Relay and TV.com Join Social TV Race

Posted by Richard Kastelein in Breaking News on August 12, 2010  |  0 Comments More from this author  |    |  Follow Richard Kastelein on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Twitter | YouTube

In an exclusive interview, the Hollywood Reporter has unveiled  that CBS Interactive’s TV.com and Relay are hooking up and using Foursquare-style user check-ins and badge rewards in an attempt to tackle the social TV space.

With Relay, you can check in on a particular program and make new friends chatting about your favorite shows or check out what your old friends are watching and pick up a new TV habit.

The goal: become the go-to digital companion for the live-TV experience important to a conglomerate that owns a broadcast network and wants to support its ad rates.

While TV.com Relay joins an increasingly crowded field of so-called social-TV services, its CBS affiliation will bring a huge advantage: on-air promotion in CBS primetime programming when Relay leaves beta mode in time for the fall season in September.

The team at Relay is planning to tackle connected TV but for now - it'll only be available on iPhone, iPad, Android and Palm Pre devices and is only available to be tapped into via Facebook Connect with further plans to use other Social API's and SDK's to merge into other social networks.

Despite being a CBS product, Relay will offer all the broadcast inventory of TV.com - which covers the spectrum of American programming and boasts close to 200 million visits annually and rising.

With plenty of visitors and social media integration, TV.com is hoping to leverage the numbers to build a burgeoning Social TV space where viewers can interact and share via the new technology.