Just what is happening with social TV?

One of the most hotly contended areas of social media is social TV. We seem to be waiting on tenterhooks for someone to invent ‘the thing’ that successfully makes TV viewing a  truly social experience, integrating functionality and content from social networks. We’re starting to see attempts at this, but also a lot of failures too as people try it without truly understanding the medium.

Xbox have made the most amount of noise on this recently, when they added Twitter and Facebook to the Xbox 360 this month. Boxee have also tried to crack social TV, by bringing you a range of social network functions right to your TV screen through their free software. Impressive technology, but takeup hasn’t been wide enough to signify a breakthrough in social TV.We also already have a computer and a TV, we don’t need to bring a third element into the mix.  Broadcasters have also made moves to integrate social media and TV. Fox tried this earlier in the year, by overlaying a Twitter feed into a rerun of Fringe and Glee. The consensus was generally that it was a bit of a failure. Hopefully some lessons have been learned : not least that the majority of their viewers didn’t even want Tweets on their TV screen.

I think the issue lies in the fact that we’re looking for someone to crack something that will never work. We need to stop looking at the TV screen to provide the answers ; I simply don’t think social media can ever be successfully intergrated with TV viewing and this isn’t down to any technological limitations, rather a reflection of our behaviour. TV is, ultimately, an inclusive experience, physically bringing people together as they gather round the screen. Social networking is a different community experience entirely. We’ve built up our own communities online and this doesn’t translate to a physical viewing experience. The problem is that you can’t bring your own community online when others will be watching with you. What I might want to see from my social media community is not necessarily what the person sitting next to me wants to see.

Obviously, not everyone watches TV together, but I think this is one of the biggest obstacles in social TV. I personally like watching something on telly, then dipping in and out of my social network community to comment on what I’m watching. I like doing this selectively, I’m not sure I want the continual intrusion of Twitter streams into a TV show. For me, the answer lies not in the TV, but on our computer. To date, the most successful integration of social and TV in my opinion, was the live streaming of Obama’s inauguration speech, which included comments from Facebook. This encapsulated a major breakthrough in real-time TV and it seems to have sparked an ultimately pointless race to be the one that replicated this on our TV screens.

It worked because not only was it an historic moment and it was fascinating to see a live commentary on this ‘from the people’, but because I was already on my computer, updating Twitter while flicking from one screen to the next. It was complementary to my experience, rather than an intrusion on a TV viewing experience. It also comes down to the event itself. If I tweet while watching TV, it’s almost exclusively on ‘real’ events (sport, news etc..) rather than drama. With TV we still require a suspension of disbelief : something that I think is broken when you interspers commentary from the ‘real world’. I think this is also why the Fox experiment failed. It also held such resonance because we were all keenly aware of how readily Obama had embraced social media throughout the whole campaign. It was fitting and natural that social media would play a major part in his official inauguration.

Social TV is still the reserve of the tech elite – it’s emerged from our existing practice of ‘one eye on the screen, one eye on our Twitter feed’. The thing is, I quite like having my laptop perched on my knees, selectively participating in my online community. I like it because sometimes I can shut the computer and completely switch off. I don’t feel a need to have social commentary on every aspect of my daily life. This anticipation for someone to finally crack social TV is ultimately fruitless :  I think we’re looking for a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.