Social TV

The trend for using online social networks to talk about TV is increasing. Even when they are watching alone, people still want to talk about programmes and share their opinions with others, and a high proportion of the conversations in social media are around what people are watching. This is reflected in the recent proliferation of platforms designed around creating ‘Social TV’ experiences.

Why is this of interest to NoTube?

The theme of the one of the NoTube showcases is TV and the Social Web; technologies that can help people interact with each other while watching TV – whether that’s with people on the Web or in the same room.

By linking de-referencable URLs with social APIs, NoTube aims to provide the infrastructure to connect people, their friends, their activities, and their televisions in a suitably privacy-preserving way in order to make TV in the future a more enjoyable and interesting experience.

For example, by

Creating linkage points into social network discussions, as well as shared bookmarking and commenting systems
Using community features for smart sharing and discussions

What NoTube has done so far in this area

The focus of NoTube’s Beancounter prototype is to re-use a user’s existing activity data from social media sites to generate personal programme recommendations based on the user’s interests. This is based on the observation that a user should not have to explicitly tell any system what her preferences are, since a lot of data about these preferences are already available online; for example, in her social network profiles and ratings on YouTube and IMDB.

Meanwhile, our N-Screen prototype focuses on finding interesting niche video content and sharing these ‘hidden gems’ with friends when exploring an online collection as a group.

Future plans in NoTube

We are currently investigating the closer integration of online social activity, such as programme recommendations based on twitter trending, and real time interactivity such as voting.

Find out more