I moderated a workshop on social TV at the UXTV conference a couple of weeks ago. Approximately 70 – 80 participants attended the workshop (I was expecting 20 – 30 based on the number of position papers that were submitted). Overall, it went pretty well and the participants were a nice mix from industry/academia and North America/Europe. The workshop was largely discussion–based, where the participants discussed different topics in smaller groups and then had a larger discussion with the larger group. I had planned on going through five different discussion topics but we only had time for three (the attendees were fairly talkative). Here’s a short summary of some of the discussions that took place:
Topic - Creating social experiences for interactive TV
Discussion questions:
How can TV-mediated social scenarios augment TV watching?
Who are the target users of social TV concepts?
- A lot of discussion about target users
- General assumption is that younger users will use social TV since they’re already on Facebook, MySpace, etc
- This assumption was challenged by several participants who felt that the elderly would have more use for social TV features since they watch more TV and their networks are smaller (so they may have a greater need to socialize via TV)
- Talk of the elderly then led to discussion about how social TV should be “simple” – the assumption that it should be simple was again challenged by another participant (older doesn’t always mean less technical)
- In retrospect, I should have had the participants define what they think social TV is because I think there are a lot of different notions about what it is – voice chat vs. text chat vs. polling vs. asynchronous features (e.g. recommendations, sharing TV history/DVR list, etc)
Topic - Social TV and the Social Web
Discussion questions:
What can interactive TV learn from the social web?
Where should social TV features live? Online? On the set-top box?
- One participant started off this segment of the discussion stating that we can’t really know what will with TV since social software is still pretty new and we don’t really know which sites will fail/succeed
- We then started talking about the limitations of the set-top box as a gateway to social TV
- No keyboard, are users willing to have a wireless keyboard on the coffee table next to the remote?
- TV isn’t an open network like the Internet – cable/satellite/IPTV providers aren’t going to open up their networks
- People think about their social networks not which of my friends have the same TV service as me
- TV is a shared device, nobody wants to login to their TV
- There was some discussion about how social TV features should live on the web instead
- Users already online using social sites, they wouldn’t have to recreate their networks (social network fatigue)
- Others felt that TV is more accessible – more people know how to use TVs and more people have access to TVs than computers/Internet. Limiting features to computer users may miss some users who could benefit from these features.
- One of the participants worked at CurrentTV and talked about their experiments of using Twitter with the presidential debates
Topic - Moving past prototypes into viewers’ homes
Discussion questions:
How can social TV concepts move from the prototype stage to actual products in viewers’ homes?
What are the technical, user experience, and business constraints that need to be solved?
- ROI came up a lot at this point. Without a good business model around social TV, it is hard to see where it would fit in the TV experience.