From a trebling of web traffic within sixty seconds of Channel 4 mentioning the Celebrity Big Brother URL on-air, to 59 million hits in a day to a restaurant web site advertised during the US Super Bowl, advertisers, broadcasters and technologists are falling over themselves to exploit a massive — and growing — opportunity.

In my latest piece for GigaOM Pro, published today, I take a look at some of the ways in which the elastic nature of Cloud Computing is being exploited in order to support the increasingly rich interplay between on-screen and online content.

As more of us watch television whilst also able to get online with a laptop, tablet or smartphone, the opportunities for further interaction – and the prospect of extreme spikes in traffic within seconds of an on-screen prompt – grow by the day. There are some interesting examples of early success here, but it remains an opportunity that is still a very long way from being fully understood or exploited.

Thanks to Tom Lounibos at SOASTA, Andy Parker at Channel 4, and everyone else who took the time to speak with me as I prepared the piece.

Image ‘138/365: It’s not Rocket Science FUTAB‘ by Christopher Thomas, shared on Flickr with a Creative Commons license.

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