IFC has not been shy in its promotion of the sophomore season of Portlandia.

The comedy’s creators, writers and stars Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein are currently on a 6-city tour to plug the show, one of the new episodes is already streaming online and on Wednesday, the network announced its launching IFC Sync in conjunction with the Jan. 6 premiere.

VIDEO: ‘Portlandia’ Season 2 Episode Available Online Ahead of IFC Debut

A “live, dual-screen experience,” powered by ClipSync, IFC Sync will allow viewers to chat and interact on the network’s website using their Facebook log-in. And with online events geared towards certain broadcasts, Armisen and Brownstein will host the first chat during Friday’s 10:00 p.m. ET premiere.

The duo will chat with fans and answer questions about the series throughout the premiere episode. And over the coming weeks, the service will host other chats and unlock supplementary content and videos from the show.

Mashable reports that the new service differs from other interactive companions in that its designed to work on multiple platforms, including web browsers, tablets and mobile phones.

Future Sync conversations timed to Portlandia episodes will be hosted by an IFC moderator.

Permalink: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/portlandia-season-2-fred-armisen-carrie-brownstein-278110

ClipSync Moments gives viewers the ability to share videos with friends on social networks. But instead of sharing a link to the entire video and having their friends search for the part it refers to, ClipSync attaches comments to a specific moment in time. Once connections on social networks click through a ClipSync Moments link, they’ll be taken to the video moment — and comment — in question. That helps publishers to achieve a viral effect that can increase viewership of their videos through social sharing.

But the product isn’t just for drawing viewers in from other networks: It can also increase engagement among viewers that choose to watch a video that their friends have already commented on. When choosing such a video, users will be able to see their friends’ comments pop up during the course of the film, and can respond to those comments, adding to the conversation about particular moments.

ClipSync Moments is similar to social sharing implementations that some publishers have already rolled out. Most notably, it’s like Hulu’s Facebook Connect integration, which lets viewers share videos and comments with their Facebook friends, with links pointing to a specific moment in the video when clicked. But by making Moments available to multiple third parties, ClipSync is hoping to standardize the way this sharing happens.

ClipSync has signed up a few of its existing customers as launch partners for the new product. Epix, IFC, RealNetworks and Major League Gaming will all introduce ClipSync Moments as part of their online viewing sites. ClipSync CEO Itzik Cohen told us in a phone interview that the company has more customers on tap to take advantage of the product, which will be announced in the coming weeks.

The second Social TV Summit was held this past Wednesday.  It is a conference that focuses on the effects of social media on what people watch on their TVs, tablets, computers or any mobile computing device.  The event was sponsored by ClipSync and GetGlue.

ClipSync, the pioneer of social TV, recently launched ClipSync Moments – a new application that lets people express themselves and interact with their friends around the video moments that matter most.  So when you’re watching a certain show, even if you don’t like the whole show but you found a scene or a moment that really struck you or made you go ‘aaaawwwww’, you can comment or share that moment because of the snap feature the app has.

“ClipSync Moments is fixing today’s broken conversation around digital video. We are now able to capture the conversation, self-expression and passion around fans’ favorite movie scenes and moments and connect it with their social graph. We know that content needs to be bite-sized and contextual in order to be socialized and shared. ClipSync Moments accomplishes this for movies and television, making it the most captivating social viewing product in the industry,” said Itzik Cohen, CEO and co-founder of ClipSync.

EPIX, the cross-platform premium entertainment service which is a joint venture from Paramount Pictures, MGM, and Lionsgate, already commited to socializing their premium video content with ClipSync Moments.

“ClipSync Moments enable our viewers to share the movies and performances they love and discover new favorites,” said EPIX Chief Digital Officer Emil Rensing. “EPIX is excited to work with ClipSync to offer new viewing experiences and connect fans to their favorite movies and artists.”

GetGlue, an entertainment-based social networking website for mobile devices, recently updated their offerings with the Tumblr integration, check-in widgets, and their latest social TV service FX Has The Movies.  They are also more socially integrated, as you can use GetGlue, Facebook and Twitter to connect to the service.

And the broadcasters seem to want in on the socialization of TV as well.  Start-up ConnecTV, a social TV app currently in its beta phase, announced earlier this week that they made a deal with 10 broadcast groups with 201 stations, including ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, CW and WB affiliates, in markets that cover 76 million U.S. homes. The TV groups include Belo Corp., E.W. Scripps Co., Gannett Broadcasting, Hearst Television and others.  A number of broadcasters involved in the deal also invested an undisclosed amount to ConnecTV.

“Our mission is for ConnecTV to be the social network that empowers entertainment, news and sports fans to share the greatest moments in television,” said ConnecTV co-founder Ian Aaron. “With over five billion TV viewers and the explosion of tablets and smart phones globally, we are truly at the beginning of a new way to watch TV.”

As for other news on social TV, YuMe received a $12 million strategic investment from Samsung Ventures and Translink Capital, while Boxee started selling a $50 device that lets users toggle between broadcast TV and web video options.

If you still feel a little doubtful about the effects of social TV to your favorite program, here’s a little bit of fun facts: according to Madati, Facebook affected the rating of Psych when its newest season premiered last October 12th.  #HashTagKiller, a game on Facebook that allowed the audience to participate in solving crimes for the first seven episodes of the new season, contributed to the 8% increase in viewers when the show premiered.

People love to be involved in things, from voting on American Idol, or telling show producers which characters they love or hate to just about anything.  Want it or not, social TV is here to stay.

Permalink: http://siliconangle.com/blog/2011/11/18/how-social-is-your-tv/

Gone are the days when television is the only way to see your favorite programs or movies.  Now you can watch shows on your computer or just about any mobile device– all you need is a connection, and in some cases a subscription, and you’re good to go.  Real-time entertainment is what people are looking for–we always want something fresh to keep us up to date.  But with this demand for real-time entertainment, how has it affected traditional TV?

Time Warner Cable, the second-largest cable company in the U.S., reported a loss of 128,000 subscribers for this quarter, and they are down by 16,000 total subscribers.  And while their cable service consumers declined in numbers, their broadband data subscribers increased by 89,000.  One possible reason for the shift is real-time entertainment.

More people are subscribing to services like Apple TV, Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, Spotify, Rdio, Pandora and Slingbox, so they’re shifting from their traditional cable subscription to broadband services as these services require internet connections.  With more people glued to their mobile devices, real-time entertainment providers are extending their services from home computers to smart TVs, game consoles, set-top boxes, and of course mobile devices at no additional cost.

“Game consoles, set-top boxes, smart TVs, tablets and mobile devices being used within the home combine to receive 55% of all real-time entertainment traffic,” reads an excerpt from the Sandvine Corp.’s 10th Global Internet Phenomena Report.

“Of course, real-time entertainment’s emergence is not exclusive to fixed-access networks. Within the mobile networks surveyed, real-time entertainment is the largest component of traffic overall, and in Asia-Pacific it is even the largest on the upstream, thanks to peercasting applications like PPStream.”

And so real-time entertainment service providers are doing everything to gain more viewers.  YouTube is pushing to make itself become channel-centric.  They want to provide channels that have hours and hours of on-demand entertainment.  They recently live streamed Cold Play to mark their big push beyond amateur videos and further towards the entertainment scene.

ClipSync sees tremendous potential in the real-time entertainment sector, leading the charge in social TV.  The social wave is here to stay, but traditional TV is the last media hold out.  Itzik Cohen, founder of ClipSync, has uncovered a way to actually create value around social TV, increasing engagement and producing real results for content publishers.  ClipSync is big on data, drawing out the necessary metrics to prove its solution.  But that doesn’t mean there aren’t challenges still facing the startup, especially with the growing variety in devices that support real-time and on-demand entertainment.  Looking to the future of social TV, the consumer steadily moves into increasing power, and Cohen sees the viewer becoming a part of the content itself.

“We’re very focused on taking content designed for passive viewing and adding a layer of social interaction that will improve metrics,” Cohen explains.  ”There’s already pretty good content, whether we add those layers or not, but improving things like traffic is still hard to achieve.

“Getting 5% improvement on a show is very challenge, but we’ve done a lot of work with producers and studios.  Content in the future will have the viewer as part of the content and story.  Without the viewer, there will be no show.  Think shows like American Idol that have viewer texting and voting.”

Set top boxes are one of many distribution channels companies like ClipSync look to as potential points of integration for the future of TV.  Western Digital set-top boxes are now equippedwith Spotify, Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Pandora to give their audience various types of entertainment for hours and hours of media consumption.

It’s a movement that won’t easily die down, as mobile technology in particular empowers consumers to demonstrate their interests and demands more than ever. The industry as a whole is undergoing one of the most profound shifts it’s ever seen, but determining what that really means for publishers, distributors and advertisers remains to be seen.

Permalink: http://siliconangle.com/blog/2011/10/29/whats-the-future-of-social-tv-look-like/