TVloop Blog

I attended the NewTeeVee Live conference yesterday and my favorite panel by far was Bridging the Gap between TV and the Web moderated by NewTeeVee writer Chris Albrecht.  I won’t rehash the lively discussion as you can read about that here.  Instead, as the title of this post suggests, I want to focus on the television buzzword of the day - transmedia.  The term came up several times while Heroes Writer and Producer, Jesse Alexander was speaking on the panel about how Heroes, as well as other properties like Star Wars, have extended the reach of their content beyond the television to the Web, print, mobile, etc.  It’s a fascinating story of how the producers of Heroes have rallied the audience around the show on every night of the week rather than just on Mondays.  The result is a huge following of ultra-passionate fans that can’t seem to get enough of the show and its multitude of characters. For those of you that are also new to the term, transmedia is defined by Wikipedia asfollows:

Transmedia storytelling, also called multiplatform, crossmedia or enhanced storytelling, is storytelling across multiple forms of media. By using different media, it attempts to create “entrypoints” through which consumers can become immersed in a story franchise’s world. The aim of this immersion is decentralized authorship, or transmedial play.^[1]

So how does that apply to TVLoop?  Well the short answer is that it really doesn’t…yet.  But it can and I believe it will in fairly short order.  For instance, our Addicted to Heroes application currently has ~500,000 users across the top five social networks, 67,000 daily active users on Facebook alone.  Those 67,000 users come to the Facebook application to watch full episodes, play trivia games, take quizzes, and more importantly, to discuss Heroes episodes and plot lines.  The last part is where transmedia kicks in.  Here’s just a snippet of the conversation occuring around the last episode:

These are passionate users basically discussing the future of the show.  Are the powers that be at NBC listenting to these users and adapting the show accordingly?  Probably not, but they could be.  Transmedia should strive to be more than just distribution.  It should include user conversation and the story should progress accordingly.  This isn’t a new idea as several original Web series have tried to incorporate user feedback without much success.  But this would be something new for broadcast television, and for the passion shows like Heroes and Lost, it could be interesting.  Fans certainly couldn’t come up with anything more absurd than polar bears on a tropical island.