Behind closed doors in offices from the media cen­ters of New York to the enter­tain­ment cap­i­tal of Hol­ly­wood, con­tent pro­gram­mers and code jock­eys are no doubt try­ing to fig­ure out how to marry tra­di­tional tele­vi­sion with social networking.

Does the lean-forward expe­ri­ence, inter­ac­tiv­ity and backchan­nel chat­ter of social net­works have a place in the tightly con­trolled, lean-back world of tele­vi­sion? I’m among those who believe the two will wed in a sat­is­fy­ing way, though we’re likely five to 10 years from that hap­pen­ing. I blogged about Intel and Yahoo’s exper­i­ments with the Cin­e­matic Inter­net (or Wid­get Chan­nel TV) last year, and I’ve writ­ten over the years about the largely dis­cred­ited exper­i­ments with “inter­ac­tive television.”

But a week ago today, in the cor­po­rate offices of BT in Lon­don, the Trav­el­ing Geeks were treated to a 10-minute pre­sen­ta­tion by Tanya Gold­haber, a grad­u­ate stu­dent at MIT just fin­ish­ing up an eight-week intern­ship at BT, about “Social TV.” We were so intrigued that we kept toss­ing ques­tions to her well after her allot­ted time.

Peer-influenced view­er­ship

As audi­ences con­tinue to frag­ment, as more of us mul­ti­task with lap­tops on our laps while we’re watch­ing TV, as the major social net­works con­tinue to amass mil­lions of more mem­bers each week, and as the Inter­net finally comes to our liv­ing rooms with a new gen­er­a­tion of devices like Boxee, it’s only a mat­ter of time before tele­vi­sion becomes social.

Gold­haber showed some screen­shots of what a pro­to­type social TV screen might look like. (Pro­to­types I’ve seen at the Intel Devel­op­ers Net­work and at LinkTV a few months ago take it in sim­i­lar if some­what dif­fer­ent directions.)

I sus­pect most of us don’t want to see a CNN-like crawl of our friends’ com­ments at the bot­tom of our prime-time pro­gram­ming. But I cer­tainly would like to know if my friends were enthralled by a one-time PBS spe­cial, or if DirecTV was tele­vis­ing the ninth inning of a no-hit game, or if one of my friends was inter­viewed by a news crew.

Gold­haber noted that today’s Elec­tronic Pro­gram Guides are all but impos­si­ble to nav­i­gate, and she cited stud­ies that peo­ple would rather get view­ing rec­om­men­da­tions from a friend than from a com­puter. In sur­vey of TV view­ers, 37% of respon­dents said they started watch­ing their favorite TV show because of a friend’s rec­om­men­da­tion or word of mouth.

I asked Gold­haber if, a few years out, social net­works might lead to “swarm­ing behav­ior” among TV view­ers, caus­ing quick spikes in view­er­ship for little-known niche pro­grams based on social influ­encers’ actions. Cer­tainly pos­si­ble, she said.

I’d be intrigued by a sys­tem that auto­mat­i­cally feeds me infor­ma­tion about what my friends are col­lec­tively watch­ing, instead of hav­ing to wait for them to tell me through a kind of tweet burst. And I’d also be inter­ested by a peer, or friend of friends, rec­om­men­da­tion sys­tem that ele­vates obscure but high-quality inde­pen­dent Web programs.

Social TV could reshape the tele­vi­sion land­scape — which is why you’ll never see the major net­works lead this trans­for­ma­tion. Like Nap­ster and Apple in the music indus­try, the inno­va­tion will come from the bot­tom up, well out­side of the media and enter­tain­ment industries.

BT and open source

I’ll be hon­est: Before I vis­ited the UK, I assumed that BT was Britain’s ver­sion of AT&T: mono­lithic, impos­ing, not ter­ri­bly open to inno­va­tion. An evening of con­ver­sa­tions and an after­noon of pre­sen­ta­tions at BT has dis­abused me of that notion.

BT’s pur­chase of Sil­i­con Valley-based Rib­bit (I met Rib­bit exec Crick Waters, now BT’s EVP for Strat­egy and Biz Dev) has led to a remark­able amount of cre­ative fer­ment around open­ing up the BT plat­form to out­side devel­op­ers. (Take, for exam­ple, openbroadband.bt.com: “Power your apps with pro­gram­ma­ble broad­band. Join our part­ner ecosystem.”)

On Sat­ur­day after­noon I had a short dis­cus­sion with Howard Rhein­gold about BT and our host, JP Ran­gaswami, man­ag­ing direc­tor of BT Design (pic­tured above — Howard refers to him as BT’s “CIO”). Howard said that unlike America’s “fear-driven” tele­coms, BT has the oppor­tu­nity to rein­vent itself as a “net­work plat­form” that extends well beyond tra­di­tional telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions by tap­ping into the Net’s well­spring of connectivity.

How­ever that even­tu­ally pans out from a busi­ness per­spec­tive, JP and his team are on the case.

Related

• Howard Rhein­gold: Will BT let JP cre­ate the first open net­work oper­a­tor? One sce­nario for the mobile Web

• Tom Forem­ski: UK Diary: Tues­day — It Never Rains But It Pours … More BT Innovation

• Meghan Asha: BT’s Pro­gram­ma­ble Broadband!

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.