Talking Back to Your TV, Incessantly

[Commentary] Television, historically an extremely passive way of consuming media, could become something else, a hybrid form of professionally produced content and crowd-sourced comments.

Right now, a crawl sometimes shows up at the bottom of the news, but in the not too distant future, it could be your friends' comments that are streaming by, or a curated feed of commentary from a third party, or algorithmically popular Twitter messages that bubble up in real time. "I think that television has changed a lot in the last 18 months," said Robin Sloan, who works in media partnership development at Twitter. "Shows are all in English, but now there is this kind of subtitling going on." And media companies can't ignore the new level of collaboration. "I think it is accelerating Darwinism in the media business," said Bryan Wiener, chief executive of 360i, a digital marketing agency. "If people aren't talking about you, you are dead. And brands have to attach themselves to things that are permeating the culture and fuel the water cooler."