• The Hollywood Reporter, Thursday, August 12, 2010 11:23 PM

CBS Interactive is giving television the Foursquare treatment. The digital division is beta-testing TV.com Relay, a service that transplants Foursquare's combination of user check-ins and badge rewards from brick-and-mortar venues to TV shows, notes The Hollywood Reporter. The goal: become the go-to digital companion for the live-TV experience important to a conglomerate that owns a broadcast network and wants to support its ad rates.

While TV.com Relay joins an increasingly crowded field of so-called social-TV services, its CBS affiliation will bring a huge advantage: on-air promotion in CBS prime-time programming. "It can be very reciprocal for TV to help online, and online to help TV," said Anthony Soohoo, SVP/GM of CBS Interactive's entertainment and lifestyle unit.

The trend is clearly using the Web and TV at the same time, reports Adweek, quoting a recent Nielsen study. According to the study conducted on behalf of Yahoo, it found three out of four Americans use the Web and TV simultaneously, and half do so every day. Multitasking is now commonplace among most demographics.

In fact, more women (77%) claim to multitask than men (73%). The average multitasker spends over 2.5 hours per week using the Web and TV at the same time.

Read the whole story at The Hollywood Reporter »