Social TV coming of age

As pointed out at MediaTel Group’s recent “Internet Comes to TV 3″ breakfast event in association with Rovi, TV has always been social.

The panel were in agreement that some forms of social media will work very well around TV, but on a private screen rather than a shared screen, with a consensus that you don’t want your personal Facebook plastered on the 42” lounge screen.

Nigel Walley, managing director of Decipher, thinks that the recent launch of Zeebox has taken social TV to the next level. On a connected TV, the Twitter feed is currently the whole of Twitter. Zeebox is able to feed an automatically related Twitter feed to the programme you are watching onto your second screen device.

Nigel suggested that at the next level, perhaps Zeebox could enable small groups to chat rather than the whole of Twitter.

BBC media correspondent and event chairman Torin Douglas pointed out that if you look at BBC One’s Question Time on Twitter there are so many tweets flying in that it makes it impossible to follow.

Taking social on a step further, the next version of Microsoft XBox 360 Kinect is expected to have face recognition, so the device knows who is in the room. This also takes addressable advertising forward, allowing the games console to recognise those present and just serve advertisements appropriate to them.

But as David Brennan, founder of Media Native, points out, with all these technological advancements, privacy must be taken seriously as if trust is lost, it is very hard to regain.