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ABSTRACT

In a world where linear television is increasingly losing its relevance, there is a significant need for new ways to engage the viewers around television content. This paper presents a new extensive concept for Social Television based on time-indexed comments, enabling the viewers to receive comments from his or her chosen network, displayed when relevant to the content.

The application is developed using experiences from research on Social Television, which is also presented in the paper. The result of the study is a crowdsourced annotation technology providing the end users with closer contact with other viewers, and the content providers with more information about the viewing habits of their users. This information can be used to further promote and develop the content to create an even better experience for the users and to increase revenue for the service providers.

INTRODUCTION

You can’t stay relevant as a broadcaster with a one-to-many communication strategy. It’s a two-way street now. More and more content is being consumed on other screens than the television, and often outside of the live broadcasting schedule. Even when used, the television often has to compete for attention with other devices. Many consumers frequently use social media for discussing television content, but most social TV- applications have limitations and limited spans. Accessing Televisions “Backchannel” using hashtags through Twitter or Facebook enables the users to participate in the global conversation, but this excludes all users who are unable to catch the live broadcast.

This paper presents an extensive Social TV-concept utilizing the results from research on Social Television. Using this knowledge, we have developed a concept for a Social TV application targeting several of the areas that most social television applications touch. The defining feature of the application is time-indexed comments, i.e. comments associated with the moments they are referencing in the video.

This offers the ability to replay the comments at the same place in the video for each subsequent play, and to iteratively add reactions and discussions to the video as time passes. The result is powerful, and we believe this provides a significant value both for the end-users and the service provider, both of which are described in the paper.

The paper is partially based on the author’s Master Paper, “Social Television: Creating a Social Network in the Player” (13), but new content has been added from newer studies and further development on the application.