believes this will change people’s conception of how we get access to television.

“You can come in five or ten times a year and a pay a dollar. We have lots of habitual one dollar buyers. It’s a massive dent in the psyche.”

For Aereo to have a long-term impact, though, it will still have to survive an ongoing legal gauntlet. On this front, it has a decent chance because investors and lawyers designed the company as a high-stakes bet, counting on a 2008 appeals court ruling that said private remote DVRs don’t violate copyright (you can read the legal details here). After broadcasters sued it last year, Aereo won the first round and the case is now on appeal.

The price tag for the loser will be high. On one hand, media mogul Barry Diller and others have put at least $58 million into Aereo, money that could evaporate if Aereo is shut down. On the other hand, GigaOM Pro analyst Paul Sweeting (who has written about Aereo) said the initial court decision was a “disaster” for the networks and that a loss at the appeal level will open the floodgates.

“If the networks don’t win, what it means is that all you have to do is bounce a signal off a cloud-based DVR and you can do what you want,” said Sweeting by phone.

Whatever the outcome of the court case (which could go to the Supreme Court if courts in New York and California continue to disagree), Kanojia thinks he will have made an inexorable dent in the current tv structure. He also thinks the litigation will help other pioneering TV companies.

“The legal situation is unfortunate, but it forces clarity and that’s a good thing.”

As Eliza Kern described in her post on the rumors, Bluefin’s technology allows broadcasters — and more importantly, brands — to see where and when their content is being discussed on social networks and elsewhere on the web. The company was founded by MIT scientist Deb Roy, who began by collecting every sound his young son made during a 3-year period and then used algorithms to detect patterns in that data (Bluefin’s CEO will be speaking at our paidContent Live conference in New York on April 17).

Television is where the money is

Twitter’s decision to concentrate on TV-related features and partnerships isn’t that surprising. As we’ve described before, the company has been coming under increasing pressure to generate meaningful amounts of revenue in order to justify a market value that is estimated to be in the $10 billion range, based on recent sales of its shares on the private market. And while Twitter has been building up its “promoted tweets” and other advertising-related features, the most obvious and lucrative source of revenue is still television and other video-related content.

Twitter's true strategy? If they are 2nd screen for TV, and take over TV audience measurement, they control both social and TV advertising?

—
Nova Spivack (@novaspivack) February 05, 2013

Twitter’s moves in this direction started with partnerships for specific events like the Academy Awards, where it helped broadcasters filter and aggregate tweets about the content, and then expanded with deals related to things like NASCAR and the Summer Olympics, where the company created customized portals or hubs and had its own staff of editors curating content related to the event. After the Olympics, the head of Twitter’s media partnerships bragged about how much traffic the service drove to NBC’s programming, and it’s clear the company wants more of those kinds of relationships.

Even the launch of Vine, the six-second video app that Twitter recently acquired, can be seen as another extension of this focus: while most people have been using the app to share short clips of their cats and other ephemera, there have already been advertisers and brands taking advantage of the new format — including The Gap — and it’s easy to see how those clips could become mini-advertisements.

Our 2nd @vineapp experiment: stop motion 1969 denim. What should we #Vine next? vine.co/v/bJ6QQYKuDgz

—
  (@Gap) January 28, 2013

It’s not just a desire for revenue that has driven Twitter into the arms of television, however. As Eliza noted in a post about the use of Twitter during the Super Bowl, the fact that the network works as a “second screen” for such events has been obvious for some time — and it makes sense for Twitter to capitalize on that in whatever ways it can. And as Peter Kafka pointed out at All Things Digital, adding analytics to its video-related partnerships via Bluefin would allow Twitter to make a better case for why brands should care (it also has a partnership with Nielsen).

Twitter should be about much more than just TV

So what’s wrong with Twitter getting into bed with NBC and other broadcasters, or becoming a handmaiden to traditional television? A couple of potential pitfalls showed themselves during the Olympics: one was the fact that Twitter’s content hub was unavailable to non-U.S. users because of geographic restrictions that its partner NBC was subject to. By now, we’ve grown used to Twitter content being unrestricted — except in special cases such as Germany’s request to remove Nazi tweets, when changes have to be made for legal reasons. A geo-gated Twitter just seems wrong.

Acq of Bluefin Labs by Twitter feels like their equivalent of the "offline cookie" - how to close the loop w advertisers re: effectiveness

—
Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) February 05, 2013

The other incident that occurred during the Olympics was Twitter’s decision to shut down a journalist’s account after he criticized an executive at NBC and posted what the company said was a private email address. Twitter later admitted that this was mis-handled, but it raised the question of whose interests the company would be likely to protect if push came to shove: will the needs of broadcast partners take precedence over the needs of users? In some ways, they already have.

For me at least, getting into bed with television broadcasters and defining success as driving traffic to their programs is not as interesting a use of a global, real-time information platform as something like the “networked journalism” we saw during the Arab Spring and other events. Obviously, Twitter can still do things to help encourage that kind of activity as well, but if it doesn’t generate the same kind of revenue as a TV deal, how much attention will it get? Not much.

I am as much a fan of discussing shows like the Super Bowl on Twitter as anyone, but I don’t really need another way to find out about the latest NBC sitcom or reality show. I would much rather Twitter focused on filtering and curating the broader universe of discussion around important issues than boosting the viewership numbers of The Biggest Loser. Unfortunately, that’s where the money is.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Dmitris K

According to Deadline, three different endings were filmed for this Monday’s Hawaii Five-0, each featuring the reveal of a different killer.

During the live broadcasts (both East Coast and West Coast), viewers will be encouraged to vote for whodunit via Twitter or the official CBS site — the winning ending for each broadcast will be aired in real-time. This could, at least in theory, lead to CBS airing a different ending in New York than in Los Angeles.

Actively including social media voting in the show is a television first, but it’s also a natural build on how Twitter has become an essential part of the television experience for many viewers.

Take for example ABC Family’s Pretty Little Liars — at this week’s Television Critics Association press tour, the show’s creators pointed to Twitter as being a huge factor in the show’s popularity and ratings success:

When the subject of the amount of social media the show gets and the involvement of the fans, Oliver Goldstick said, “What’s great is it’s almost taking us back to old time television where people all watched at the same time because there’s something communal. It’s tribal. People are watching this. They’re not just DVR’ing or watching later online. There’s an aspect of this that is really old fashioned, as cutting edge as it is, because people are experiencing simultaneously.” King added that, after Toby was revealed as part of the ‘A’ Team, the network got a call from a mother who wanted to complain about having a room full of sixteen-year old girls who couldn’t stop crying.

(I do not know what being a member of the A-team means. But apparently it’s a big deal.)

The catch with the Hawaii Five-0 experiment, though, is that participating will encourage real-time viewing, commercials and all — the driving force behind much of the television innovation happening these days (see also recent experiments in second-screen technology like the StorySync experience for AMC programming).

But it also requires a Twitter account and/or active engagement with the internet, which could be an issue for Hawaii Five-0‘s audience: According to AdWeek, the median age of the show’s viewers is 55 years old.

I’m not saying people older than 55 don’t know how to use the Internet — my parents are both active users of Twitter. They also don’t watch Hawaii Five-0.

Much of the coverage of Costolo’s talk has focused on the numbers he provided during the speech, including the fact that Twitter now handles more than one billion tweets every couple of days (it took over three years for the service to hit its first billion) as well as the promise he made that users would be able to download their entire archive of tweets by the end of the year — although Costolo hedged his bets about whether the company would be able to meet his deadline.

Twitter brings back the real-time, unfiltered conversation

But apart from those headline numbers, and some history about Costolo’s experiences at the University of Michigan, much of the hour-long talk (which is embedded below) was devoted to how the Twitter CEO believes that the service has reshaped and disrupted media. Ever since the invention of the printing press, he said, we have had what amounts to broadcast media of one kind or another: it is one-way, and while it achieves broad distribution, it loses some of the benefits of the original town square or what the Greeks called the “Agora,” where townspeople shared the news of the day.

“The interesting things about the Agora, the interesting characteristics of it, are that it was multidirectional, it wasn’t someone standing on a stage like I am with you and just dictating. So there was a conversation, a real dialogue [and] it was unfiltered, it was not interpreted… and it was real time.”

Along with all of those benefits, Costolo said, there were also disadvantages — in the sense that there was a lot of noise, a lot of mistakes and rumors, and the information took a long time be distributed. But while the invention of newspapers and radio and television solved the distribution problem and much of the accuracy problem, it dramatically increased the costs of distributing news or information, and it lost the multi-directional and unfiltered aspect that the town square used to provide. And it also made the news very “outside-in,” with observers providing the details instead of participants.

In a nutshell, that’s what the Twitter CEO says his network provides now: a way of injecting the real-time, multi-directional and unfiltered nature of the town square back into the media. And the best part, Costolo says, is that while most new technologies are disruptive to traditional forms of media — in the sense that they disintermediate them — Twitter is actually complementary to mainstream sources of media such as television. More than once, the company’s CEO referred to the “second screen” experience that Twitter provides for real-time events such as the Olympics and Hurricane Sandy.

Although Costolo said that the “town square” aspects of Twitter apply to all kinds of media and not just television, it’s worth noting that the vast majority of examples he used to demonstrate where he sees the company going — and the power he believes it has as a media player — involved television, and Twitter’s ability to drive viewership of real-time events. This was most obvious when he talked about the Olympics and how despite the criticism from Twitter users about NBC tape-delaying events, the viewership for those events was still the highest NBC had ever seen. And it raises questions about where Twitter is focusing its attention as it tries to reinvent itself (it’s also worth noting that if Twitter is a town square, it’s one that is owned by a single company).

“So along comes Twitter, and Twitter reinvents the Agora. We once start to see multiple perspectives on a particular news story or event that’s happening. We once again start to have a shared experience across the globe about what’s happening and what we’re viewing right now. We once get an unfiltered perspective on what’s happening. But at the same time, it complements all these traditional forms of broadcast media, and all sorts of fascinating in ways that we would have never predicted.”

Looking for the signal amidst the noise

Costolo also talked about how the company sees Twitter as “the pulse of the planet,” and said that one of the biggest challenges for Twitter is to figure out how to handle the massive flow of content it gets every day — and to sort through and filter that in a way that allows people to find the things they are interested in, and avoid some of the noise. But if you try to present just the best tweets, he said, you lose what he called the “roar of the crowd” during events like the World Cup, which is also an important part of the experience. Costolo said Twitter now has 1,400 employees and half of those are engineers.

The Twitter CEO also said that the large volumes of information and the large numbers of people participating in the network actually help, because “it helps us do things like dispel rumors more quickly.” After the riots in Britain last year, Costolo said, The Guardian newspaper did a study that showed that Twitter was particularly good at dispelling rumors about the riots — even though the CEO admitted that Twitter was also a source of some of those rumors to begin with.

“Again, if you think about going back to the Agora, what if everyone in the world is at the Agora? The benefits to that are we can see each other as people and not as cardboard cutouts. We don’t see these two-dimensional media filtered perspectives of people, we see the real person. The down side of that is, man, it’s noisy when everybody is there.”

Costolo said that solving the problem of managing the noise in Twitter while still increasing the signal for users was one of the biggest challenges the company faces in the future — along with the need to generate enough revenue to justify its $10-billion market value, presumably, although the Twitter CEO didn’t get into the details of how it plans to do that.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Cotidad and See-ming Lee

In the interview, Costolo also talked about the evolution of founder Jack Dorsey’s role at the company, although he didn’t discuss reports published by the New York Times and others that said Twitter’s creator had to reduce his day-to-day role overseeing product design because people found him difficult and indecisive. And he remained circumspect about when (or if) the company plans to go public, as he has been in other interviews, saying only that it’s “not on our radar right now.” But Costolo also talked about what he sees as the most compelling feature of Twitter — namely, its ability to turn the news inside out and show us what others like ourselves are thinking about a global news event:

“We used to have a filtered, one-way view of events in the world from the media — whether it was a sporting event like the Olympics or an event like the presidential debates last week. America’s perspective of it, or the world’s perspective of that event, would be seen through the lens of the way that the media described it to them… now with Twitter, people want to know what everyone else thinks and we’re getting this inside-out, multi-perspective view of what’s going on right now as it happens from everybody else that’s watching the same thing we’re watching.”

What’s interesting about Costolo’s description of Twitter’s key feature are the examples that he chooses to focus on: the Olympics and the presidential debate. Both were huge traffic drivers for both Twitter and the broadcast networks who aired them — according to the Twitter blog, there were more than 10 million tweets sent during the two hours that the presidential debate was on, and the Olympics sparked about 150 million tweets, according to the company. Although some have argued that Twitter as a “second screen” is a distraction during such events, it’s obvious that plenty of people disagree.

Twitter is complementary to media, Costolo says

But the Olympics were more than just an event; they were also the subject of a carefully choreographed partnership between the official broadcaster and Twitter. There was a custom news hub curated by Twitter staff (geo-gated, of course, due to NBC’s licensing restrictions) and in the wake of the Games, the company’s head of media partnerships boasted to the New York Times about how much the Twitter partnership had increased viewership for NBC’s broadcast, saying “What we saw is that it was an amazing daytime-teaser trailer, driving people into prime time.”

That partnership also caused some controversy after a Twitter staffer alerted NBC to the fact that a British journalist had posted a senior executive’s email address without his permission, which is against Twitter’s privacy rules. The journalist’s account was quickly suspended, which left Twitter with a bit of a black eye from a public-relations perspective, since its motto has always been “let the tweets flow” and both Costolo and general counsel Alex Macgillivray have talked about how Twitter is the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party.” Some said Twitter had lost its users’ trust.

What seems clear from Costolo’s discussion on Marketplace is that this kind of corporate partnership with existing media outlets, and likely television networks specifically, is where the company’s future lies — for better or worse. As he described it:

“I view it as very, very complementary to the news outlets. In fact, one of the things we saw during the Olympics is that Twitter actually… drove tune-in to the Olympics. [and] what was happening was people would see on Twitter something like, wow, the U.S. women’s 4-by-100 meter relay team just broke the world record — and then they would make sure they tuned in that night to watch it, when they might not otherwise even know that women’s track and field was going to be on that night. So I think it is incredibly complementary to news and media in a way that maybe other technologies haven’t been in the past.”

Costolo also talked in the interview about how the company fights on behalf of its users when they are involved in court cases like the one involving Occupy Wall Street protester Malcolm Harris, in which the New York district attorney forced Twitter to provide personal information about Harris, including content that he had posted on Twitter. But when it comes to the kind of media model that the company seems to be pinning its hopes on, it sounds like being the “second screen” for public events broadcast by existing media players is the future. Whether that will bring Twitter fame and fortune remains to be seen.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users George Kelly and Giuseppe Bognanni

Aside from Khan’s star power, the show is so popular because of the types of issues it tackles — female feticide, caste discrimination, dowry deaths, child abuse and medical practice among them. According to one of the show’s producers, the amount of engagement and the number of responses from viewers is “completely unprecedented.” Here’s a sample of what we’re talking about, just 13 episodes into the show’s existence:

• 400 million viewers on Indian television and across the world on YouTube.
• More than 1.2 billion people have connected with Satyamev Jayate across its website, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and mobile devices.
• More than 8 million people have contributed a total of more than 14 million responses to the show’s content via Facebook, web comments, text-message votes and a telephone hotline. More than 100,000 new people respond each week.

The responses take all sorts of forms, from votes on a weekly poll question to long, heartfelt letters explaining a viewer’s experience with an issue or how the show has changed their thinking on an issue. And although 95 percent of responses come from India, the show has received them from 5,000 locations in 165 countries, including as far away as northern Canada and Alaska. The show’s topics regularly rank among the top trends on Twitter shortly after each episode airs.

Surprisingly, the producer said, the India-created Satyamev Jayate has not received a single piece of hate mail from bitter geopolitical rival Pakistan. In fact, there have been numerous requests for an episode on India-Pakistan unity. (If you have 90 minutes, here’s an episode on human dignity.)

Parsing through millions of messages

In order keep up with all the messages, Satyamev Jayate turned to Persistent Systems, an Indian IT consultancy with offices around the world, which created a system for automating their analysis. Here’s how the process works.

About a day-and-a-half before each show, Satyamev Jayate’s production company tells Persistent what the issue will be and the two groups come up with a taxonomy that will help the system sort through messages based on what topics will be brought up during Sunday’s show. But it’s not by any means the definitive list. As activity ramps up on Twitter while the show airs (tweet rates are highest during commercials and immediately after it ends, by the way), the team gets a sense of what topics are resonating with viewers and what themes they can expect in the nearly million responses that will follow.

When the responses actually do start pouring in after lunch, they hit a system designed by Persistent to automatically tag them and score them based on interest level and sentiment. So, as Mukund Deshpande, head of business intelligence and analytics at Persistent, told me, a long message with an interesting story will be marked as higher quality, while a short, congratulatory note will be scored lower. Because so many viewers write in “Hinglish,” a combination of Hindi and English, an off-the-shelf system wouldn’t have been as accurate for processing these messages.

In the future, he’d like to train the system to recognize various gradients of emotion, too, beyond just simple sentiment. That means not just “positive” or “negative,” but also “happy,” “sad,” “angry” and any other way a viewer might be feeling.

The best messages are then sent to a team of trained analysts — often college students and graduates, along with some Persistent employees — who decide which ones are worth following up on for a Friday radio show Khan does, and for placement on Satyamev Jayate’s web site. These analysts try to ensure that the stories shared are truthful and that the messages don’t contain personal information that could get viewers in trouble or affect their privacy. Data visualizations about how many people have responded and where they come from is available on the Impact section of the show’s site, as well as on separate Impact pages for each episode.

Making a difference with data

Aamir Khan

All this feedback has an impact, both on the show itself and on India. Satyamev Jayate’s voting process, in particular, has yielded some impressive results. After the first episode about female feticide, or the selective abortion of female fetuses, 99.8 percent of viewers said they agreed with the idea of a fast-track court to prosecute doctors who perform such operations. When Khan presented the results to the Indian government, officials agreed almost immediately to amend the court system accordingly, the producer told me.

Sometimes, though, the results simply present an interesting — if not troubling — view into the Indian subconscious. Almost 32 percent of respondents, for example, voted in favor of the right of families to use force preventing the marriage of two willing adults (subsequent analysis uncovered some reasons why, including continuing opposition to inter-caste marriage), while almost 14 percent of respondents one week said that beating a woman is a sign of masculinity. And although women comprise only about 32 percent of the show’s audience, they have accounted for the majority of responses on shows addressing issues important to them.

The producer said his team also uses the data to inspire ideas for future shows and to populate a weekly radio show that Khan does with a local journalist. The Satyamev Jayate team analyzes the week’s messages in order to pick the most powerful and determine trends in viewers’ feelings, and Khan shares them during the interview. The second season, he said, will be shaped in part by how viewers responded to the format during the first season and the issues they want covered next.

Beyond just the next season, though — and the occasional political victory — the hope is that all the data Satyamev Jayate generates will have continuing utility. Deshpande said he’d like to see it used for ethnographic and social science research, because the dataset is larger than most academic studies could generate (something that’s already happening with crowdsourced medical research) and it’s very high quality because of the demographic and geographic information attached to it.

However, the producer with whom I spoke seems perfectly content right now with the way Satyamev Jayate is resonating with the public. For example, he said, viewers are reporting crimes they previously might not have considered too big a deal and are reaching out to disabled citizens. This is the first time many people are speaking openly about these issues, he said, and they’re able to track the effects because they’re able to ensure no message is left behind.

In Godin’s post, the author and marketing guru says that the world Twitter is choosing to enter by making advertising revenue its primary concern — over and above the interests of its users — is the same world that TV inhabits. The real customers for a TV network or channel, he says, aren’t the users but the advertisers who pay to produce the content, and this same dynamic is present in the newspaper industry as well (which is one reason why the switch to being funded primarily by readers could be so disruptive for that business, as I argued in a recent post about the Financial Times and the New York Times).

Advertising gets in the way of serving users

The problem with a focus on advertising for someone like Twitter, Godin says, is that making what advertisers want the main priority will tend to distort the things the network does — in ways that could run counter to what readers want. As he puts it:

“If they relentlessly sell the attention of their users, they will have a misalignment as they maximize profit. The advertisers will want ever more attention, and the users will want to avoid those interruptions the advertisers are paying for. Tension will keep rising as users feel trapped by a medium with few substitutes that begins to charge an ever higher tax in the form of attention wasted.”

This is a dilemma that Facebook is having to confront as well: it has become hugely popular as a social network that allows people to connect with their friends, but the vast majority of its monetization strategy consists of trying to interrupt and/or take advantage of those connections to satisfy advertisers — something that could effectively poison the well for many users. Sir Martin Sorrel, chairman of advertising and marketing giant WPP Group, has wondered whether advertising as we know it is even compatible with socially-based networks, and others argue that ad models simply don’t suit what amount to communication platforms.

Godin’s solution is similar to Caldwell’s model for his new venture App.net: while Caldwell wants to make user and developer fees the primary revenue source for his network, Godin suggests that Twitter should charge users for a variety of features that only power users are likely to want — things like advanced analytics, verification (which some users have already been given, but only on a case-by-case basis decided by Twitter) or other enhancements. The core of Godin’s argument is that this would align Twitter’s interests and those of its users, which would turn out better for both:

“Every decision proposed will have to answer just one question: what makes our users happier? Free is a great idea, until free leads to a conflict between those contributing attention and those contributing cash.”

Is it better to have loyal users, or giant scale?

Dave Winer, meanwhile, argued in a recent post that Twitter should do the opposite of what Godin suggests: in other words, that it should seek out those power users or people with some kind of celebrity-style following (not necessarily TV or movie celebrities, but possibly technology thought leaders, he says) and offer them a revenue-sharing relationship. One of Winer’s key points is that much of the value in Twitter comes from those users, and therefore they deserve to benefit from the monetization of the value they are creating, in much the same way that YouTube has preferred partners.

Unless Twitter reaches out to try and retain these kinds of users, Winer argues, it could lose them to competing networks — whether it’s Google+ or other offerings that give them what they want (one would-be Twitter competitor, Status.net, got some mileage out of forming relationships with celebrity users, but it wasn’t enough to give the network much traction). In a Twitter conversation with me, Winer also made the point that his proposal isn’t contradictory to Godin’s, and that the network could both charge some users and pay others as part of a different monetization strategy. As Winer puts it in his post:

“Not all your users are the same. Some see their output stream as a work product. Something they care about, learn from, put love into, and use it as a way to gather ideas from others. For some people this will be considered enough of a product that they want to be paid for it.”

In a recent post on the virtues of being free — a post that was a response in part to Dalton Caldwell’s App.net proposal — Union Square Ventures managing partner Fred Wilson argued that the only way for networks like Twitter to reach the largest number of users, and thereby achieve the kind of scale they need to in order to become valuable businesses, is to be advertising supported. And he is probably right about that. But is scale the most important thing? And could the race to achieve that scale actually ruin the network?

Godin and others have a point when they argue that advertising has the potential to distort the relationship between a service and its users — and we’ve already seen hints of how that might play out, in the turmoil around Guy Adams and the suspension of his account after he criticized one of Twitter’s corporate partners. The benefit of the models proposed by Godin, Caldwell and Winer is that they would be as user-centric as possible, and therefore less likely to become distorted. But they would also sacrifice the scale Wilson refers to. Would the trade-off be worth it?

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Mark Strozier and Rosaura Ochoa