It's remarkable that today it's taken totally

for granted and it's a foregone conclusion

that people tweet along with broadcast.

What's really interesting is that this kind of

virtual roar of the crowd is happening during

the broadcast window in most cases.

Twitter's chief media scientist Deb Roy

came up with a metaphor for this phenomenon

of the roar of the crowd on Twitter and on mobiles

which he calls the social soundtrack.

So this is the germ of what inspired the name Amplify,

to sort of amplify it.

We basically asked ourselves, how can we make that

soundtrack a little bit louder?

And here's what it looks like in action.

This was one of the most talked-about moments

of last year's NBA season.

So there was a sustained roar of the crowd

over this particular play.

Jack Dorsey, one of the co-founders of Twitter,

describes a tweet as a caption to a much larger context.

And we wanted to actually bring that context

in the tweet in real time, and here's

what it looks like.

[Announcer] Wade from behind takes it away.

Chalmers, Cole, James!

The announcer is half the fun.

And the idea here is that, the NBA,

the rights-holder, is obviously providing

the broadcast through their broadcast partner,

and that's the first screen.

And you can see here the social soundtrack

of the folks watching and tweeting about it

during the broadcast window.

Sharing this conversation with other people

who are tweeting about it and on and on, et cetera.

Now what the idea for Amplify is,

and this kind of idea for real-time video,

is that at the same time, complementary to this,

we can actually target a clip from the game

in real time, right after the dunk or the block,

out to someone who may have forgotten to tune in.

And similarly we can feed that clip straight

into the existing conversation at the moment

when it's peaking, during that broadcast window

like you saw at the beginning.

And then here obviously it's kind of

a visual representation of what we mean by Amplify,

this virtuous cycle created by feeding this

existing conversation with real time clips.

Amplify's main use case has come out of sports

and that we originally thought of as instant replays,

but it's not the only one.

And it actually started with inspiration

from the east coast earthquake from a few years ago.

So here's a visualization of what it looked like

for tweets to travel along the eastern seaboard

when the east coast earthquake happened.

These graphs here are actually,

those aren't seismic readings, they look like them,

but those are actually, the y-axis is tweets.

So you can see the tweets travelling,

anticipating the shock wave coming through.

So we starting really nerding out on earthquakes

on Twitter, and we found this particular account in Chile

that was created by a 15-year-old who hooked

a seismograph up directly to a Twitter account.

So we're like wow, okay, tweeting objects,

this is pretty cool.

What else can we find?

Then discovered this account, which is

a pollution meter on top of the US Embassy in Beijing.

One of the only accounts technically in China

that actually isn't blocked.

This pollution meter actually tweets out

air pollution levels automatically in Beijing

on a regular basis.

A couple of years ago there's a minor diplomatic dust up

when this device couldn't actually process the level

of pollution in the air on a certain day

and it actually revealed an easter egg

in however this thing was programmed

and it just tweeted out crazy bad.

(audience laughter)

Sometimes the tweeting objects have personalities.

So we tried to think of how do we get this

tweeting object into the world of brands?

And here's what we came up with, with our partners

again at the NBA.

Right at the moment when the dunk happens,

the backboard itself has a Twitter account

and tweets out a picture of itself

getting dunked on.

And then a lot of things started happening

that we didn't anticipate at all.

We started having partners come to us with ideas

for using this idea of two-screen video

that went way beyond instant replays.

You can start to see some of the brand integrations here.

This is Duracell sponsoring a live weather map

by the Weather Channel, that they tweeted out

to people in cities about to get hit by storms.

Obviously from a brand integration point of view,

really creative and news you can use

like go buy batteries because you're gonna be

out of power soon.

So imagine that level of artfulness and that level

of care and that level of imagination applied

to anything that you can see on TV

and imagine if the control room for all the TVs,

live or taped, et cetera, were constantly

pumping out second screen content.

It's really just the beginning,

and the best part about it is that

the story-telling on TV already,

as this magazine said a year ago,

is in its platinum age.

And at the exact same time, smart phoness

are making TV even better than it is.

We don't at Twitter think of ourselves as

rivalrous to TV, and we think of our position

with respect to TV to be very modest,

basically just a way to connect the audience

with the creators on the screen.

We tapped into something unknowingly

that was this hunger for this ability

to tell stories across two screens.

(tech-inspired music)