itvt

Santa Monica, Calif.-based two-screen interactive TV specialist,
Jacked, Inc. (note: the company’s flagship product, Jacked SportsTop,
is a browser-based virtual desktop that features a dashboard of widgets
and that is designed to provide synchronized two-screen ITV
experiences specifically for sports broadcasts), recently signed a deal
with Los Angeles TV station, KCAL 9, that sees it providing the latter
with a two-screen ITV service to accompany all its live broadcasts of
LA Lakers basketball games throughout the rest of the current season,
as well as next season.

The service–dubbed the “Carl’s Jr. Lakers Live SportsTop” and
featuring a range of interactive content, commerce, communication and
advertising widgets–is part of a sponsorship package for the
eponymous fast food chain that includes on-air, online and in-game
promotions. Located on KCAL 9’s Web site, it presents viewers with a
catalog of widgets that they can drag and drop onto the screen, in order
to customize their interactive experience (note: viewers can save their
settings for future games). At launch, a total of 16 widgets were
available, including Scoreboard, Player Profile, Box Score,
Play-by-Play, Video, Team and Cheerleader photos, Flickr Fan photos,
Team News and Ticker, and a trivia game. A chat widget allows
viewers to interact with one another and with KCAL personalities, and
gives them the option of setting up private chatrooms (note: for NBA
games, Jacked offers what it calls the Jacked Heat Index, a
patent-pending application that uses analytical metrics to dynamically
index each player’s performance at any specific moment during the
game, so that viewers can follow players and see at which points in the
game they are underperforming, meeting, or exceeding expectations; in
addition to using game stats, the widget adds a time component, so that
a player becomes “cold” when he or she is underperforming or
spending a large amount of time on the bench). According to Jacked, its
platform monitors the TV broadcast and automatically populates the
widgets in real time with relevant content. The company touts this
capability as providing advertisers with the opportunity to “extend their
brands to consumers online when they are most engaged in the
broadcast experience.”

Jacked’s platform incorporates standard IAB leaderboard, banner and
button ad units, as well as new proprietary ad units that dynamically
size and publish to the widgets on the end-user’s screen: the company
says that the ads can be tied to events during the broadcast and
geo-targeted, and that they will eventually also be synchronized with
broadcast ads. “This partnership marks a key milestone for Jacked in its
effort to establish a local SportsTop network enabling broadcasters like
KCAL to collaborate with advertisers like Carl’s Jr. to provide sports
fans with a truly unique and engaging cross-platform experience,”
Jacked CEO, Bryan Biniak, said in a prepared statement.

In other Jacked news:

• In order to encourage usage of its service by football fans, Jacked
  conducted a sweepstakes promotion around this year’s Super Bowl:
  users who registered on the company’s Web site before kickoff could
  enter its “Football Challenge Sweepstakes” to have a chance of winning
  a $100,000 cash prize for making 20 correct predictions about the
  game. The company also used the occasion of the Super Bowl to launch
  a number of new features on its SportsTop platform. The new features
  are a Video widget, which uses the company’s “Searchcasting”
  technology to look for team and player videos related to the game that
  is currently being broadcast, and that also includes a search function
  that lets viewers search for specific videos within the widget; a Player
  Profile widget, which automatically highlights players, based on key
  events taking place during the game; a News widget, which
  automatically searches for relevant news during a game; and a Chat
  widget.

• Late last year, the company announced that it had expanded its
  partnership with NBC Sports and NBCSports.com to provide the latter
  with a two-screen ITV service, dubbed NBCSports.com Play Action, to
  accompany its “Sunday Night Football” broadcasts. The new deal built
  on an existing deal between the companies, under which Jacked
  provided NBC Sports with a two-screen application for its broadcasts
  of Notre Dame football games.