Today Twitter launched Curator, a tool for publishers to pull tweets around a certain topic or event and publish them anywhere. This means you’ll be seeing more tweets about a show when you’re watching it. Matt Dennebaum writes in a Twitter blog post that:
Curator was built to allow media publishers to search, filter and curate Twitter content that can then be displayed on web, mobile and TV. Those who have been testing Curator have seen strong increases in audience engagement, participation and attention. With these encouraging results, we’re opening up the product to all media publishers around the world, for free. This includes news organizations, production companies, broadcasters, local governments, and even concert venues.
Already, Twitter partners with other platforms like Spredfast and Wayin, among others, and encourages broadcasters to partner with them for more “advanced” integrations. The Curator tool only works for Twitter and Vine content, so to access social reactions on Facebook or anywhere else, broadcasters would need to use a competitor.
This means that more people will be able to consume tweets without ever logging in or registering for a Twitter account. As Kurt Wagner points out over at Recode, that audience is the one Twitter needs to court Wall Street, the syndicated audience is a “better representation of Twitter’s size than the 288 million MAUs it reports.” It fits into the proposed general Twitter timeline and primes that non-tweeting audience to get used to seeing social reactions all over their smart televisions, too. Our screens are about to get very, very busy. Let’s just hope control rooms have good taste in selecting Vines about watching “Dancing With the Stars.”