The union of social media and TV has a bright future

By Angel Gambino

The recent Sky Play deal with Xbox makes clearer the potential value of combining social features of gaming and TV. The marriage of broadcast and broadband with local storage makes direct-to-home platforms a powerful foundation for the future of social TV.

Social TV has a long history in this country, going back to basic multiplayer interactive TV games, such as those offered by PlayJam. These allowed a few people to participate at the same time or on different devices. After overlays of SMS interaction like AQA’s Mr Know it All on MTV became common among channels targeting younger audiences, sending text messages to the TV and formats like Pop Idol took audience participation mainstream.

Then, during the American election night, Twitter got into the TV game. The stream of tweets about the election, mostly from Obama supporters, were broadcast on TV. Although there was nothing too new about the format, Twitter joining the conversation was momentous. The US buzz about social TV is largely about recommendation engines that display suggestions from others based on your viewing habits. Adapting Amazon’s ‘If you like this you may also like’ to programme discovery is taking social TV to another stage.

I wonder, though, if this is the best we can do to catapult TV into a new immersive conversation. US social TV companies looking to enter the UK market will have to solve problems that we’ve been grappling with for years. One of the challenges is getting broadcast, broadband and mobile operators to work together to provide a seamless user experience. However, the two main incumbents offering quad-play here still need to demonstrate to customers why they need all services from one provider. Social TV applications could be one way to demonstrate the value of such bundled services.

The most social activities that occur while people are watching TV are the millions of people texting, instant messaging and interacting on social networks while they watch. TV viewing may be passive, but viewers are actively socialising on other media. Some companies looking to enable peer-to-peer communications on the TV screen, so that a viewer can text a friend from their mobile phone and both can choose to see the message on their TV. They can also participate in group chat, displayed on the TV, with some people communicating from a PC while others are on their mobile.

The power of recommendation in this environment - adding the key time-based element, providing immediate effects - combined with gaming applications, could create a more social TV experience.

Angel Gambino has recently become an Advisor to Integra5, an American social TV platform and applications company

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