ConnecTV’s Broadcast Push Set To Go Live

On June 12, ConnecTV will have literally grown by leaps and bounds overnight.

That’s the date when the start-up social network, designed to complement TV viewing from a second screen, will integrate with 10 major U.S. broadcasting groups that together cover 201 stations, 45 of the top 50 markets and 76 million households.

“We’re preparing 30-second spots, graphic elements, online promotional marketing, an on-air tool kit,” Stacy Jolna, ConnecTV’s co-founder and CMO, said in an interview Sunday at NAB. “We’re going about a mile a nanosecond getting ready for the national launch.”

ConnecTV, available as an iPad app since January and also accessible through PC and Mac, works in lockstep with TV viewing, delivering content related to the show a viewer is watching. It also features live social media discussions about the program and shows users what programs their friends are watching.

News came in November that ConnecTV struck a long-term commercial partnership with broadcast groups Barrington, Belo, Cox, E.W. Scripps, Gannett, Hearst, Media General, Meredith, Post-Newsweek Stations and Raycom. Nine of those station groups are a part of Pearl, the consortium formed in 2010 to pursue mobile DTV.

But the June 1 announcement is a new development, revealed Thursday during a Chyron press conference where its alliance with ConnecTV around its Engage program was also discussed. Engage provides broadcasters access to interactive graphics related to on-air social media engagement. With the ConnecTV partnership, news producers will have the opportunity to drive newscast viewerss to ConnecTV to take a survey, collect the results and then reveal the findings of the survey, complete with Engage-driven graphic treatment, on the air.

Besides gaining a larger audience through its 10 broadcast group partnership, ConnecTV will also gain significant marketing support through on-air and online promotions on the groups’ stations and station sites.

Those broadcasters will also be able to sell ads on ConnecTV through their stations’ local ad teams. Not only will ConnecTV content correlate with a TV show, but its advertising will also be able to coordinate with an ad airing on TV, Jolna said. A car commercial on TV for instance could be accompanied by an interactive ad for a complementary local dealer on ConnecTV.

For all that’s going on at NAB 2012, click here.