Mashable was writing about Social TV – in 2011. Nielsen shared changes and visions of engaging viewers in content in 2013 as the engagement of consumers in content from one platform to another as a means of engaging consumers in ads.
Cut to late 2013, early 2014–new visionaries are bringing to the table a new kind of Social TV and a new meaning for engaging with content. The visionaries I am talking about are philanthropist Jeff Skoll and CEO Jim Berk of Participant Media (and PivoTv and TAG Media), and Marc Erlbaum of Philadelphia-based startup Eflixir – delivering a streaming platform of socially meaningful and cause related films via Amazon. Erlbaum is also founder of Nationlight Productions producer of films Café with Jennifer Love Hewitt and Everything Must Go with Will Ferrell.
In case you’re unaware Participant Media brought audiences An Inconvenient Truth, 12 Years A Slave, Lincoln, The Cove and Charlie Wilson’s War among others. They launched PivoTv this year.
I’d given up my television years ago as protest to the dearth of content appealing to what Erlbaum refers to as audiences’ “higher instincts.”
I can honestly say socially meaningful and cause related content offerings from these two have me seriously in the market considering a flat screen.
Renee Hobbs, founder of Media Literacy Lab and founding director of the Harrington School of Communication and Media at the University of Rhode Island put it best. These services “offer counter-programming to mainstream entertainment fare of sex, violence, children, animals and UFOs.”
And they offer some special opportunities. They bring new outlet options for young creative talent and ideas looking for space for their voice and messages to be seen and heard.
Erlbaum has built Eflixir on a model with a portion of the fee to watch donated to a relevant and associated charity – Alcoholics Anonymous, Free The Children, Advocates For Injured Athletes and so on. The platform also provides digital access to social resources and links where folks can actually instantly engage in a community with the like-minded and get involved with organizations for real impact. Let’s face most of us are fickle when it comes to our viewing. We jump around between Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, cable and a zillion other options. The Eflixir model just might be an edge in gaining loyalty.
Participant Media’s PivoTv offers a really useful and relevant resource capability on a website tab called Take Action. It connects the television station with real, immediate, opportunities to take social action and make donations. You can even track how a cause you’ve donated to is doing towards fulfilling goals of petitions signatures or dollars raised. The Take Action pages also provide socially conscious news. And with Take Part Live you can find some really compelling video discussions of real people talking about real issues.
If you want to be entertained and engaged I encourage you to give PivoTv and Eflixir a try. You can watch, enjoy, engage and take action. That is definitely Social TV.
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