What is the state of social TV? A quick review of the most interesting facts. This presentation was given during the Ignite Global Week at the Social Media Week in Roma (February 9th, 2011)

1. 1)I am Livia Iacolare and I’m the social media coordinator for the Italian edition of Current
TV. I’m currently doing some researches on the so called “social tv” phenomenon and I’d
like to share my findings with you.

2. 2)The first question is “what’s social television?”. It’s anything that connects people
through television: it may be a special box set, an iPhone app or any particular technology
designed for that purpose.

3. 3)Actually TV itself has always been a social medium, because it creates a representation of
society as it is and aggregates a community around specific events that shape a common
identity.

4. 4)Moreover, we can watch TV while chatting with our friends, because TV content contains
breaks and pauses that allow us to focus our attention on something else without missing
anything.

5. 5)The development of technology also allowed us to have the so called two-screens experience,
whereby we can watch TV while using our laptop or smartphone to share our viewing
experience.

6. 6)A collective viewing experience is not necessarily a social experience. Is there anything
such as “social cinema”? I haven’t heard of it. We don’t Tweet from a theater while
watching a movie... Unless it’s a very bad movie or “The Tourist”.

7. 7)We don’t chat with our neighbor, unless we’re stupid and uneducated. That’s because the
location itself discourages interaction, due to established social rules that no one is
willing to violate.

8. 8)Now let's roll some social TV experiments: I want to mention what we did at Current to
cover US Presidential Elections in 2008: we were able to display Tweets on screen during
the presidential debates in USA. It was pretty cool!

9. 9)Currently there are iPhone and iPad apps that allow you to check into show (or rather
potato couch-ins): it’s basically the logic behind Foursquare applied to TV consumption.
Miso and GetGlue are the most popular ones.

10. 10)What are the pros? You check in and earn special badges, product discounts. What are the
cons? You have to perform in-app searches in order to find the show you are watching. They
still require too much effort.

11. 11)ABC made a step forward by creating an app that is able to sync up with what is going on
on TV just by listening to audio. This app works only for Grey’s Anatomy, the most popular
show of the network.

12. 12)Once the app is ready the iPad screen animates and shows polls, additional information and
content that is related to what you are watching. It also allows you to share your
activity on social networks and message your friends.

13. 13)Only two weeks ago some people in California launched IntoNow, an app that is like Shazam
for TV shows. It instantly recognizes what show you are watching just by listening to
audio. It covers 130 channels of live broadcasting.

14. 14)Now, thanks to these apps we can collect interesting information about how many people are
watching our content on TV... But what about the sentiment? What do they think about what
they see on TV?

15. 15)About 10 days ago Bluefin Lab released a technology based on MIT researches which enables
content producers to track in real time and at scale what people are saying on social
networks about every single piece of content.

16. 16)...which actually brings me to talk about the reliability of traditional TV rating
systems. Do you know how many families in Italy are actually monitored by the the official
TV rating system? Only 5163. I’m sorry... how many people live in Italy? 60 millions?
That’s not even 5% of the Italian population!

17. 17)Social TV might actually provide us with better ways to calculate TV ratings in the
future. How will that be possible? Well, I believe that the real change will arrive once
all TV sets will be connected to the Internet.

18. 18)Information about the audience will be much more detailed, to the point that we will see
contextual ads the way we do now on the Web or rather extremely targeted ads that only
appeal to the people who are watching TV.

19. 19)The natural evolution of social TV would be a more sophisticated on-demand TV whereas the
system is able to automatically pick the shows that you like and also suggests the ones
you might like or that your friends like.

20. 20)So that’s pretty much what I was able to share with you in 5 minutes. The evolution of
social TV is currently in progress, so if you are interested in this topic feel free to
check out my blog and follow me on twitter. Thank you!