SECOND SCREENS AND SOCIAL TV - Making waves in the broadcast world - D2D. Feb 14, 2012 - 05:05 PM GMT Second screening is the new way to consume broadcast content, with companies beginning to look at ways to control the way consumers second screen - and how to make money out of it. George Cole provides an overview of this 21st century viewing trend. Second screen is making waves in the broadcast, social media and video worlds. In essence, second screen involves using a second display device, like a smartphone, laptop or tablet, while watching television. Many people are now second screening: research by Nielsen found that 70% of tablet users and 68% of smartphone owners used their device while watching television.
“There are a lot of stats that show that a very large percentage of people who watch TV are doing it with a second screen on their lap,” says Chuck Parker, former Chief Commercial Officer of Technicolor. Social TV is a second screen activity. Many see the tablet as the perfect form factor for second screen usage.
TV Audience Social Interest Mapping – Shameless vs. Newsnight vs Masterchef. How easy is it to differentiate between audiences of different types of TV programme based on their socially signalled interests? This evening, I ran a couple of Twitter searches against the #shameless and #newsnight hashtags. In each case, I grabbed 1500 of the most recent tweets and generated lists of folk who had tweeted the corresponding hashtag at least twice in the sample set. I then grabbed the lists of all the friends of the folk in each list to generate a projection map of the friends of recent hashtaggers.
The final preprocessing step was to filter each network to contain only nodes that had at least an indegree or outdegree of 25 (that is, I filtered the network to only include folk who had at least 25 friends, or were linked to by at least 25 of the folk in the corresponding hashtaggers list). Here’s the resulting map generated around the #shameless tag – it gives an impression of folk who tend to be followed by folk using the #shameless tag: Like this: Like Loading... The Social EPG is the Social TV of Tomorrow. While social TV apps continue to crop up like proverbial weeds, the future of the social TV app will likely be a proprietary social EPG (electronic program guide) provided by the same company that supplies your pay TV service.
It will likely come with a companion tablet device too, one your pay TV provider gives you for a low monthly fee, much in the same way they now provide set top boxes. Multiple tablets will mean multiple fees, but most households will want at least one for every adult or teenage member. This model is the obvious next step for an industry that’s waiting and watching as the current wave of app developers figure out the rules of the game.
They’re helping to figure out the ideal user experience and which behaviors (e.g. check-in, chat, recommendations) viewers are most interested in. And they’re doing it all on their VC’s dime as the big industry players just sit back and take notes. Sort of. Social TV Applications Matrix 2012. ConnecTV Prepares To Take On IntoNow With New Social TV Platform. Today, a company called ConnecTV is launching an ambitious new service for socializing the TV viewing experience using mobile and web-based applications. The new app, available first on the iPad, with Android tablet support in the works, is similar to competitor IntoNow in that it also seems to “hear” what’s on TV in order to load the appropriate content.
But the way it’s processing the data on the backend is completely different. There’s no “Shazam-like” experience here – everything ConnecTV does is in real-time. ConnecTV was founded a couple of years ago by the former TV Guide President Ian Aaron, the former founding head of technology at TiVo, Alan Moskowitz, and the original Chief Programming Officer at TiVo, Stacy Jolna. The proprietary technology underlying the service was developed over the course of the past two years, with no venture funding. Instead, the startup was self-funded and took in money from a few, undisclosed “high net worth” people. A Social-Media Decoder. Power shift: Deb Roy, CEO of Bluefin Labs, says social media have changed the relationship between media consumers and producers. From his 24th-floor corner office in midtown Manhattan, the veteran CBS research chief David Poltrack can gaze southward down the Avenue of the Americas, its sidewalks teeming.
For more than four decades, it has been his job to measure people’s television habits, preferences, and reactions. In large part, this has meant following the viewing habits of Nielsen panels of TV viewers and parsing the results of network surveys on their opinions. On a late September afternoon, with fall premieres under way, his desk was strewn with color-coded opinions from 3,000 Americans who had wandered into CBS’s Las Vegas research outpost, Television City, at the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino, and agreed to fill out TV surveys for the chance to win a 3-D home entertainment system.
But now he’s also dealing with a growing force: the masses talking back through social media. Social TV articles. The Future Of Social TV Is Now. Social "check-in" service GetGlue waited until nearly halfway through January to release its 2011 infographics. That same day, it closed a $12M round of financing led by Rho Ventures, with participation from TimeWarner Investments, RRE Ventures and Union Square Ventures. At the end of 2011, GetGlue hit two million users and logged 100 million check-ins.
The site is only two years old, yet it has grown 1000% year over year. The million user mark came in April 2011. From just January to September 2011,it saw an 800% increase. GetGlue is a service that lets users "check-in" to watching TV shows, reading books and listening to music. GetGlue users openly share their feelings about entertainment, especially when it comes to popular shows and movies. At this year's CES, we looked at how web connectivity, time-shifting content and "second screens" will affect social TV. Perhaps the future of social TV is already here. Former ‘Idol’ exec invests millions in new social TV app Viggle.
The man who launched American Idol is getting into the social TV business. Robert Sillerman announced today that his new company, Function(x) will soon debut a TV loyalty app called Viggle. By checking into various TV shows — the app will come with audio recognition software — viewers can earn points that can redeemed for rewards from companies such as Burger King, Sephora, Fandango and the Hulu Plus service. The company says the app (which is launching soon) will highlight shows with “check-in bonuses.”
You can set reminders and “like” shows, and Viggle will curate Twitter conversations for each TV show (100 channels will be included at launch, with more on the way). Partners can serve up companion content such as real-time polls and quizzes. Function(x) says its working with several networks and production companies to create second-screen experiences on Viggle. While there are lots of similar competitors in this space, Viggle promises better rewards beyond badges and stickers. 10 Ways Facebook Is Integrating Into Your TV, Music, Games, Cars & Cameras.