Twitter adds TV discovery features, moves forward with TV Timelines

Twitter is starting to make a bigger push for TV fans, networks and advertisers wanting to reach a primetime audience: The company has started to make its TV Timelines feature more widely available, and is adding shortcuts to the TV experience directly to its users’ tweets.

TV Timelines is a feature that Twitter has been experimenting with for a few months now: It aggregates TV-related content through a separate interface within the Twitter app, consisting of a dedicated page for each TV show.

Each of these TV Timelines pages offers access to three columns, featuring highlighted tweets directly from TV networks, official show accounts and actors, tweets featuring video excerpts and other media as well as all tweets about a show. Mashable first reported about TV Timelines in March.

But while the feature was initially just available to a subset of users and only for a few TV shows, Twitter is now making it more widely available. What’s more, the service has also added a new discovery feature to get people to use TV Timelines. Some tweets about TV shows now feature a direct link to the TV Timelines page for that show, as shown in the screenshot below:

This seems for now to be restricted to Twitter’s mobile apps, and may also not be available to every user or every show just yet. A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment on the new feature.

Twitter has long looked to closely align itself with TV networks as a way to target TV audiences with ads within its products through its Amplify ad platform. Giving users a more curated experience to read just about a TV show without the need to follow hash tags or browse through many unrelated tweets could help to convince brands that they’re actually reaching the audience they are looking for, and further grow monetization.

TV Timelines is just one of Twitter’s attempts to offer users a more curated experience. Some time later this year, Twitter also wants to roll out a new experience consisting of curated tweets and media around major news events, something that is internally being called Project Lightning.