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• 15-Sep-2009 by Philip Hunter
• IBC delivers mixed verdict for social TV
• IBC News

Social TV is big news at IBC 2009 but is it a hit, or is it hype?

A walk around IBC’s seemingly endless aisles reveals a glut of solutions for social TV and at first sight plenty of enthusiasm from the floor. But drill a bit deeper and the reaction is more nuanced, with plenty of scepticism over the scope for social interaction via the TV to generate significant direct revenue for operators and content providers in the near future. Quite simply many people go into passive mode when they watch TV and if they want to interact with friends and recommend the programme they are watching they are more likely to pick up their mobile and call them or send a text. At least that is what the cynics say.

Yet social TV has already made some impact around the edges and its longer term potential is too strong to be ignored.   In any case social TV needs to be seen in its broader context as the next generation of service improving content access and enriching the whole consumer experience, according to Tracy Geist, SVP of Market Development at Open TV, which is showing a range of interactive TV technologies at IBC, including an integrated search function that provides seamless access to content across multiple sources including broadcast and over the top.  “Social networking is about enhancing the user experience by creating a more personal and relevant layer of interactivity on top of existing TV services,” said Geist. “This translates to better content recommendations, simpler search & discovery and better integration of multiplatform content. Social networking is about recreating and improving the TV conversation.”

Extended search will be the most compelling aspect of social TV, suggested Geist, highlighting OpenTV’s big idea of mood based search based on keywords such as “funny”, “sad”, or horror”, which could be combined with standard user preferences such as particular actors or film directors.

The idea of social networking as something users will engage in before rather than during TV is shared by Trusted Opinion, the leading Social Recommendations Network, which announced availability of its social networking TV product for IPTV middleware providers at IBC. “We believe TV watching is an inherently passive experience,” agreed Trusted Opinion’s COO and co-founder Todd Greene.  “However, deciding what to watch, and browsing opinions of friends and others about content, engaging in games around the content (trivia, contests, etc.) is a natural extension of the TV.  In fact, it's already what millions of people do online...we just offer that same experience on TV.”

Some other vendors at IBC are taking a more bullish line, insisting that social TV has a greater future than just as an extension of the EPG. “I believe that the actual TV programmes should incorporate social elements,” said Michael Lantz, CEO of Accedo Broadband, which launched App Store just before IBC, enabling consumers to access favourite IPTV applications directly in the living room with a remote control, including games and social other ingredients such as recommendation. “It might be a “Fan Club” for certain shows or a totally new way to create TV by including the viewers in the show format. We have only seen the beginning,” Lantz added.

Lantz highlighted significant interest in use of the TV for games that take advantage of large high definition displays combined with a suitable user interface, given that most current remote controls were not designed for interactive engagement. Indeed a number of vendors are demonstrating novel interfaces at IBC, with Philips showing its uWand technology allowing users to interact with graphical objects at the screen by pointing at them.

Other vendors are still backing the standard remote, extending its utility through software. This approach has been taken by Nagravision with its widget publishing platform debuted at IBC, allowing operators in effect to drip feed sanitized portions of the Internet to subscribers for access via graphical icons on screen. "The widgets in our new publishing platform bring manageable 'chunks' of the internet to the screen of customers' TV's,” said Yves Pitton, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development at Nagravision.

Social networking will only succeed in the long term if it brings benefits to all parties – consumers, operators, content owners and advertisers.  “For operators it will deliver a larger portfolio of content and applications for less work, while content providers will benefit by avoiding having to port the content to all platforms themselves, and for advertisers the gains will come later,” said Accedo’s Lantz. “But once the volumes are there, it will provide new possibilities of actually interacting with the marketing message and driving revenues directly on the TV device.”

Perhaps it will be TV that comes to social networking rather than the other way round, as witnessed by the phenomenal success of BBCiPlayer, which was recently voted as the most desirable service for mobiles by teenagers in a survey by analyst group CCS Insight. Food for operators to digest here perhaps?

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