ITV looking to explore second screen prospects

ITV believes a large amount of its content would be suited to second screening, and is looking to delve into this growing field and create a fully interactive viewer experience.

Speaking at the Future of Entertainment summit, which took place in London last week, James Micklethwait, ITV Player director, spoke of his enthusiasm for second screening and its growing relevance to ITV’s programming roster.

“We have carried out some experiments in this area and seen some massive successes. We have the types of shows that lend themselves very well to this kind of experience.”

Britain’s Got Talent, the final of which was watched by 12.6 million viewers back in May, had a quarter of a million people using the second screen application alongside the main television programme.

Commenting on the potential to make money from second screening, Micklethwait said: “In terms of opportunities, the reason why second screen is interesting is because it gives access to broadcast scale audiences, not Internet scale audiences, and generates broadcast dwell time and not quick internet-style visits, so that is monetisable surely. The rest, we have to work through.”

Back in April ITV signed a deal with Shazam, the audio recognition application, through which the broadcaster can use the latter during its ad breaks.

The system recognises when an ad is playing, and launches second screen advertising. It was trialled during the Britain’s Got Talent final, and Mickelthwait was pleased with the result.

“Shazam generated 50,000 interactions in one minute. We are very pleased with that, especially as these were the first Shazam-enabled ads in the UK and most consumers do not even know what Shazam-enabled is yet.”

To read the full V-Net article, click here.