We wrote about Twitter’s collaboration with a startup called Snappy TV and Turner Broadcasting that allowed the NCAA to tweet out highlight clips from March Madness throughout the annual college basketball tournament, with the clips sponsored by AT&T and Coke Zero, and a Twitter spokesperson confirmed Monday that the ESPN clips will appear in a similar manner inside Twitter Cards. The report indicated that Twitter will be selling advertising specifically around the sports clips that are tweeted out.

The company announced major updates to its Cards technology in early April that allowed for more types of content to appear in the tweets and more app promotion for third-party apps cross-posting to Twitter. The key to Cards is that a user never has to leave Twitter to view the content the Cards contain — everything is viewable directly in stream, which encourages users to stay on Twitter’s website.

My colleague Mathew Ingram and I have written about Twitter’s transformation over the past year or so to become more of a media company, and Twitter’s partnerships with television, music and video outlets are numerous. There were rumors of deals with Viacom and NBC, a partnership with Nielson to measure user activity around television, the launch of the Twitter #music app and following music entertainment show.

For Twitter, all of this content could make tweets more engaging for users who become captive audience members participating in live events. But perhaps more importantly for the company, if it’s gearing up for the IPO everyone expects, video provides an excellent platform for advertising and big brand partnerships that could make Twitter a lot of money.

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A few years into Steve Jobs’s second stint as Apple’s CEO, the company hadn’t yet reinvented itself as one of the world’s most-important technology companies, but it was a big-enough distribution channel for the two-year-old Gracenote. At that point, Gracenote had built a respectable business collecting and providing metadata for the compact discs that people were ripping onto their computers, and it relied on software partners to get in front of the music consumers doing the uploading. One of those partners was a popular Mac jukebox application called SoundJam MP.

Ty Roberts Source: Gracenote

So, Gracenote Co-founder and CTO Ty Roberts told me during a recent interview, his company heeded Apple’s warning and bought more servers. At some point around that time (details on the date of the acquisition are sketchy), Apple bought SoundJam MP. Then, at MacWorld in January 2001, Apple released the first version of iTunes (based on the SoundJam technology) and grew Gracenote’s footprint by putting it on more machines. In October 2001, Apple released the iPod and changed Gracenote’s life forever.

The holiday season — particularly Christmas morning — provides a clear example of how stark the change was. “We used to call it iPod day,” Roberts explained, because the company’s servers would go crazy as people opened up their new iPods and immediately began ripping CDs onto their computers. The company’s chief scientist would stay up 20 hours a day for 5 days straight to make sure the database didn’t crash under the load.

From that point on, Roberts explained, a graph showing the rate at which people were uploading music to Gracenote would go from a steady incline into a vertical line. At one point the company was getting metadata from — by Roberts’s estimate — literally every CD being ripped onto personal computers. There was so much database traffic — both writing and reading — because Apple didn’t release the first version of the iTunes Store until April 2003; if users wanted to use their iPods, they had to upload music first.

Scaling like the big boys

Today, of course, Gracenote (which Sony acquired for $260 million in 2008) is pretty much ubiquitous, at least when it comes to metadata. It has metadata for about 130 million songs — and growing — from all over the world and provides metadata to everything from iTunes to Path to your car’s entertainment console. Even if they’re not available for sale as MP3, if someone somewhere at some point ripped a CD and entered its information, Gracenote has data on those artists and songs.

Its database now gets 15 billion queries a month, or 500 million a day (“We’re probably bigger than Bing,” Roberts joked), and the company’s infrastructure has scaled a few times to meet this demand. What began as a small web database running on a few servers grew into an Oracle environment that provided better performance. And when Oracle became cost-prohibitive because of Gracenote’s expanding scale, it shifted again into a highly optimized system that spans thousands of cores in four global data centers.

Now, GM and VP of Automatic Content Recognition Michael Jeffrey noted, almost everything from the chip level up is optimized specifically for Gracenote.

There’s no “world music” when you’re in the “world”

And this setup lets Gracenote do a lot more than just recognize music listeners’ files and give them the album art. For one, Roberts explained, it lets Gracenote be a global company. “We want to have all the music in the world,” Roberts said, “… because our customers ship their products globally.” In fact, part of the reason it’s now part of Sony is that Sony was distributing Gracenote so widely as part of the music player in its Vaio line of laptops.

In order to ensure that everyone has a natural experience wherever they’re accessing Gracenote, part of the job of the company’s 100-person editorial team is to categorize music hierarchically by locality. So, when a user in Japan uploads a CD and Gracenote returns the metadata, it’s categorized as “rock and roll,” for example, rather than a catch-all category like “world music” that a U.S. user might see.

“We want music to feel like a person in your country actually organized it,” Roberts said, “not some dude from California.”

Better music and television through data science

All that data also makes Gracenote a natural fit for recommending new music, although right now the company prefers to let partners handle the algorithms because recommendations tend to be highly product-specific. For example, the iTunes Genius feature is a pretty run-of-the-mill recommendation engine, but, Roberts explained, Apple places a premium on accuracy because its recommendations cost users 99 cents (or more) a shot. With a subscription service like Spotify, though, trying new music is risk-free, so it can play a little faster and looser with its algorithms.

Because Gracenote is present in so many cars — about 35 million — the company has put a lot thought into how to optimally deliver services there, too. Until drivers can bring their interest graphs and music libraries with them to their cars, he explained, any sort of in-car recommendation engine has to be pretty simple and non-distracting — perhaps like thumbs-up or thumbs-down button on the display that will eventually be able to recognize someone’s tastes.

The company has even developed what Roberts calls “machine listening,” which is the ability of an algorithm to recognize the mood, tempo and other audio attributes of music. This is comparable to what Pandora offers, but Gracenote has data on pretty much any song someone could possibly have, which means it can make even your personal music library that much smarter. One idea the company is tinkering is something Roberts describes as “audio coffee.” Depending on any variety of factors — time of day, location, driving conditions or behavior — the stereo system could pick music that either picks up a driver’s pulse or maybe relaxes him.

For Gracenote’s next chapter, the company is banking tablets to deliver a kick like the iPod did last decade. Gracenote is already working with television partners on real-time ad-swapping and intelligent content recommendations, and now it wants to dive deep into the second-screen world. Its new product called Entourage uses a tablet’s internal sensors to hear the television show or music playing in a room and then surface related content, perhaps from the web — like what Entourage user Zeebox provides — or perhaps produced, interactive material like the SyFy channel delivers via its Sync app.

Two ads for two different viewers.

Later this year, GM and VP Jeffrey said, Gracenote will be doing pilots with some large sports broadcasters around a “cheer and jeer” feature that measures how hard people in a room are cheering for or booing their favorite sports teams. If you’re elated, you might see an ad for season tickets. If you’re sad, maybe it’s an an for beer.

Even Roberts is impressed, especially considering that the company’s first use of audio recognition was to make sure users got the right data for their exact version of a song: “I never thought the recognition would break open these kind of new fields.”

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We’ve heard a good deal over the past year or so about Twitter building up advertising opportunities as well as multimedia content, and now it’s all coming together during March Madness. SnappyTV will bridge the tech gap between Twitter and Turner Broadcasting to create new opportunities for advertising revenue around the second screen television experience, providing short highlight videos throughout the entire basketball tournament.

Twitter is clearly interested in making money from social TV, as it demonstrated with the Bluefin Labs acquisition, so this partnership is a window into what that concept could look like.

We covered the news about the partnership on Monday that was first reported by USA Today, but today I spoke further with SnappyTV CEO Mike Folgner about the technology involved in his platform and how it presents opportunities for both the basketball fans and Twitter. Folgner built one of the first in-browser video editors with Jumpcut in 2006 before the company was acquired by Yahoo, where Folgner went to become general manager for video.

The partnership this year will allow editors at Turner TO use SnappyTV’s video-editing platform to put together short, 15-second highlight videos throughout the tournament. Editors with Turner will use both human judgement and an algorithm from SnappyTV that tracks the most-discussed moments on social media to pick the best moments from the games, and less than a minute later, can send out an video with the highlight for people to view and (hopefully) retweet.

“Let’s say something happens, like there’s a great play, and 20 seconds later, there’s a tweet from the March Madness account with the play. And people can watch it almost instantly and retweet it,” Folgner said. “You just get this really cool second screen experience around Twitter and the game.”

This isn’t the first year that SnappyTV and Turner have partnered to provide March Madness clips — they actually provided the same function for last year’s tournament. But this is the first year that the videos will be able to take advantage of Twitter cards, which allow you to expand tweets without leaving the main Twitter stream to view content. (Last year the videos were just tweeted out as URLs.) And this is the first year that Twitter has found advertisers specifically for those video — AT&T and Coke Zero will be sponsoring them.

“The real difference with this year is now these advertisers who are buying these key TV shows, now they have the opportunity to buy the social conversation around the shows as well. And there really hasn’t been that connection before,” Folgner said. “People watch TV and talk about it on Twitter. So by sending the video out, you connect the brand advertisement on television with the branded content on Twitter.”

Users watching from the March Madness app (available mainly to existing cable customers) will be able to see the social conversation around the games, as well as the highlight videos they’ll be able to replay and tweet out. While the number of videos per game will vary, SnappyTV estimated that it would be about 10 clips per game on the high end. Which, at more than 60 games, is a fair number of video tweets. So you might want to follow the @marchmadness account at your own Twitter discretion.

It will be interesting to watch how the partnership plays out for this year’s tournament — and if it goes well, just how quickly SnappyTV gets acquired before the next one rolls around.

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To provide some background context, recall the popular news site launched an online TV network in August that streams 12 hours of live footage a day from New York and L.A. It’s a big investment, but the company is hoping its hyper-engaged user community will follow the brand into the video space, and that all that footage will produce buckets of viral content clips to spray across HuffPo and AOL web sites.

So what is the significance of the iPad app in all this? At first glance, not much. The app is simply another way for a user to watch the live stream — which features both ordinary people and celebrity guests like Bill Maher — while reading and adding comments, and sharing shows to Twitter or Facebook. Here are a couple of screenshots that show how comments can appear either stacked or tiled:

On its own, the HuffPo Live app is not extraordinary. Where it could be a real game changer, however, is the fact that the app can be slung onto a TV set using Apple TV. This means that Huffington Post has a chance to control not just a living room’s second screens but also the primary one as well.

In practice, this could occur if groups of friends watch the presidential elections on HuffPo Live and share comments in real time via their iPad — comments that would appear on their TV. If this comes to pass, HuffPo Live will have created what amounts to a walled garden extraordinaire in living rooms across the land.

But could HuffPo actually pull this off? In the short term, the answer is no, as the commenting system is too rudimentary. It allows users to like or flag a given comment but does not let users create a limited community like the ones they know on Facebook or Twitter. A company spokesperson says improved commenting features are coming soon (a Reddit-style up-or-down voting system might be one idea).

Meanwhile, bandwidth will provide another obstacle to HuffPo Live as most houses don’t have the capacity to enjoy an uninterrupted live stream on several devices at once. (Although, as Om’s recent account shows, things are improving quickly).

Still, the future prospects of a living room with a single media source dominating all devices is intriguing from both a user and marketing perspective. Will we one day see other content makers like the NFL or BuzzFeed try to do the same thing?

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For there’s always a motive beyond keeping people entertained. For the Breaking Bad StorySync experience, the goal was to discourage DVRing your way through the episode broadcast. In the case of the Marvel’s The Avengers second screen iOS app, the goal seems to be driving Blu-ray and DVD sales.

I didn’t know the Avengers app existed until I opened the Blu-ray case, and even that was a fluke (like most people, I suspect, I tend to ignore the paper inserts tucked alongside shiny new Blu-rays or DVDs) — but in the long run, that fluke was most fortunate.

First off, this app is Hulk-sized: When I sat down to test out the app, I had to clear off several apps and a dozen podcasts to find a spare 435 MB on my iPhone. (I also tested it on iPad.) The home screen of the app, originally released this summer, emphasizes the Item 47 Comic-Con experience and dossier files on Avengers characters — you have to go one level deeper to get to the good stuff.

Through the magic of BD-Live and a shared wi-fi network, syncing my devices with the movie was almost instantaneous (for those whose Blu-ray players aren’t online, there are also audio and manual sync options). Once I hit play, the second-screen experience began flooding in: Photos, text and video from the film popping up on my devices fast.

By far the best feature of the app was the on-screen Pause button, which allowed you to stop the movie without reaching for your remote, followed close behind by the “Sync App to Movie/Sync Movie To App” buttons. That’s because the barrage of updates on the second screen was literally impossible to keep up with — and with few exceptions, it was all pretty compelling.

Trivia notes added extra insight about the production’s collaboration with NASA and director Joss Whedon’s decision to cast Mark Ruffalo. Still images included storyboard galleries and photos of the film’s extremely attractive cast, timed with their first on-the-big-screen appearances.

Between the two, the iPad version of the app was a whole lot prettier than the iPhone, thanks to the screen resolution — also, certain features performed better there.

And the video was especially great: Highlights include Tom Hiddleston goofing around during his wirework stunts and Scarlett Johansson’s stunt double practicing the fight choreography of Black Widow’s first scene.

All the clips loaded cleanly, and were soundless in case you hadn’t paused the film to watch them (though most of them were good enough to warrent my full attention). In short: That 435 MB was not ill-spent.

The only major bug I found came with the text-based updates, like actor bios or filmmaker notes: When the text fit into one screen, everything was fine:

But try though I might, I could not figure how to finish reading entries which were longer than the confines of the frame, on either the iPad or iPhone. I tried scrolling, swiping, zooming and even asking Siri — but no dice. If you know how to scroll the text in this app, please let me know — I’m very curious how some of these notes end.

Before you ask, it’s not the three boxes at the top of the text field (those are a design element), or that down arrow at the bottom right of the screen (that minimizes the timeline). Believe me, I tried.

I also couldn’t get certain links to load, such as links to comics — the app is not a bug-free experience in its current form. But what’s there is without a doubt great fun.

In fact, the only other caveat I’ll mention is this: I spent at least half an hour “watching” the first major scene of the movie — skipping back and forth through both the film and the app timeline, using the sync buttons to rewatch certain bits with a new perspective, or catch up with what I’d missed while looking at a device.

Seriously: It took 30 minutes for me to get to the opening titles, which appear 11 minutes into the movie. The Avengers were nowhere close to assembling before I had to go to bed. However, I’m looking forward to getting through the rest of the experience, slowly but surely.

You don’t need to purchase the film in any form to check out the second screen content — not only is the app free on iTunes, but there’s an “Explore on your own” option that lets you browse the timeline content without syncing. However, if you’re one of the fans who helped The Avengers set box office records this summer, you’ll enjoy having the experience as a viewing companion. I know I did.

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But where is the real value in the hot new idea that many in broadcasting are still beginning to explore?

“There’s no difference in the creative at all,” Neil Mortensen, research director of the UK TV umbrella and traditional-advertising champion Thinkbox, told a Royal Television Society seminar on the topic on Tuesday. ”It all revolves around extensions of (viewers’) current behaviour.”

Today, aggregated online discussion of on-screen TV shows is a second-screen quick win – prescribing hashtags is easy. Broadcasters and producers are also concocting engagement propositions like voting apps and game show participation. But these are mostly accompaniments to content that is still conceived for a linear TV screen.

“People have always been doing something else, like doing the ironing, while TV is on,” Juliette Otterburn-Hall, digital director of UK independent TV producer Shed Media, told Tuesday’s seminar.

She cited extra production costs and uncertainty over whether networks or producers own the accompanying products as potential issues around second-screen development. But Otterburn-Hall said issues could be ironed out as the matters get thrashed out:  ”We’re used to making programmes that you sell, distributing it; we understand it. This adds a whole myriad of complexity. We can overcome these things – it just means more jobs and lawyers.”

Mortensen added: ”It improves (viewers’) enjoyment of the TV-viewing experience. A lot of people now say they won’t view the show unless they can interact with it. The fact you are multi-screen and connected is driving more people to watch (TV).”

Zeebox has gained more plaudits than many for testing the second-screen waters. Its app includes social discussion of TV shows, a channel-changing EPG, live information about on-screen dialogue, e-commerce links and a HTML framework with which broadcasters or producers can create their own in-app viewer engagement modules for use during their shows.

Having clocked 1.5 million downloads and 300,000 to 400,000 monthly uniques since launching in the UK last year, Zeebox will likely launch in the US next week, co-founder Anthony Rose told Tuesday’s Royal Television Society seminar.

That launch will be alongside “a very big US partnership”. And it will come with an app upgrade packing a stream of friends’ viewing activity and reminder bookings. It will place Zeebox head-to-head with Intonow, the similar companion app that is now under Yahoo’s ownership.

In the UK, Zeebox quickly earned a double-digit-million investment from News Corp’s BSkyB, for a 10 percent stake, that sees Sky’s sales unit selling ads in to the app and will, in the next couple of months, see a subset of Zeebox’s features integrated in to Sky’s own Sky+ PVR remote control and recording apps.

Together with significant US carriage, the tens of thousands of Sky+ users who will soon see Zeebox’s social TV streams could help popularise the concept, which has so far been adopted well by the early crowd, for a more mainstream audience.

If that becomes the case, where will the money be?

“Advertising will ultimately fuel this whole business,” said Rose, whose app takes brands’ display sponsorships and affiliate links for products mentioned in shows. “Advertising is a $70 billion industry in the US - there’s the potential to have a reinvention of the ad industry – personalised, targeted.”

But Thinkbox’s Mortensen said conventional TV ad sales already allow advertisers to target consumers using demographic and ratings data well. Mortensen said he sees the second-screen opportunity as “chat”, “play” and “buy”.

Sky product development director Gareth Capon disagreed: “New platforms always give you new advertising and commercial opportunities. If you don’t have great user experience, you won’t have anything to commercialise.”

Capon cited Sky Sports F1′s live in-race camera selector for iPad: “You couldn’t do that without being on someone’s lap.”

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“If you look at interactive TV… it has been the roadkill of the information superhighway,” he said, adding: “Advanced set-top boxes never achieved scale.”

The same can’t be said for mobile, and that’s why companies like Shazam are putting their apps on iPads and phones, as opposed to TVs and set-top boxes. “We are operating at scale,” said Garland, pointing to some impressive numbers: Shazam now sees 10 million new tags a day, or a total of one three billion tags a year. Two million new users sign up for Shazam every single week.

Up until now, Shazam has mostly been known as a music recognition app: Users can have the app listen in on a song they hear anywhere, and they’ll almost immediately get the name of the artist, the song title, and additional information. Shazam recently began to expand into the TV space, and is now able to identify almost any show on over 160 U.S. TV channels.

This obviously opens up a whole new range of ad revenue possibilities, and Garland said that Shazam has already partnered with over 160 brands to do things like deliver additional information about a product that’s advertised on TV to the second screen.

And, as Shazam is doubling down on TV show recognition, these ad experiences will play an even bigger role. However, you won’t see a Coke ad on your mobile while a Pepsi ad is playing on TV any time soon – at least not within your Shazam app. “Right now, that’s certainly not how we are working,” said Garland.

For more about the importance of second-screen apps, check out my conversation with YouTube Director of Product Management Shiva Rajaraman at this week’s Mobilize conference.

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Please note: This article contains MASSIVE spoilers for the 5th season of “Breaking Bad.” You’ve been warned.

For the past two months, AMC has prefaced each new episode of the critically-acclaimed drama Breaking Bad by alerting viewers to the existence of BreakingBadStorySync.com: A second-screen experience for each episode, timed to update with the show if you skipped the DVR and watched live.

Second screen experiences are nothing new, but they’re something I’ve always primarily associated with award shows and lighter fare. I was curious as to what a second-screen experience for a gritty cable drama like Breaking Bad would be like. So for the 2012 finale, I made sure I was home in time, with my laptop on the couch with me.

Powered by the real-time web platform Echo (whose website was down as of writing — Google cache here), Breaking Bad Story Sync proved to be a relatively entertaining mix of photos, video, polls and flashbacks, cleverly tied to the on-screen action — a great way to engage fans. But it was also, at times, a crass effort to get people watching ads — while watching ads, on top of ads.

The episode, “Gliding Over All,” began with anti-hero Walter White (Bryan Cranston) gazing intently at a fly — Story Sync began by reminding us about the 3rd season episode where Walt was super-obsessed with a fly in the lab…

…before moving on, a few minutes later, to poll viewers on whether or not the shocking murder which ended last week’s episode was necessary.

(For not the last time, the poll showed that an overwhelming majority of people are no longer rooting for Walt.)

One more poll popped up before we reached the first commercial break of the episode, at which point I expected to see some bonus content to keep those normally used to a DVR experience from getting twitchy. Instead, we got this:

Yeah, that’s a banner ad right above another ad.

There were three more ads for the SRT over the course of the Story Sync experience, turning my two-screen viewing experience into two screens of commercials. In addition, when I clicked to watch a video replay of a violent prisoner-shanking montage (which was the StorySync update immediately following that montage airing on TV), the video began with a 30-second pre-roll ad — for Breaking Bad.

Yo dawg, I heard you like “Breaking Bad” so I put an ad for “Breaking Bad” in your “Breaking Bad” Story Sync experience.

Overall, the technology powering the service performed well — there were no lags in updates, no loading issues, and the interactive elements were glitch-free. I also liked the subtle “tock” noise which indicated an update — just enough to alert you without being distracting.

Beyond the technology, though, watching with Story Sync had two strong benefits: First, the polls and quizzes, which at times lacked subtlety:

But did offer some fun interactivity:

Second: The flashbacks and reminders of past episodes, which were timed perfectly with the on-screen action. If you’ve never watched Breaking Bad, know that it’s a show which loves thematic callbacks and inside jokes, a fact which Story Sync celebrated all episode long:

The biggest drawback to a second-screen experience on a drama like Breaking Bad is that like many sophisticated dramas, there are often big moments that are played quietly. Which is to say that I was looking at my stupid computer when, on screen, it was revealed that Walt had brought along his trusty vial of ricin poison to his meeting with a potentially expendable contact — a big character and plot moment, and one that I completely missed.

In fact, I didn’t learn about it until the next day, when I read one of the many blog recaps of the episode. Instead, I thought that the Story Sync update which followed that scene was foreshadowing ricin’s appearance.

Despite that unfortunate glitch, I overall found the whole experience intriguing, especially those moments which proved that whoever was behind the experience had some snark in them:

Second-screen viewing is definitely not a fad, and leaning into the curve of distracted audiences isn’t a bad strategy, especially when you can also simultaneously encourage real-time engagement. And given that Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan has said he’s worried about how DVRing affects the current TV business model, it’s hardly a surprise that this show is one of the first to play with this combination of elements.

The next time we might see Story Sync again will be when The Walking Dead returns for Season 3 this October (it originally launched during Dead‘s second season last spring). But while my first experience was interesting, I’m not sure it was compelling enough to make me forego using my DVR for future AMC programming — especially given the additional ads that came with it.

Perhaps it’s enough to just watch a TV show — especially when it’s one of the best shows on television. Perhaps I’m more old-fashioned than I thought.

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