Never.no announced that Al Jazeera English will use never.no’s Interactivity Suite (IS) to enable Social TV by taking viewer questions, displaying Twitter, Facebook, and email comments, and conducting on-air polling.
The real-time flow of social commentary and polling input allowed presenters to adjust their questions accordingly during live interviews. never.no’s technology allowed viewers to become a social part of the programming, which in turn helped Al Jazeera present content that was most relevant to them.
With IS, the Al Jazeera production crew could take viewer questions or ask questions by publishing them to Facebook and presenting them on air. Viewers could then vote using Facebook or email. From there, the crew was able to publish the results, change the course of on-air interviews, and push questions back to the audience in real time — a powerful Social TV programming feedback loop that built strong viewership and ratings for Al Jazeera.
Al Jazeera English used never.no’s cloud-based IS service during 9/11 memorial weekend, and it has now extended the IS installation for an even more thorough integration with its broadcast systems, enabling increased control and seamless live Social TV workflows.
The never.no IS is a tool kit for creating the technical backbone of interactive broadcasts and Social TV experiences. IS supports true Social TV by enabling viewers to influence a broadcast in real time and by allowing them to interact with one another and the rest of the world. With IS, a broadcaster can effortlessly aggregate user-generated content from social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook into programming, and even build synchronized companion apps that enable viewers to interact with their televisions using an iPad(or tablet), PC, or smartphone.