Talking Back to Your TV Set, Endlessly (NY Times)

David Carr talks about the new way we’re watching TV thanks to social media. Not coincidentally, Carr, with a camera crew in tow, attended Twitter’s SXSW party last night, where he spent quite a while speaking with Robin Sloan and Chloe Sladden, two of the key people working to make Twitter a great medium for interactive TV. 

Chloe and I also got to talk for a while, and spoke about how difficult it was to create the feedback loop that great interactive TV needs before social media was ubiquitous. I worked with networks like FOX, ABC, HBO, and NBC for several years on many of their key broadcasts (The Super Bowl, The World Series, The Olympics, Sex and the City, The Sopranos, The View) and we tried everything — set top boxes, mobile phones, SMS — with varying degrees of success, but Twitter and Facebook have made audience response easy and immediate.

While it’s been a huge tool for building the audiences of next generation internet TV companies like Next New Networks (over 40 million views last month, from over 20 million uniques) and Revision3, it’s also something that’s making broadcast and cable TV a lot more interesting and interactive as well. This is a terrifically exciting time to be a producer — anyone who doesn’t see massive opportunity here needs to start a YouTube channel, a Facebook Page and a Twitter feed and give me a call.