Austin Allen
Photo courtesy of The Noun Project
For Social Media Week in San Francisco (#SMWSF), Adobe held a panel on The Future of Social TV. Social video is described as when a viewer is engaging with a second screen while viewing TV.
Here are the key takeaways for today’s Social TV experience:
1. The best experience with media is with your friends. Social TV needs to solve a problem. What is that problem? How can TV still be social when your friends aren’t around to watch?
2. Marketers need to find a way to find you online and offer you something that adds value to your TV viewing experience.
3. Different genres will always create a different experience (not all genres might have the potential to be social).
The Future:
1. Will 2nd screen devices or the content itself become more central? Most of the panel agreed that the “socialness” of TV as it currently is, is due to the 2nd screen device. We can’t see this changing anytime soon. The future of social TV lies in how well the 2nd screen device is able to add value to a video, but it is also important for the content to be worth talking about. One panelist envisions that social TV will mean your device can automatically realize you are watching a certain show and offer premium content to go along with it!
2. Will social continue to be more prevalent with appointment TV: IE: news, sports, reality, season finales? or will on-demand content find it’s place with social? Social TV will always be more useful with appointment TV, Viewers want to watch and gossip as events unfold live. Although it is possible for someone to engage with on-demand content, it is most likely that someone else has seen that content and talked about it already.
3. Television won’t be disrupted, but rather expanded. It is clear that video is here to stay, but Social TV is still very young. New technologies could change and expand TV like we never would have imagined.
Are you a social TV viewer? What do you envision the future of social TV to look like?
Tags: 2nd screen device, Adobe, bars and tone, BARS+TONE, Digital Media, Media, San Francisco, social, Social Media Week, social tv, Technology, TV, twitter, Video
The Future of Social TV