The notion of the television experience as a simple one screen affair is slowly being obliterated as second screen integration becomes more and more prevalent. With the recent Haunting Melissa, a horror film designed for iOS device integration that incorporated narrative structures tied up with mobile settings, and App, another film with accompanying mobile based content while the film plays, the trend in multi-screen storytelling has been building.

Now in promotion of the upcoming season of A&E series Bates Motel (a prequel to Hitchcock's 1960 classic Psycho) the show's website is offering the viewer the chance to navigate themselves around the murky corners of the motel using the Flashlight app on their phone. Created by digital agency TVGla, the experience uses HTML5 websockets to enable your phone to operate as a far more advanced controller than the television remote lost n the crease of the sofa.

Despite being relatively lightweight in its involvement with the TV show itself, the smartphone integration is an interesting way to create greater levels of immersion and engagement in a decades old medium.