Tweets during shows, Snapchat's Live Stories, and other social tools are ushering in new communal viewing moments, and may transform TV business
Social Media Takes Television Back in Time — The actor Joshua Malina is one of those guys you know from TV. You may not recognize his name, but his boyish face would ring a bell. Tweets: @mgsiegler . See also Mediagazer Tweets: M.G. Siegler / @mgsiegler : I'm sure television didn't think this would be the way to buck time-shifting trend. And yet... http://www.nytimes.com/... http://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
The Times' argument lands midway through an arc that started with Twitter's TV Timelines experiment earlier in 2015, which began aggregating show conversations, photos, and video into curated timelines. This piece extends that logic to Snapchat's Live Stories and celebrity live-tweeting — Joshua Malina among them — framing second-screen chatter as a counterweight to time-shifted, ad-skipped viewing rather than a distraction from it.
The tension it identifies — communal live moments versus bespoke on-demand catalogs — became the defining split of the decade that followed: by early 2017 the same paper was describing how Netflix-style abundance had fragmented entertainment into bespoke choices, breaking the TV-centric schedule this article's social tools were trying to shore up.
First-order effects
- Broadcasters and their advertisers get a measurable reason to care about live airing again: simultaneous tweeting turns a DVR-vulnerable broadcast into an event with real-time audience participation.
Second-order effects
- Twitter and Snapchat convert companion-app behavior into platform strategy — owning show conversation makes each a distribution partner for networks, the positioning Vertical Networks would later exploit with original shows built for Snapchat, Facebook, and YouTube.
Third-order effects
- If live social moments keep pulling fragmented audiences together, they become the connective tissue for what analysts now describe as media converging on a continuous flow of episodic video across streaming, podcasts, and social apps — and studios already market accordingly, as with personalized campaigns built on Cameo, Twitter Spaces, and TikTok.
The trend: Social platforms are evolving from TV's second-screen sidekick into the scheduling and marketing layer for an entertainment industry whose on-demand catalogs have otherwise dissolved the shared schedule.