Social TV Doesn't Have to be this Hard

NewTeeVee had an article the other day about the difficulties of Social TV features, and how we may be further away then we thought we were from having a truly viable solution from a user-standpoint.  Some of the distress comes from how to coordinate the social part of the process: how to type, how to get a group together, how to display conversation.

There are a couple of key words worth pointing out: conversation, engagement, lifestyle.  All of the functions of Social TV need to support these aspects of user-behavior.  After all, it wouldn’t be called “social” if these things weren’t inherent in the experience.

For instance, for interactions and typing, some services use the remote, which has proved difficult.  Not surprising.  I know how to flip to CBS on my remote easily.  It’s a whole different story if I’m trying to type “Did you just see that call on the tennis game?  That was ludicrous!” By the time I’m finished, the match is over.

A very important piece of this equation is to offer solutions that fit into the behavior of your users as seamlessly as possible. One solution? SMS.

I can’t commentate the tennis match easily on the remote. But I know how to text with the best of them, and so do most people.  In June, there were 135 billion text messages sent worldwide.  That’s an average of almost 500 text messages per mobile user per month.  Given those figures, you could assume that most people you meet on the street will be able to type on a phone a lot quicker than they can on the TV remote.

So why not integrate SMS, and other highly-used devices and platforms, into the Social TV experience?  Users are already communicating and conversing with them, so the adoption hurdle is more or less taken care of.

This is just one example of how expanding the toolkit can bring the industry closer to achieving an experience that our users will like and stick with.

What have you found that works or doesn’t work?  Are there any features that you love or that you’d like to see more of?