As writers and producers exploit technology to find different ways to bring characters and stories to life, audience expectation is re-writing the rules of engagement. The net effect for the TV industry is a drastic shift in the way stories are told, and, curiously, Australian expertise has found itself at the forefront of the change.

"You have to stop thinking of the audience as a separate entity and think of them as part of the process," producer Charlie Aspinwall says. His company, Ludo, was behind the ABC "crowd-sourced" comedy #7DaysLater, which took its story cues from engaging directly with fans.

Hoodlum, a Brisbane-based company, is now one of the most prolific multi-platform producers in the world. In addition to Ten's Secrets & Lies, the ABC comedy The Strange Calls and Foxtel's Slide, Hoodlum produced The Dharma Initiative and Primeval Evolved as well as an online series for the British spy drama Spooks.

"When we explain to writers or creators we work with that basically you don't have any boundaries, you can go beyond the scenes or characters, and your world becomes so much bigger, you can almost see the light bulb go on," says Hoodlum's Tracey Robertson. "They realise they can explore this whole world they have held in their head, that they can turn it into something and put it out there, it's amazing."

While the worlds "multi-platform" seem to belong to the digital age, in truth using different platforms to tell a story can trace its roots all the way back to the iconic American soap opera Guiding Light which spent at least five of its 72 years simultaneously on both radio and TV. It wasn't quite "multi-platform storytelling" back then, but it was a start.

In more recent years, franchises such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Dark Shadows and Doctor Who have used novels and audio dramas to build an "expanded universe", from Star Wars' much-loved 70s-era novels, Splinter of the Mind's Eye and Han Solo at Star's End, to entire new seasons of Dark Shadows and Doctor Who produced on audio CD in the style of radio dramas.

Film franchises have even dabbled in the TV platform, such as Indiana Jones' small screen spinoff The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, or more recently, Marvel: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, which is linked to the Marvel film franchises such as Thor and Iron-Man. Even Star Wars' much-maligned TV bastard child, The Star Wars Holiday Special, was an attempt (albeit a largely dismal one) to connect the characters and the audience using a different platform.

"It really isn't new, but because of digital platforms it's deemed to be new," says Robertson. "But the truth is, we've been doing it on old platforms for years: books, records, cassette tapes, comic books, all that stuff. Most of the time it's been used as marketing, and it hasn't always necessarily been used narratively. In some cases it's been driven by the commercial side of the business. But that is changing."

For Robertson, the turning point was her own love of the iconic 1990s TV drama Twin Peaks, which expanded its universe with books, including The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, and a set of cassette tapes titled The Secret Tapes of Agent Dale Cooper, with newly recorded material. Robertson soaked up the richer history of the town and its inhabitants. "Can you imagine what Twin Peaks would have been like if they'd had social media when they were making the show?" she adds.

More recently, multi-platform has come to include glimpses behind the scenes and audio commentaries (such as those you would find on a DVD) and engagement on social media, either to deliver narrative material to the audience, as with Foxtel's teen drama Slide, or in the form of story-linked games for platforms such as Facebook, or as a means of "crowd-sourcing" story and character points for some programs in real time, by engaging with the fans directly.

But despite all that engagement, what is revealing is that the audience do not usually want their hands on the controls, Aspinwall says. "The audience want a director for the show, they don't want to direct the show," he says. "But having access to the director, being able to talk to them, is exciting, demystifying and engaging."

In some respects, that conversation is reminiscent of the now-defunct website Television Without Pity, which pioneered online recaps of TV programs and, often, found itself the platform for hostile engagement between viewers and program producers such as Aaron Sorkin, who frequently went online to butt heads with his constituency.

"I think obviously we're reacting to the way media is disseminated because of personally how we're interacting with the media itself," Aspinwall says. The Strange Calls and #7DaysLater producer Daley Pearson "is constantly online.

"He lives virtually pretty much, that is part of his everyday life, so that's necessarily how he's going to interact with his audience. He's going to be constantly talking to them anyway."

Expansion into the multi-platform world is not always costly, but can be creatively cumbersome. "Content creators are a bit nervous about the audience," says Aspinwall. "Are they going to get involved? If they get involved are they going to spoil it? People shouldn't worry about that, and they should stop thinking about them as 'the audience' for a start. It's just everybody else out there, and they can be a part of it."

The benefits, however, are there to be reaped, either in commercial terms, where Hoodlum has used its international credentials to launch into the US market, working on American versions of its shows Secrets & Lies and The Strange Calls, or purely for kudos, as Ludo discovered this week when its series, #7DaysLater, won an International Emmy award for its excellence in the digital medium at the annual television market MipTV in Cannes, France.

"The more you bring down barriers to your audience and flatten the playing field, the more the audience comes in, the more you can draw people into your show," Aspinwall says. "They become stakeholders in what's going on."