Twitter television
August 13, 2014
As with most things, ComentaTV started relatively small.
About four years ago, the Buenos Aires-based technology company worked out that 30 percent of Argentine soccer fans tweeted regularly as they watched games on television.
It inspired ComentaTV to create an algorithm that would scrape all of those tweets, save them to ComentaTV's servers, and then allow television producers to push the most popular tweets onto screens, using a proprietary iPad app.
"When people realized that they were not just a number but that they could actually be part of the action, they went crazy," says ComentaTV founder Juan Melano.
And then things went big.
"For one game, we had over 150,000 interactions. So we went from 30,000 to 150,000 just by finding the gimmick that would let people have those five seconds of fame, Andy Warhol style, with a Tweet."
ComentaTV's technology is considered so valuable because it seems to have mastered the tricky art of tracking and then organizing - in easy-to-read graphs and lists - the massive amount of data being pushing on Twitter and Facebook everyday, all around the world.
The company was snapped up by US tech firm WayIn earlier this year. It counts as its customers several TV networks in North America, Europe and in India.
Fine line between democracy and talent shows
Popular television shows like "The Voice," a live singing show, use Melano's software because it is able to grab all the tweets by people watching and talking about the show on Twitter.
While it may sound simple, it isn't: big players in Silicon Valley admit they have had trouble picking out relevant tweets from the massive global Twitter haystack.
Melano says he and his team are able to make these tweets relevant by connecting the process to the television screen.
"We put these integrations on air, so you can visually see how people are reacting to two different performers," Melano says. "The performers can see what the people are saying about them - it's like a live polling for who's performing better. And it affects their performance. They have to try harder to win the audience on Twitter."
So like spying
But Patrick Breyer, a Pirate Party member of the Schleswig-Holstein state government and a noted data privacy blogger, says he has worries about the privacy implications of services like WayIn's ComentaTV product.
"They call it social intelligence," says Breyer. "It's what intelligence services have been doing all along - but [they're doing it] for financial and economic purposes."
Breyer says it's problematic that all of this seemingly harmless product preference data is being compiled and possibly combined in gigantic databases.
He's worried it is being used to add to a minute-by-minute picture of your life online - every tweet, every Google search, every bank transaction, and every location can be tracked. Ultimately, he worries about companies using this data to manipulate people.
"The advent of the Internet makes it possible to analyze much more about our behavior and interests," Breyer says. "Of course it makes it easier to manipulate us in our decisions. So there's always a fine line between trying to be helpful and advertising on the one side, and manipulating people on the other side by, for example, making use of preferences and needs that people may not even know about themselves."
But Twitter TV integrations seem here to stay.
Melano says the power of television - and TV shows telling their viewers to get involved online, using a "call-to-action" - is too powerful to resist.
"Why would I be tweeting about a TV show?" Melano asks. "Because I love it, because it generates an emotion in me, but also because there's a call-to-action by the TV show, asking me to be part of it."
Privacy concerns just don't seem to be the issue for ComentaTV - and if the company is right, then those concerns are secondary for users too. As Melano says, those 15 minutes of fame on Twitter may be irresistible. But, then, name one celebrity who hasn't sold a bit of their soul - not to mention their privacy - to get famous.