Could Social TV threaten your average TV Sports Presenter?

written by: Paul Johnson

Mint Digital (www.mintdigital.com), the makers of the fabulous www.picklive.com social football game, has announced a real time data visualisation app for the Apple ipad.

You can read the full post here:Mint Digital - Blog - Mint’s iPad Challenge

"Picklive captures a whole load of data during every football match they cover. For the World Cup, they'll be covering every single match. We always thought there were other things to do with this data. The World Cup and the iPad turned out to be the catalysts we needed to put things into gear, and we think we may be onto something quite special...it combines the football data from Picklive with fun and intuitive analysis tools. For example, it allows you to compare cumulatively, or per match, all footballers in the World Cup across a variety of stats like goals, shoots on target, tackles and more."

In essence, this is going to provide a lot of the same real time information that sports presenters on TV e.g. SkySports (Football Saturday) have access to.  Initial thoughts:

1. I love the idea that I can snack on real time answers to those questions that pop into my head whilst I am watching the World Cup matches at home/in the pub/on the move.

2.  I love the idea that I could become equivalent to the tv sports presenter and impress/bore/wind up my [non ipad owning] friends with fast facts and stats about the match we are watching and the other matches being played.

3.  I love the idea that this is a concept that builds upon the 2 screen experience, and could have relevant context to other types of linear and non linear tv / events.

4.  It is hard to tell from the photos that Mint Digital published what will be covered, however they look as though they are doing an awesome job on the interface, especially when you consider the amount and complexity of data they are trying to interpret and display back to your average footie fan.

Reading this story started me thinking about the broader impacts these data visualisation tools could have on the 'voice' of the main Sports Broadcasters and their [sometimes] very overpaid TV presenters.  Admittedly, this is one for the distant future, but still...

...doesn't it make you wonder whether these tools could open up opportunities for the social media masses, what has up to now been the preserve of TV presenters / broadcasters/sports pundits...

...if you think about bloggers and tweet peeps, those who have created a solid and loyal base of followers.  With this kind of data visualisation tool at their finger tips, could these same guys start engaging with their own audiences at the same time, and become a social tv presenter via the 2 screen experience?

If yes, then what might that do to the [sometimes fake tanned] personalities we watch on our big screens?

Could we choose which commentary to listen too via our socialtv enabled big screens, and switch off the main man?

Could it breed a new group of audio bloggers streaming direct to the tv's of an audience born from the social web?

Could it open up new opportunities for local radio and individuals to build audio audiences directly to the big screen, based around premium content they do not own?  What new business models and impacts could this have?

Could Mint Digital develop their data visualisation tool on the ipad into something bigger, something that creates an even closer interaction between the big screen and the 2nd screen?

Could social tv use these data visualisation tools to drive augmented reality onto the big screen?

More questions than answers in the post, and would love to hear your thoughts...

Paul Johnson is a writer for Appmarket.tv and founding Director at Montgomery Aston and has been specialising in making sense and acting upon the convergent areas of Media, Communications and Consumer Management for the past 15 years.