Your TV buddy ... Image via Wikipedia
If you own a tablet or smartphone, and you are watching television, chances are you vacillate between two screens. That has the TV industry pretty excited these days.
Before this was a buzz in the media, in February of 2010, The New York Times' Brian Stelter asked, "Remember when the Internet was supposed to kill off television?" and then went on to write this:
The Nielsen Company, which measures television viewership and Web traffic, noticed this month that one in seven people who were watching the Super Bowl and the Olympics opening ceremony were surfing the Web at the same time.
Last July, about a year and a half later, Rapid TV News reported on a white paper by British technology research company Mobile Interactive Group, which updated that number for the US and UK. It had "40% of mobile users saying that they are most likely to be multi-tasking using their phone while watching the TV." (Some estimate that number nearly doubles when you look at the 18-24 demographic.)
The white paper summary states, "Mobile will become the main vehicle for interaction between viewer and broadcaster," predicting that interactive events on Facebook alone could generate billions of dollars.
Whatever the reality of the revenue, make no mistake -- the TV industry is on board from producers all the way to the cable and satellite industries.
"It's not a matter of if anymore, it's a matter of how quickly," says Braxton Jarrett, CEO of Clearleap, which provides web-based content management systems cable and Internet Protocol Television providers.
Jarrett says he has watched the television industry change drastically over the past 10 years, but never so quickly as right now. Second screen is right in the middle of that change.
Stelter has a line in his story that almost sounds old-fashioned fewer than two years later.
If viewers cannot be in the same room, the next best thing is a chat room or something like it.
It's not the "chat room" comment that I mean. It's the "If viewers cannot be in the same room ..." part. Because as I interviewed six of the sharpest tech minds thinking about second screen effect, I asked them all the same question: "Will the second screen and the first screen ever merge?"
No, says Alex Iskold, CEO of GetGlue, which had 1.7 million users "checking-in" to shows 13.5 million times in September. "If two people are in the room, you don't want to cram all of that information onto one screen."
So my wife and I may be watching TV together, but we're really in two different worlds -- transported away by my Droid phone and her iPad.
Second screen appears to be sticking around. I've written about how that has given television shows a new chance to measure audience engagement. But this phenomenon is so new that no one knows exactly how consumers will want to use it.
"There is no one silver bullet," says Somrat Niyogi, CEO of Miso, a social TV platform that's trying to answer that.
Right now the biggest tech beneficiaries of social TV will surprise no one: Facebook and Twitter. Because people were already talking about their lives on those platforms, it was natural they would be talking about television too. But, so far, that experience is a little like the Wild West.
"Everybody is talking about TV conversations, but where are they?" Iskold says. "They're drowned in a stream of tweets."
The next generation of second screen innovators are asking this: Beyond tweeting and liking, how do TV consumers want to engage? I checked in with up-and-comers Clearleap, Miso, GetGlue as well as established brands TVGuide.com and YouTube to hear about their best ideas. Here's what I came across:
Miso.com is connecting "Dexter" to its fans
Call it transmedia, call it producer-consumer interaction, Niyogi sees second screen adding value to the show itself. The first attempt at this is a partnership with both "Dexter" and DirecTV. Watch this brief explanation.
Niyogi says finding the right balance for each show -- how much a watcher can consume without getting overly distracted -- is the critical element.
"Dexter is a very lean-forward experience, it's a fairly intense show," Niyogi says. "In this case, it's about simplicity of sharing. For instance, people love quotes. When there's a great quote, it immediately comes up on your screen and you can share that."
For Miso to make this happen, the advancements are twofold and very distinct from one another. One is purely technological and involves the cable and satellite companies getting their content connected to the Internet, so direct communication between your first and second screen happens easily.
"The reason we're working with DirecTV is because they are pioneers in innovation in this space," Niyogi says. "A vast majority of their customers are going to have Internet-enabled boxes."
At the same time, producers and studios will need to start thinking about the second screen as a new platform not only for marketing, but content creation itself.
"What hasn't happened so far is stepping back and asking, 'How can we use this second screen to make the show better?'" Niyogi says. "It starts with the production company. You're going to see a lot of innovation happening that answers that question."
TVGuide.com: The Watchlist lets you dive in multiple directions
With 24 million unique visitors, TVGuide.com could have rested as a go-to website for TV viewers. But the company saw the second screen effect coming and they have built a platform that leverages its partnership with the print-based TV GUIDE Magazine.
"Our advantage," says Christy Tanner, executive vice president and general manager of TVGuide.com, "is that we have a wealth of information about television that goes back to nearly the beginning. So we're focused on a holistic and broader second screen experience."
Tanner says it's not just check-ins -- although those have grown 150% year-over-year since the Watchlist landed last October -- but it's having one site to read articles, check listings, watch your friends' Facebook and Twitter accounts. And when Tanner talks about the main purpose of the Watchlist, it gets back to a fundamental premise.
"It is to allow people to find something good to watch," Tanner says.
GetGlue.com is filtering the Twitter stream and improving rewards
Iskold says that quality over quantity is the much-needed quantum leap in second screen. Some people do that for themselves -- filtering who they follow when it comes to tube chatter. But that cuts deeply into the social aspect. So Iskold's team created an algorithm that looks at sentence stucture, grammar and keywords to fix the problem. Imagine being at a crowded party where your ears could pick up on the wittiest and most relevant conversation. That's what GetGlue is after.
"This all started because we wanted to be a digital water cooler," Iskold says. But we couldn’t do it, it was just complete noise. Now you can actually read very cool and interesting comments, because we distill the conversations and bring the best insights into the spotlight."
The other key improvement, Iskold says, is making rewards for watching television more meaningful.
"Rewarding people is key," he says. "We've made a lot of progress in this, but we're working to do more. What we know is that a badge that doesn't mean anything after awhile. What does is a little bit of that brand you like. So if you're a fan of "Mad Men," then you're going to get a little piece of that show when you check-in to it."
And then real rewards follow -- for example, GetGluers received 40 percent discounts at the Gap just for doing what they do.
"These are the incentives that make sense to customers," Iskold says.
Clearleap integrates social information right on the interface
Jarrett doesn't dispute the idea that second screen is here to stay. In fact, his service enables cable companies to send real-time information to social media networks. But imagine some of the basic second screen uses -- "What are my friends watching right now?" -- being built into the first screen interface.
"In the user interface you can get recommendations from a typical model like you might see on Netflix," Jarrett says, "but more interestingly, you can do things like plug-in personalization to see what your friends are watching and share what you're watching and do that in a way that is integrated directly into the television experience."
The YouTube remote and the video-on-video experience
Facebook and Twitter might get a lot of the attention when it comes to social TV watching, but YouTube has a major second screen presence as well.
"Our users are already using us as a second screen, particularly on mobile," says Francisco Varela, global head of Platform & Games Partnerships at YouTube. "We need to be able to bring new content or relevant content in that new environment."
Watching YouTube on your television is a key push toward that new environment, best understood by looking at YouTube Leanback. (More on this in the near future.) But in the next few years, as more television connects to the Internet, YouTube remote will enhance any TV-watching experience, Varela says.
"Let's say you're watching Glee and they're doing a song and you say, 'I haven't seen that Madonna video in ages,'" Valero says. "Pause the show, watch the video, and then go back to your Glee."
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Whatever good ideas come along, Iskold says, viewers are going to name the game this time.
"It all comes down to whether people will vote with those clicks," he says.
