iTV has had a huge impact on all areas of television research, from production, and delivery to discovery and enrichment of television content and communications.

The delivery of TV media, as discussed in an earlier post, is no longer limited to one, static device in the home. Set top boxes (STBs) from Sky or BT, Over The Top (OTT) video / media services like youtube or vimeo, and the increasing use of smartphones, PSPs and other mobile devices has fragmented the experience of TV viewing into a multitude of discrete media delivery contexts.

For example, this video by the German design firm syzygy shows an consumer-centric overview of the technologies and interaction scenarios currently available in iTV. Simply put: the user controls the TV with a fancy remote (based on an iPad or tablet), which synchronises content, games and communications between ‘friends’, with product placement and advertising.

Another significant area of research in iTV is the use of network communications technology to enhance the usability of Electronic Programme Guides (EPGs), which, faced with ever increasing amounts of available content, present significant challenges to broadcasters and consumers to highlight and recommend appropriate content. More sophisticated, browser-like iTV interfaces and devices have opened up the possibility of using techniques for content navigation and selection derived from social networks and other web services.

For example, vidque.com uses a twitter-like user interaction model of users’ personal ‘streams’ of content (in twitter, 140 characters of text), to share videos. By watching and posting videos, each person’s viewing habits become a channel, which other users can watch and ‘follow’, providing a more personalised and network-centric alternative to the a-priori genre or time-based list format of most EPGs. Vidque incites users to ‘curate’ their streams of videos, expressing something about their tastes and interests, creating another mechanism for them to project their identity into the social network through their choice of media.

iTV’s impact on TV production has only recently started to propose new business models for how media production is funded. For example, independent producers
such as Robert Greenwald, whose politically charged documentaries have found it hard to gain funding from traditional studios or broadcasters, have used the web to connect directly with media consumers who are happy to ‘pre-buy’ the film on DVD to fund its production. Many more of these ‘crowd funded’ projects are being produced in this way via services such as Kickstarter.com.

As well as funding, iTV has also enabled other, more participatory ways for viewers to participate in TV production. For example Resonant Object is a new science fiction TV series that involved viewers in an expanded narrative via an Augmented Reality Game (ARG), happening in various different channels. Their involvement may extend from sitting in front of a TV to participating in a mobile phone-based game or even attending live events and contributing audiovisual content to what becomes part of the TV show.

Where are the Joneses was a pioneering project by David Bausola at Imagination, which got a brand (Ford in this case) to fund a soap opera which was scripted collaboratively by viewers of the sohw, participating on a public wiki. Their scripts were then produced by a professoinal crew and distributed via Youtube.

The fact that a brand like Ford funded Where are the Joneses demonstrates that this is a viable and potentially very disruptive business model. Rather than Ford paying an advertising agency to do product placement in an established TV show or film, they simply directly commissioned the use of a existing web platforms (wikidot, wordpress and youtube) to enable the voluntary user-generated scripting of the show, and funded the professionals to produce it, demonstrating how the advertising and broadcasting industry could be disintermediated by this kind of TV production process.

More generally, the infrastructure of iTV lends itself more to a network paradigm of communication than traditional broadcast. Opportunities abound for the enrichment of an expanded TV experience, in which viewers, broadcasters and other interest groups can participate in a ongoing conversations about media. Opening up the mass of these conversations about TV (via social media and other networked communications channels) that have always been an important part of the viewer experience, drives the changes to how TV and media is being produced, discovered and delivered.

A recent example of how facilitating people’s interactions with each other can enrich understanding of media is the Berlin-based start-up soundcloud. Started by music professionals who had been used to sending each other audio files by email, and were dissatisfied with the inability to discuss and enrich the media they were sending each other in any level of detail.

In the slide above you can see that comments on the audio track are embedded in the waveform of the audio. Their comments actually segment that track into sections that can be seen to relate to each comments, giving a much more granular set of annotations than is possible via email or on other media sharing platforms such as youtube, where comments are attached to entire media files.

A quick comparison of the quality and tone of comments on soundcloud and youtube could suggest that having to take the time to comment on a specific segment of an audio file encourages more context-relevant and incisive discussion (or discourages other kinds of comments and flames). This ‘in-content commentary’ mechanism also provides much more metadata about what the commenter is talking about, because it relates to a specific segment within the media file, which may have a very different meaning or reference than the rest of the track.

Soundcloud is a great example of how how people can be enabled to mobilise networked media in order to interact with each other, and how that interaction can be harnessed to enrich the experience and annotate the media being discussed.

So much of the effort in iTV research seems focused on trying to understand and profile TV viewers to then try to guess at and satisfy their established tastes. Soundcloud, instead, focuses on stimulating people’s interactions, using media (text/comments), via another piece of media(an audio file), as a way of understanding that media, and enhancing that media in terms of how it can be indexed, discovered, shared and re-used for further interactions.

This approach, which seems comparatively under-researched, highlights another possibility: that of investigating people’s conversations by looking at how they deploy, share and interject text, images, videos etc. in their interactions around other media (eg. TV).

That is the aim of this research project: to investigate mechanisms and heuristics for harnessing discussion between viewers of iTV, as a way of understanding the media they are experiencing and interacting around, and at the same time, looking at how they are deploying media to interact with one another as a way of understanding their conversations.

In short: understanding media through how it’s used in conversation, and conversation through how it uses media.

I’m working at British Telecom at their research centre at Adastral Park, on a project called ‘Social Film Club’. I’m working with a fantastic group there in the Future Applications team, who are all working on new ideas about the possibilities of creating new services and products with the merge of Television and telecommunications infrastructures.

‘Social Film Club’ refers to a whole set of ideas and technologies that BT have already been working with. It builds on work they’ve already been doing with ‘Social TV’, a catch-all term to describe Interactive TV (IPTV) systems that support and extend the sociable aspects of TV viewing {{1}} – both co-present and remotely.

Since both media and communications now use the same IP network infrastructure, television viewing itself is no longer a clearly distinct activity with a specific domestic device and context. When people say they are ‘Watching TV’ they may mean that they are using a specific piece of hardware (‘The TV’ may refer to largest screen in the house, although the same video content may be accessible on smartphones, PCs and tablets). They may be talking about engaging in a set of relationships defined by rights and contracts (for example, a TV
subscription to a specific company with rights to broadcast live sports events){{2}}, and the act itself may involve the interaction of a variety of communications devices and services beyond the time-honoured combination of TV, remote and sofa.

This lack of clarity as to the status and activity of television in a networked media environment coincides with an often-cited ‘fragmentation’ of the ‘traditional’ media environment {{3}}, in which the mass viewership used to be served by a tightly integrated media industry where infrastructure and content production, promotion, delivery and evaluation were all orchestrated by a limited number of organisations.

Cultural ‘reception studies’ of TV soap operas prior to this so-called fragmentation highlighted the social function of TV, such as soap operas being used as a touch point for interpersonal conversations {{4}}, or as a means of social group formation and identification (or counter-identification) {{5}}.

No longer having a constitutive binding ‘sameness’ to what people watch, providing a foil for collective conversation and identity may have contributed to the kinds of social/cultural isolation Putnam discusses in ‘Bowling Alone’, but one of the promises of Social TV is that IP Communications have created new ways for people interact with each other through and with television.

So the broad subject of my research is how the infrastructure IPTV can be mobilised for interpersonal and group interaction.

[[1]] For early examples of use of the term, see Coppens, T., Trappeniers, L., Godon, M.,: AmigoTV: towards a social TV experience. In: Proc. EuroITV 2004, U. of Brighton (2004), and Oehlberg, L., Ducheneaut, N., Thornton, J.D., Moore, R.J., Nickell, E.: Social TV: Designing for Distributed, Sociable Television Viewing. In: Proc. EuroITV 2006, Athens U. of Economics and Business (2006) 251–259 [[1]] [[2]] For example, using the BBC Iplayer to watch ‘catch-up’ TV does not require a ‘TV license’, whereas watching a simultaneous broadcast requires that viewers buy one or face a £1000 fine. (see http://iplayerhelp.external.bbc.co.uk/help/playing_tv_progs/tvlicence) [[2]] [[3]] See Putnam, Robert. 2000. Bowling Alone. New York: Simon and Schuster. [[3]] [[4]] For example, in Sonia Livinstone’s viewer surveys, something like 40% of participants reported that their soap watching was to provide a regular topic of conversation with friends: Livingstone S M (1988) Why People Watch Soap Operas: An Analysis of the Explanations of British Viewers European Journal of Communication Vol 3 #1London: Sage [[4]] [[5]] Ien Ang’s famous studies of Dutch watchers of the American soap ‘Dallas’ suggested that rather than identifying with the glamorous lifestyle of Texas oil billionaires deicted in the soap, Dutch viewers actually watched while engaging in form of a collective critical distancing. Ang I (1985) Watching Dallas: Soap opera and the melodramatic imagination. London: Methuen [[5]]

It’s my second day at BT’s Future Applications research lab, and I’m sat at my cool 1990’s style ovoid lozenge office desk, doing a broad web-survey of Social TV applications. I’ve just been given my hall pass that allows me in and out of the automatic security doors, each one bearing a sign (in the italic variety of the ubiquitous BT font) saying:

“Please keep noise to a minimum as you walk through this office”.

I’m snorting, wheezing and squeaking with supressed laughter. The researcher sitting opposite me is giving me worried glances, and I can sense heads, peripherally visible over partitions and banks of computer screens, turning and peering in my direction.

While looking at some prototypes of ‘Avatar Party Mode’, a kind of ‘Virtual Sofa’ service available on the Sky Player foR Xbox Live, I had made the mistake of putting on my headphones and calling up some episodes of one of my favourite late 20th Century TV late-night TV shows, Mystery Science Theatre 3000.

The premise of Joel Hodgson’s MST3K, for the uninitiated, is that as part of an evil scientific experiment, ‘Joel Robinson’ and his robot sidekicks are trapped on a deep-space asteroid and forced to watch B-movies, where, represented as cinema-seated silhouettes at the bottom of the screen, they heckle and wisecrack their way through the film.

I am certainly not the first to make this association. Social TV researchers have turned to MST3K’s presentation style as a model for an acceptable user interface to indicate the co-presence remote viewers and even enable chat-partner selection on the bottom third of a TV screen (Ducheneaut, Moore, Oehlberg, Thornton & Nickell, 2008){{1}}, or as an example of potential applications/services that invite viewers to overlay user generated content and republish personalised video streams over IP (Banerjee et. al., 2002){{2}}. In cultural critique, film and television studies, MST3K has also been invoked as a perfect example of a ‘meta-show’, and used to illustrate how ironic re-appropriation of pop-cultural artefacts can express aesthetic dissent (King, 2007) {{3}}.

The CollaboraTV project implemented this kind of interface as the premise for their ground-breaking Social TV application. They even did some viewer expeience research contrasting this kind of ‘virtual audience’ interface with traditional text-chat underneath video playback, and found that the virtual audience increased audience engagement and enjoyment{{4}}.

In terms of interface, ‘user experience’, and it’s choice of B-movie ‘sociable’ media{{5}}, MST3K seems to offer a useful set of guidelines for Social TV design and research, primarily because the acceptance of it’s visual design and irreverant tone was established when it became a popular cult TV programme. But on a more abstract level, MST3K offers inspirational design patterns for Social TV because of how it constantly shifts focus between the viewer and the viewed, opening up endless imaginative, performative and conversational opportunities.

This shifting of focus foregrounds an aspect of television viewing that is often passed over by cultural critique of the ‘dumbing down’ of TV audiences (Bourdieu & Ferguson, 1998){{6}}. Ien Ang wrote about this in her often-cited book ‘Watching Dallas'{{7}}, where she argues that part of the enjoyment of watching the show for global (in her case Dutch) audiences, far from aspirational identification with the camped-up millionaire Texans, is a smug awareness that ‘other people’ are watching the show in earnest, but that for ‘us’, the show’s tastes and values are an object of collective ridicule. Bad TV, in this way, can be seen as a possible object of counter-identification, forming social groups of collective dislike.

Perhaps a successful deisgn for SocialTV could start with a ‘dislike’ button, and build it’s sociality on the collective activites of booing, heckling and throwing things at the screen.

[[1]]Ducheneaut, N., Moore, R., Oehlberg, L., Thornton, J., & Nickell, E. (2008). Social TV: Designing for Distributed, Sociable Television Viewing. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 24(2), 136-154. doi: 10.1080/10447310701821426. [[1]] [[2]]Banerjee, S., Brassil, J., Dalal, A., & Lee, S.-ju, others. (2002). CDNs for personal broadcasting and individualized reception. In Proceedings of WCW. Citeseer. Retrieved March 29, 2011, from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.7.7964. [[2]] [[3]]King, J. (2011). Mystery Science Theater 3000 , Media Consciousness , and the Postmodern Allegory of the Captive Audience Source : Journal of Film and Video , Vol . 59 , No . 4 ( WINTER 2007 ), pp . 37-53 Published by : University of Illinois Press on behalf of the Univer. Film, 59(4), 37-53. [[3]] [[4]] Harrison, C., & Amento, B. (2007). CollaboraTV: Using asynchronous communication to make TV social again. Adjunct Proceedings of EuroITV2007, 218–222.
[[4]] [[5]] In their paper cited above, Ducheneaut, Moore et al. also point to MST3K as a reference point for their observation that some types of content (such as a B-movie) tends to free up people’s attention for more discussion and interaction. [[5]] [[6]]Bourdieu, P., & Ferguson, P. P. (1998). On television and journalism. Pluto Press. [[6]] [[7]] Ang, I. (1985). Watching Dallas: Soap opera and the melodramatic imagination (p. 148). Routledge Kegan & Paul. [[7]]