The Second Screen is the Social Screen
At Socialbomb, we’ve worked on several different types of social TV apps, from sharing rich media related to time-shifted content in True Blood Live Feed, to co-viewing of live television in Skins Captionbomb. Unsurprisingly, all of our applications have been highly social - not just including a like button and a tweet button, but actually built from the ground up to integrate users’ friends and other viewers into the experience.
The 20th century involved, in some ways, a cultural shift toward getting accustomed to sitting in front of a screen. Whether it was a movie screen, our television or our computer, we spent a century learning how to sit in front of a glowing rectangle instead of a fire. And those rectangles became increasingly personal and interactive. The pull of time was toward lean-forward.
So far, the 21st century seems like it will be about learning to interact with multiple screens simultaneously, all of them personalized, all of them aware of each other. Today we’re starting with two screens, most commonly a smartphone and a television. You can imagine that, decades from now, when nearly every surface is a screen, this multi-screen literacy we’re developing will be a vital skill.
So how do we increase personalization? One way is with sensors, as we’ve seen each generation of smartphone become more and more aware of its context in the world. But that’s about it, not us. The way that we increase personalization for the user, right now, is social.
Our primitive lizard brains aren’t so equipped for modern technology. Subconsciously, we’ve developed a deep relationship between our friends and family, whom we use our smartphones to communicate with, and the phones themselves. Logically, that relationship extends to other things we do on our phones, and, combined with a cultural drive to bond over media, makes our second screens the ideal place to gather our friends and discuss the latest episode of Mad Men. We were doing this via text messages, emails, and tweets years before we had specialized apps for it, and we’ll continue to use those channels as long as they remain satisfying, often to the exclusion of any kind of official app.
There’s a lot of experimentation going on in the second screen space. No one’s nailed the experience so well that they’ve become a clear thought leader, let alone a market leader. It’s a question of what users want, what content owners can provide, and what technology makes possible. But the answer is most certainly social. It will look less like a DVD bonus disc with a like button, and more like a new software platform for social media, in the most “media” centric meaning of the term, providing deep integration of viewers into the content experience.
If you’re in NYC, come by our offices to talk about social media on the second screen at tonight’s SocialTV Meetup!
-Adam
