Zeebox partners with second-screen social TV firm Monterosa to reel in third party apps and sites

One week after social TV app Zeebox finally arrived on Android, a new partnership with Monterosa has been announced which aims to give broadcasters, producers and brands early access to Monterosa’s new second-screen service, and allow them to create and deploy richer, interactive viewing experiences.

Monterosa’s content and technology aims to bring television and connected audiences together, and its clients include ITV, Channel 4 and UKTV, whilst its production partners include Endemol, ITV Studios, Syco, and TwoFour.

We’ve written about Zeebox before, and we recently interviewed the UK company’s founder Anthony Rose about the rise of social TV. Zeebox turns your mobile device or laptop into an interactive companion that enhances whatever you watch on your main TV screen – it knows what you and your friends are watching, and it lets you all share, chat and tweet about whatever’s on.

As a result of this hook-up, the new “self-service” Monterosa product will offer a selection of third parties a way to involve TV audiences through Zeebox and their own websites or mobile apps simultaneously. Monterosa say it will offers “robust scalability” of its ‘2-Screen Cloud Services’ and will add a Web-based control centre for producers. The first invitation-only release of the product will be integrated into Zeebox’s ‘Showtime’ tools, adding live audience polling to a growing suite of interactions that broadcasters, programme-makers and brands can use to augment live TV.

“Zeebox and Monterosa are both pioneering forces in social and second-screen television,” says Tom McDonnell, commercial director of Monterosa. “The combination of Monterosa’s expertise in highly content-specific interaction and zeebox’s capabilities and audience is a potent one. We believe this is an industry-defining step.”

2012 is gearing up for a big year in the social TV space, and earlier this year Zeebox announced a partnership with BSkyB to co-launch a second-screen experience under the Sky+ banner, integrating the ability to search for, discover and record TV content, with Zeebox’s augmented TV viewing features.