IBC 2016: Vizrt, Blurrt partner on social storytelling for broadcast TV

Blurrt, a social media storytelling platform, and Vizrt have announced a technology partnership and integration. The partnership will provide broadcasters and producers with the opportunity to utilize both companies’ expertise working with real-time data and display.

Blurrt identifies and collects social media data, assessing every post in real-time using a custom-built Natural Language Processing (NLP) system that looks to understand the language, context, and tone of voice used in each individual case. Blurrt also has a unique ability via this NLP system, to recognize and place emotion-bearing posts into the following groupings: Happiness, Sadness, Anger, Thankfulness, Disgust, Love, Confusion, and Fear.

This will provide broadcasters with new ways to showcase audience engagement as well provide a new range of social media metrics, brought to life via Vizrt’s Social TV solution. The Vizrt Social TV solution will allow Blurrt’s data to be displayed within real-time graphics which will be able to be displayed live on air.

“Blurrt’s NLP gives media companies immediate insight into viewer sentiment for any topic. We can then visualize this with the Social TV solution in a variety of formats, from full screen graphics, to interactive touchscreens or even augmented reality graphics,” says Petter Ole Jakobsen, Vizrt CTO.

“We’re extremely proud to partner with Vizrt,” says Jason Smith, CEO of Blurrt. “We believe this integration is a perfect fit to enable broadcasters to show and editorialise the huge amount of conversation that takes place across social media, in a meaningful and innovative way. Blurrt is all about real-time gathering, understanding and displaying of social data, which is why it has been particularly rewarding to find a fit with Vizrt, who see real-time graphic display as paramount to their operations.”

This new and innovative approach to working with real-time social media will be showcased to visitors at Vizrt booth 7.A20 at the IBC event in Amsterdam, September 9-13. Blurrt and Vizrt will be performing several demos at the stand to show how social media data can seamlessly fit and supplement broadcast offerings.

This will specifically include examples of how both sports and current affairs broadcasters can utilize clever visual graphics technology with interesting insights. The sports broadcast examples will include a virtual studio showing a select 11 footballers from a recent game, chosen based off their individual Blurrt Score – a clever calculation that combines volume and sentiment. Other demos include touchscreen graphics comparing Trump and Clinton across a range of different variables, including sentiment expressed, volume of posts and recognized emotions being used in conversation.

These demos will also show off the ability to dive deeper into the data collected, including loading select individual tweets showing precise emotional feelings towards either candidate.