What strategic goals do interactive television marketing campaigns and TV Everywhere share? Plenty! Let's answer that by scoring some college basketball apps.

1. Slam Dunk: The ability to watch on the go with the March Madness Live app clearly cues up more opportunities for fans to engage interactively. First, simply because of greater view time and second, perhaps more important, because second screen devices currently better facilitate interactivity (tablets a case in point). At $3.99 for all platforms (kudos on accepting Paypal), this is a slam dunk even if it did entail a lot of squinting on my phone. CBSSports.com continues to score with free on-line viewing when airing games on their network.

2. Field Goal: With the March Madness Live app, I can easily read player shot stats and game stats and see a pic of a player along with some highlight stats. (I would have liked the ability to delve deeper into individual player histories.) Even better I can view the entire bracket at a glance (on the iPad) along with prior results and upcoming matches and game times. This feature drove incremental viewing for my colleague as she wanted to get a jump on who might be playing her team. Verizon FIOS recently launched a widget that enables fans to see and interact with their own and others' ESPN brackets on the big screen. Read the interview with Verizon and Ensequence at [itvt].  

3. Blocked Shot: Via March Madness Live, CBSSports.com or NCAA.com fans could variously follow twitter feeds [read more...] 

With Rovi's recent announcement that its TotalGuide will be on yet more connected TVs - specifically on Panasonic Viera Connect platform televisions headed to Europe - I thought it was a good time to take a look at Rovi's second generation TotalGuide, expected to be released next quarter (Q2 2012). First, check out my video of Rovi's Richard Bullwinkle demonstrating TotalGuide G2 during our meeting earlier this year at CES. 

Demo of Rovi's TotalGuide G2 at 2012 CES

1. Content Deep Dive: This is to be expected from Rovi as its guide continues to be powered by robust metadata covering, per Rovi, 2.5 million television programs and 120,000 celebrity profiles. What I liked best was the advantage over smaller screens that a big screen has in giving viewers a ton of information at one glance. I also think Rovi has a leg up in that it vets and edits related content so viewers are not as often faced with Google overload. Rovi's single screen has the overall edge here.  

2.Social TV: As you saw in the video, Bullwinkle was particularly excited about the integration of social media, what they term social discovery. Viewers, for example, can read the most relevant tweets about a particular movie they are considering watching. Rovi brings its editing expertise to this feature set as well by providing [read more...]