Thinkbox, the commercial TV industry's marketing body, have released some great research recently on the growing trend of '2-screening' - communicating on a second screen whilst watching TV. With broadcasters and advertisers keen to make the most of this secondary communication route, it's fascinating to see some of the insight and implications from Thinkbox's findings.

 The headline figure form Thinkbox's Teleporting research was that 77% of surveyed adults have gone online whilst watching TV - 65% do so at least once a week. This figure is no doubt boosted by the recent growth in smart-phone and tablet ownership, making online browsing whilst watching TV that bit easier.

While this figure looks at those people watching and browsing, we should also consider the hour and 55 minutes of TV the average adult watches via online catch up services each week, where TV programming is consumed in an online environment.

These statistics show how our consumption of TV is changing, and there are clear implications for viewers, broadcasters and advertisers alike.

A big consideration for viewers was that as more people talk about programming through Facebook status updates and tweets as the programme is going out live, it becomes more difficult to avoid the big plot developments and twist and turns if you don't watch at the time of transmission. The old cliche of avoiding the football results so you could watch Match of the Day in blissful ignorance now also applies to avoiding all social media environments if you don't want to know, for example, who got through on X Factor, whether Lucy got a date on Take Me Out or what fresh scandal has beset the people of The Only Way is Essex. The desire to watch in real time and be part of the conversation was cited by Thinkbox as a reason for the recent decrease in the proportion of TV viewing that is time-shifted (or watched at a later time). In short, the real-time interaction around programming is motivating people to watch live.

This is good news for advertisers, as less time-shifting means more ads being watched at normal speed, rather than fast-forwarded. It also means more online response to advertising, with 60% of survey respondents claiming to have searched for a brand online after seeing an ad on TV. This is in keeping with the continuing trend of fewer telephone responses for DRTV advertisers, as viewers' default response mechanism is increasingly a visit to a brand's website, a Google search or a visit to a related forum of review site.

The growth of dual consumption has also led to increased interaction with TV brands online - 2.5 million UK Facebook users are now fans of X Factor, and a variety of TV related topics - from Brian Cox to Katie Waissel - have trended on Twitter, often to the confusion and bemusement of the international Twitterati. Broadcasters are cottoning on to this - ITV2's Celebrity Juice features a specific Twitter hash tag in the opening credits to consolidate all tweets on the programme under one trending topic and allow the show's social media team to interact in real time with viewers. Channel 4 also had a lot of success with their live online 'play-along' to Million Pound Drop.

But it isn't just programming that can generate and benefit from this online amplification. The much quoted Yeo Valley ad became an immediate trending topic on Twitter after a single transmission, boosting exposure of the campaign beyond it's X Factor only buying strategy. A host of Yeo Valley Facebook groups quickly sprang up, with over 15,000 fans between them.

The key learnings for brands from all this is the importance in getting your website, search rankings and social media presence right before launching a TV campaign, and the need to consider response and interaction through online channels when evaluating the impact of a TV campaign. More generally, it will be interesting to see how consumers, brands and broadcasters continue to evolve the way they think about TV as '2-screening' becomes more popular.