Middleband Channels: Television content-aligned services

I am watching CNBC right now with my wireless notebook and iPod at my side. An analyst is talking about some hot new stock that he thinks is going to go through the roof. With a single click of a button, that stock is automatically added to my online stock tracker. With another click, I am connected to an instant messaging session where people watching the same program are talking up all the known data around the stock, the analyst and the segment. With another click, I can save the entire discussion thread to my local store, and it is automatically indexed for me. With one more click, I can add discussion participants or stock analysts to a watched list. I can subscribe to whatever content they choose to syndicate, be it a stock tip, investing resource or interesting article. With a final click, I can act on some or more of these stocks.




And these are just the basic (free) services aligned with the financial program that I am watching. There are professional services as well -- mutual fund managers and financial management tool providers, for example. For the first time, live television programming is truly a two-way, interactive medium.




In the age of always-on broadband, I think that it is time for someone to build a service around live (or pre-recorded) television content. Think about it. Beyond financial programming, there are logical applications around music, news, sports, reality television and educational programming for "middleband" services.




One can imagine a music channel whose music it plays is aligned with the music on its listener's iPods. Here, I can share playlists, grab lyrics, purchase new songs in a single click or find out when a given band is going to be playing in my area.




You would think that Comcast or Fox (also owns DirecTV) should be all over this one. Imagine starting with a programming guide of a finite number of programs that support the service, and growing from there. Could you sell advertising in this new channel? Certainly performance-based advertising, it would seem, since the targeting is so direct.




Not a bad strategy for someone like Tivo either since they are a repository for much of this content. An interesting thing is that because the audience is live, it is less important that the programming actually be live. The software would need to have some type of network linkback mechanism so that when you change the channel to a given program, the middleband software instantly recognizes the channel you are on and plugs you into its middleband services.




On some level, a middleband channel could evolve into an interactive program guide that also tracks products, digital content, sports scores, stocks and other real-time information of interest and finally, people, according to user-defined watch lists. Such guides, in turn, could be syndicated via RSS feeds, archived, instant messaged, blogged about or accessed by personal information and telephony devices.




There is certainly a critical mass of connectivity for such an application to have a meaningful audience. What better way for television content providers to re-engage with their audiences? Heck, now that Howard Stern is leaving broadcast radio, it would seem that Viacom could do worse than jumping on the "middle" bandwagon. It certainly feels like a 1+1=3 type of value proposition for the consumer and content provider alike.

Can you see using such a service?