It was four thirty AM and the red-hot sun had just broken the horizon over Lake Ontario almost blinding me on the couch where I was drifting in and out of consciousness. A beautiful day for the Royal Wedding I thought as I reached for my laptop and logged onto the net in search for somewhere to watch the ceremony. I found the PBS News Stream and it was most interesting. No commentators just the real sounds of the street; crowds cheering, cars honking, as the guests and the Royal Family arrived at Westminster Abby.  I was glued to this “non-production” television format because it was intimate and social. The Twitter Feed was the commentator. “A sea of hats” “There’s the Queen!”  “No its not” “Yes, it’s the Queen, in yellow”.  I was at an online Royal Wedding Party with guests from all over the world and experiencing Social TV in its infancy.

According to a recent report by Nielsen there are some very interesting facts around the growing Social TV trends.

• In 2010 50% of US citizens viewed online video for an average of 4.5 hours a month – up 41%
• 50% of social networking and blog site visitors also visit TV network and broadcast media sites
• 76% of Twitter followers and 50% of Facebook users also view broadcast

Marie-Jose Montpetit and her students at the MIT Media Lab recently demonstrated a prototype of an interactive television platform where a central database aggregates video from sources, shares user specified data with social networks, delivers video to the users’ TV, and allows commenting back and forth between  users and the social network via an iPhone app.

But how well would such a platform be accepted by television viewers? It seems to me that guys are snarly enough if you interrupt “their game” and  that adding Twitter and Facebook updates to “their TV screen” would not be well received.  Well, there have been some interesting Social TV initiatives. ITV Lives’s (UK) soccer TV experience around world cup soccer garnered 2 million viewers in three weeks. The key is the second screen. Over 50% of TV viewers indicated they had a computing device with them when they watched TV.

The marriage of social, mobile and TV creates more than just a dynamic party, but instead this combination is a game changer as broadcast interactivity brings engaged viewers and forces broadcasters to completely reinvent their advertising models. Not to do so would be at their own peril. Because the push advertising models of the past are no longer wanted. Broadcasters need to create new ad models for Social TV.

Intro Now (recently purchased by Yahoo!) is an open source platform and available to developers and device manufacturers. It was touted as one of the more impressive Social TV apps. It has a technology that recognizes audio and identifies content. This content can then be shared with friends on social networks. Intro Now has a new ad model test going with Pepsi where people can tag a commercial and get a coupon for a free Pepsi.

Miso, another interactive TV platform, funded by Google, that goes beyond the Four Square facility of the check-in and sharing by adding reality TV voting as part of its platform.

AT&T is also active in the space and says that Social TV will allow you to see how popular a new show is, get ratings and opinions and general sentiment analysis.Verizon entered the space in 2009 with tremendous success. They offer a number of social widgets for Twitter, Facebook and the Associated Press.

Social TV is in its infancy but with TV consumption going up and revenue increases of 8% to 69 billion the television broadcast industry is again in the limelight. The key to IDTV success will be in understanding how to engage viewers on the second screen and keep them coming back. There are a whole lot of ideas around this but if you think of the many ways you can create “Fans” and communities around shows you are on the right track. In such an environment special content would be savored, relationships enhanced, and commerce enabled for advertisers through sampling and contests.