1 Public Service Media and Social TV: Crossing the boundary between professional and collaborative production through ABC’s #7DaysLater Jonathon Hutchinson jonathon.hutchinson@sydney.edu.au University of Sydney, Australia To cite this article: Hutchinson, J. (2014). Public Service Media and Social TV: Crossing the boundary between professional and collaborative production through ABC’s #7DaysLater. Paper presented at the RIPE, Tokyo, Japan. Abstract Collaborative production between audience and producer has been discussed at length as they relate to particular forms of media technologies. The recent discussion to emerge is associated with the affordances of audience participation and a particular type of social media, social TV, which describes how producers are incorporating user activity into television production. An amount of research has been conducted into social media and public service media (PSM) (see for example Dijck and Poell, 2014; Moe, 2013) with very little work exploring the impact and potential of social TV and PSM. This paper tracks the first season of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) #7DaysLater to understand how they are incorporating user participation into the production model of comedy television. In an attempt to support the ABC’s legislated requirement to provide a space for marginalised voices, social TV plays a significant role in the facilitation and implementation of incorporating users to support and build a national, if not international, culture and public sphere. The problem is how to enable PSM social TV to occur without user marginalisation while creating high quality public service media. The research in this paper addresses this problem and suggests to avoid issues associated with social TV, PSM requires a combination of the skills of experienced cultural intermediaries and a developed policy framework that Brevini (2013) notes as PSB 2.0. Introduction A substantial body of research exploring convergence and audience participation within public service media (PSM) has been published by RIPE (see especially Bardoel and Lowe 2007; Hutchinson 2013a; Jackson 2008, 2010; Jakubowicz 2008; Kjus 2006; Lowe 2010; Steemers 2012) and others (for example Bechmann 2011; Debrett 2010; Kidd 2006). In most cases, this research points towards the generative and democratising potential of engaging audiences in content production processes led by PSM professionals. Similarly, an increasingly sophisticated body of scholarship is emerging that examines the relationship between social media and television production, a conflation broadly labeled ‘social TV’ (Harrington, Highfield and Bruns 2012). Audience contributions to social TV, referred to as ‘back channel communication’, is often limited to Tweets or Facebook comments selected and displayed on the strapline during live broadcasts. However, some