Social TV and The Second Screen

Stowe Boyd, Work Talk Research with foreword by Gerd Leonhard, The Futures Agency

(cc) Work Talk Research and The Futures Agency

Foreword by Gerd Leonhard

Let me recap the obvious: the Internet is now actually converging with television (or vice versa), the desktop computer as the most important place for entertainment or content is nally fading away, and mobile devices are where we consume - I prefer to say experience - most of what we want see or hear. Scheduled media is on its way out (except for sports, other live events and, maybe, news), and the crowd is now actually moving into the cloud, whether its for music, TV, movies, books or education. SociaLocalMobileVideoCloud if you like twitteresque morphings. This is huge, and its happening now, and soon with the BRICs in the drivers seat, as soon as they get enough bandwidth and slightly higher GDPs. Add the mind-boggling proliferation of ever cheaper and faster mobile devices, ubiquitous mobile/social media, location-based services and cloud-computing to the mix and you have the makings of an entirely new television business. The bottom line: disrupt or be disrupted. The overlap of social media and TV represents a huge opportunity for those that truly understand and internalize, embrace and partake in these changes, and that welcome this dawning networked, interdependent and many-to-many society. As Marshall McLuhan said in 1976 (!), the global village is not about peace, harmony and quiet, but about considerable debate and involvement in each others affairs less about control but a lot more about engagement and trust (which does not sound like the TV we all grew up with, does it?). Those that yearn for the clock to be turned back to the days of (literally) owning the consumer by controlling the means of distribution, of top-down media, schedules and xed release windows, might end up utterly bafed and quickly sidelined, like a twig that is thrown into a fast-moving river.

Gerd Leonhard

The overlap of social media and TV represents a huge oppor tunity for those that truly understand and internalize, embrace and partake in these changes, and that welcome this dawning networked, interdependent and manyto-many society.

By no means the rise of social TV and the second screen means that the TV business as we knew it until the astronomic rise of tablets and mobile content devices is actually safer from the utter disruptions of the mobile-digital age that we have witnessed in the music industry, for example; as clueless as musics leaders may have proven to be. But as the TV industry is probably a bit closer to its users and viewers, as it is more technology-savvy and arguably slightly less monopolistic and more attuned to what the people formerly known as audience actually want, rather than what they are told to want. This rapidly accelerating Internet-TV convergence might turn out to be TVs saving grace. Social TV and second screen business models are only the rst real embodiment of this Web-TV

Social TV and second screen business models are only the first real embodiment of this WebTV convergence, and therefore they will bring up all of the tough issues inherent in any kind of convergence.

convergence, and therefore they will bring up all of the tough issues inherent in any kind of convergence: who is allowed to do this or that, when and where, how will new revenue streams be invented and realized (as traditional revenues may decline or at least fragment), who will be the gatekeepers, when and where, and so on. Food-chain conicts, galore. To me, it looks like we are moving towards an era of utter interdependence rather than continued or increased independence. The future is probably highly collaborative, uid and organic, or it just wont happen, at all. Collaborate or die. Social media is not a better mousetrap, and social tools are not convenient g leaves that largely asocial corporations can hide behind. Rather, we are now entering the age of the Social Operating System, of the mobile-centric user and prosumer. An age where interactivity, peer-to-peer exchange, transparency and openness matter a lot more than what brand your TV is, or what channel your show is on, for that matter. This is good news for everyone, I believe. In the spirit of Gaston Berger who said the purpose of talking about the future is to disturb the presentI hope that you enjoy this white paper and spread it as far as it will go.

About This Report

Social TV is a major disruption in the rapidly changing television industry. In this report, Stowe Boyd, managing director of Work Talk Research, and a researcher-at-large at The Futures Agency, characterizes the forces at work in the emergence of social TV, presents a framework for understanding the changes that are already at work in the industry, and proles some of the most innovative companies in the sector. This report is made available under creative commons licensing: not for prot, with attribution, without modication.

About The Author

Stowe Boyd is a futurist, and an internationally recognized authority on social tools, and their impact on media, business, and society. He is chief researcher at Work Talk Research, the editor of Work Talk Reports, and a researcher-at-large at The Futures Agency. He writes on social tools and the future of work at his blog (stoweboyd.com), and is a contributing writer for GigaOMs Pro service. Stowe has presented at numerous conferences and events worldwide, including Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, GigaOM Net:Work, Reboot, Next, Mesh, Shift, Lift, SIBOS, Defrag,TEDxMidAtlantic and SxSW.

Stowe Boyd

Social TV and The Second Screen

The Rise Of Social TV

We are witnessing a rapid, technological and societal transformation of the medium of television. The combination of several recent skyrocketing innovations particularly always-on connectivity and the use of increasingly capable mobile phones and tablets have led to a profound shift in the way that people experience television. This transition is closely tied to the rise of the social web, and the behaviors and expectations that web-savvy television users bring to their rapidly changing relationship with television. As just one example of the ways that these advanced communication tools are shifting our understanding of the experience of television, note that I use the term television users instead of the more conventional viewers. As these super smart mobile devices and social tools come into the context of TV viewing the experience becomes social, and the images ickering on the TV screen become a backdrop to the users social interactions, and no longer the dominating center of attention. This shift lines up with the transition of TV from a rivalrous to an increasingly non-rivalous medium. Most media when initially invented are rivalrous, meaning that they conict with others, and as a result people would experience one at a time. When radio rst came out, people would listen to it in a group, silently, as if in church. After a decade or so, youngsters had shifted to running the radio in the background while doing other things. The same relaxation has happened with TV viewing. TV had become fairly non-rivalrous at least a decade ago, and the emergence of the social web and the use of extremely capable mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets, typied by the iPhone and iPad, respectively, has led to the phenomenon of the second screen. TV users are increasingly likely to be using multiple devices at the same time. For example, watching a conventional TV screen while texting a friend on mobile phone, or discussing the show or game with friends on Facebook. The transition to a multi-device user experience allowing timesliced viewing of TV content and socializing

The transition to a multidevice user experience allowing timesliced TV viewing and socializing is the single most revolutionary aspect of social TV.

Social TV and The Second Screen

is the single most revolutionary aspect of social TV. And, as it turns out, more time is spent looking at the other screens than watching the TV, which changes everything. This shift from TV content as the center of the television world, to a supporting role in a social TV era lines up with Kevin Kellys observation, that The central economic imperative of the new economy is to amplify relationships. And what is happening in the transition to social TV can be viewed as a shift to a new economy, and how that is manifested in the new form factor of social TV. Before we can get into the whys and wherefores of social TV, though, its probably useful to step back and reect a bit on the social revolution that has taken place online in the past ten years, to set the context for the maelstrom that TV is headed for.

The central economic imperative of the new economy is to amplify relationships. - Kevin Kelly

The Social Revolution

The web is the largest, most expensive, and most complex built object of all time, and we dont even know how much energy it consumes, let alone how many servers it has, web pages it holds, or the half life of the content embedded in it. In the distant future, anthropologists will consider the web the dening artifact of our era, as we today think of the pyramids and ancient Egypt, or Chin dynastys Great Wall. The biggest surprise about the webs growth may be the degree to which it is dominated by people socializing. When the web was just beginning, very few people thought about social tools, or projected their eventual dominance of our interactions online. In fact, when I rst started writing and speaking about social tools in 1999, I suggested that these tools were intended to shape culture rather than to speed up communications or enable e-commerce, and I faced a great deal of skepticism. But the web is dominated by social interaction, and today Facebook, Twitter and a thousand other services literally support billions of users every day, spending a growing proportion of their time there, for social interaction, work, shopping, entertainment, and play.

The biggest surprise about the webs growth may be the degree to which it is dominated by people socializing.

Social TV and The Second Screen

One more recent innovation has been the widespread adoption of streaming: a user experience design

metaphor based on the representation of a stream of updates carrying information to the social tool user. One aspect of streaming is the concept that users can follow others, and then those others updates

The open follower model has become the dominant social motif on the web today, and as a result plays a large role in shaping the cultural mores that underlie the foundation of sociality online, and in the emerging web culture of those who are increasingly habituated to the form factors of the social web.

text, photos, bookmarks, check-ins, whatever stream from those followed to those following. And, in many social tools, such as Twitter, this following is open: that means that as a default, anyway a user can follow any other user without having to get permission from the followed. The open follower model has become the dominant social motif on the web today, and as a result plays a large role in shaping the cultural mores that underlie the foundation of sociality online, and in the emerging web culture of those who are increasingly habituated to the form factors of the social web. The adoption of social tools has been paralleled by two other major trends: the development of todays high bandwidth data networks and low cost broadband has led to an always on state of affairs in the advanced economies that underlie the explosive growth of mobile, and the emergence of extremely capable, GPS and touch-enabled mobile devices. As a result, users are able to use mobile devices to accomplish almost anything that they can do with stationary devices, and they do so at all times and in all places. These mutually-reinforcing trends ubiquitous connectivity, mobile devices, and the explosion of the social revolution online are converging to transform the fundamentals of media. I characterize that as the transition into liquid from solid, and so, we are seeing the emergence of liquid media. This will change media institutions and business models, and will raise the role of curation to a new, central importance. We are seeing this rst in the open web, in blogging and other journalistic media forms, but it will spread inexorably out into every niche of the media world, and its happening to TV, right now.

Social TV and The Second Screen

From Old To New TV

The term TV carries many meanings. TV is broadcast in various frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum, and a wide variety of devices have been constructed to operate around the transmission and decoding of signals in those frequencies, and so the term TV can in fact refer to that spectrum. It is the device in the corner of your living room that captures those signals, and decodes them for you, or, nowadays, is more likely to get a signal transmitted through a cable network, and from coax screwed into the back. In general, when people talk about TV they are referring to the medium of communication that the physics of TV broadcasting makes possible. And, although our civilization might have come up with dozens of forms that medium of communication might take, principally it is a form of entertainment, showing news, sporting events, sit coms, and reality TV shows, in a swirling, kaleidoscopic hodgepodge. And on free TV broadcast or paid TV involves a relatively large proportion of ad minutes per hour. We are at an inection point, where TV becomes another corner of human civilization that has fallen into the black hole called the web. As a result, in the next few years at least in the advanced economies of the world the way we experience TV will be changed profoundly, and the meaning of the word will change in corresponding ways.

We are at an inflection point, where TV becomes another corner of human civilization that has fallen into the black hole called the web. As a result, in the next few years at least in the advanced economies the way we experience TV will be changed profoundly, and the meaning of the word will change in corresponding ways.

Old TV
Standalone TV Broadcast Centralized Monopolies Scarcity Economics Content Centric

New TV
Swarm Of Devices Social And Participatory Distributed Marketplaces Abundance Economics User Experience Centric

Social TV and The Second Screen Standalone TV versus Swarm Of Devices

The overwhelming majority of mobile devices sold in the US 80% or more in the last three months of 2011 were smart phones, with touch screens, large high resolution displays and data connectivity. Likewise, millions of tablets are being bought each month, as the world adopts a new set of behaviors around always on, mobile devices. No surprise, people are using their mobile devices while watching TV. A Razorsh/Yahoo study showed the following: 94% do email, IM, social network, or talk via phone while watching 80% are using their mobile phone, and 15% are using their phone the entire time. The old rivalrous mode of TV viewing principally watching

the plain vanilla standalone TV, and perhaps talking with others actually in the room is effectively dead, except with people who have not adopted mobile devices: a rapidly diminishing demographic. There is research demonstrating that over 75% of users who have access to mobile devices or a laptop while
source Neilsen 2012

watching TV will spend more than half of the time looking at the second screen, not the TV. To the left, you see ndings from a recent Neilsen study, showing the frequency of simultaneous device use along with TV viewing, showing that over 40% of mobile device users excluding ebook devices use the devices in parallel with TV daily. And of course, US networks are aware of whats going on, and are are actively promoting social interaction in parallel with their shows. For example, many shows are promoting Twitter use with

Social TV and The Second Screen

predened hashtags (beacons), and some like Jimmy Fallon, for example are incorporating tweets into the show format. And as new social tools are being designed specically to augment the TV experience, they are aggressively courting producers and networks to showcase these social TV apps, and to help the shows stand out in a very noisy social TV marketplace.

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Broadcast versus Social And Participatory

One of the most basic shifts in the new TV experience is the high level of social interaction, and social participation. This started spontaneously, with users taking advantage of existing social channels of communication like Twitter and Facebook and through them informing others about TV choices, likes, and opinions. Relatively quickly, TV producers and networks were paying close attention to what was being said by the great social public, and many have actively encouraged social participation. In the past year or so, a number of special-purpose social TV applications have been rolled out like GetGlue, KnowNow, and Umami designed to better support TV as a social context and social object. As the Neilsen results to the right show, conventional, asocial web usage still dominates like reading email or web surng but social networking is a close second.
source Neilsen 2012

Social TV and The Second Screen

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And many folks are looking up product information based on what they saw in ads, or doing background on the shows cast or story. And those interested in sports check the scores a lot. And, the growth of YouTube shows that people will create, share, and watch users videos. YouTube had over 1 trillion videos viewed in 2011, and 60 hours of video is uploaded every there minute, with 3B hours of video watched every month at this point.

kind\age Traditional TV Timeshifted TV Web on PC Web Video Mobile Video

source Neilsen 2012

2-11 26:03 2:03 0:33 0:08 N/A

12-17 24:11 1:39 1:35 0:25 0:17

18-24 23:57 1:39 3:54 0:46 0:16

25-34 27:46 2:59 6:00 0:53 0:15

35-49 32:07 3:02 6:08 0:38 0:06

50-64 40:07 2:44 5:16 0:25 0:02

65+ 45:23 1:43 2:50 0:13 <0:01

And these videos are taking a larger slice of the TV users time. Nielsen research from February 2012 shows the demographic spread of watching behavior per week in the US. Note that the younger cadres watch less traditional TV, and that the youngest are watching the highest amount of mobile video. [An interesting factoid: Asian-Americans watch 2.5 times as much web video as American Whites.]

Centralized Monopolies versus Distributed Marketplaces

We are still in a time when the production and distribution system for TV content is still largely closed, but there are many indications of where web-inltrated TV is headed. Today, production houses and sports cartels (like the National Basketball Association or FIFA) make agreements with broadcast networks and cable (and satellite) companies. These intermediary distribution companies make money in two basic ways. Free TV for example CBS is generally ad supported, but also is bundled into cable offerings for a fee. Pay TV is based on cable companies selling access on a monthly basis to bundels of channels, as well as on demand programming, like video on demand, or special sport events.

Social TV and The Second Screen

Broadcast and cable distribution is highly geographic, since broadcast TV signals are quite limited in

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range, and cable is almost always a monopoly managed by municipality. For example, in my town, I only have the option of Cablevision or Verizon as cable provider. However, so-called over-the-top TV threatens to shake up the established system. Over-the-top means that TV content video, programs, whatever are streamed via broadband or mobile to the users internet connected devices, side stepping the linear TV set up. Of course the networks and distributors are hoping to forestall over the top TV, just like they tried to make DVR illegal, but movements by other big players are undermining their efforts. TouTube has introduced channels, and the company is working with well-known entertainment gures like Madonna, Jay-Z, and the Wall Street Journal to create original content and deliver it over the top. Prominent entertainers, like Louis CK, are going over the top to cut out producers and networks out of the distribution pictures. Apple has been rumored to be pursuing the rights to Premier League Football, and coupled with the much discussed release of an Apple iTV in 2012, they are in a position to create an enormous push into TV apps through the iTunes app store. As we will see in later sections, the migration of TV viewers attention to the second screen and the movement of larger disruptive players like Apple and Google are together steadily eroding the control of the established TV monopolies. By 2015, we will be in a very different world for TV.

Scarcity Economics versus Abundance Economics

Underneath the articial scarcity that conventional TV networks and distributors hope to prop up, there is a brand new world of abundant content. As cord cutters, cord avoiders, and cord nevers start to cut into the prot margins and growth projections of established TV players, they will turn to over the top and second screen offerings. Geographic borders will decrease in importance. For example, football fans the world over are eager to watch the very best games and teams, and if league owners believe that they can make more money jumping outside the established model, they will certainly do so. It seems obvious that a worldwide deal

The migration of TV viewers attention to the second screen and the movement of larger disruptive players like Apple and Google are together steadily eroding the control of the established TV monopolies. By 2015, we will be in a very different world for TV.

Social TV and The Second Screen

with Google or Apple could provide more than making hundreds of deals with a patchwork of geographically limited smaller media players. The challenge of language translation may be coming to a rapid close, as various innovators are demonstrating automatic translation capabilities at this years CES, like Ortsbo, and Google and Apple

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have both been working on real-time voice translation. I anticipate very signicant advance in this area in

While the great majority of time spent watching TV is still going through the conventional networks, over the top innovations like Netflix demonstrate that there are profitable and powerful ways to end run the current business models.

the next few years, so that most national languages will be inter-translatable. So the Bulgarian market will not require a Bulgarian version of Mad Men, not will it have to be laboriously subtitled manually. There is also a generation of independent TV producers making great TV in innovative formats, and distributing it over the top, directly, without becoming ground into sausage by the networks. While the great majority of time spent watching TV is still going through the conventional networks, over the top innovations like Netix demonstrate that there are protable and powerful ways to end run the current business models. (An aside: Netix might counter the tremendous amount of bad press and customer hatred it caused when the company announced it was breaking into two companies, in order to prepare a transition away from the popular DVD-by-mail half of the service by creating a really clever social TV application.)

Content Centric versus User Experience Centric

The most signicant change from the perspective of the user, at least will be shift in emphasis toward a rich and social user experience, and a decrease in the emphasis around the content being delivered via TV. This doesnt mean that people will stop caring about high quality TV: they will still care about quality. But users will demand that TV content t into the social context. One of the most powerful examples of this shift is audio ngerprinting, which has become well-known through the widespread adoption of the Shazam mobile application. In its original version, Shazam provided the ability to sample music perhaps in a Starbucks, or while listening to the radio and Shazam would test that sample against a large database of audio ngerprinted extensively analyzed

Social TV and The Second Screen

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music. For a very large proportion of popular songs, Shazam was able to ID the song, and allow the user the option of buying it. Shazam is now ngerprinting TV shows and movies, as are other social TV apps. This provides a completely different user experience when watching TV. For example, I turn on my TV and spin through various channels, and I see a movie that looks interesting, with Richard Gere talking with Frances McDormand. My app, Umami, identies the movie and gures that I am watching HBO because thats being played there at that moment. I can then tell my friends on Umami that I am watching it, and I can nd others that are watching it, and see their observations. Research has shown, once people begin to experience TV in this way, the content the movie, the show, the game becomes the topic that is being discussed in a lean forward way, and the show is watched in a lean back way, at the same time. The new hybrid experience is lean back and lean forward at the same time, as the user shifts their eyes and thoughts from the screen in the corner to the screen on their lap. As more and more time is spent on the second screen, a completely new dynamic emerges. The second screen may be the natural place for ads, sponsorship, and selling to take place, and not on the dumb display in the corner.

The new hybrid experience is lean back and lean forward at the same time, as the user shifts their eyes and thoughts from the screen in the corner to the screen on their lap. As more and more time is spent on the second screen, a completely new dynamic emerges. The second screen may be the natural place for ads, sponsorship, and selling to take place, and not on the dumb display in the corner.

Social TV and The Second Screen

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The Coming End Run

The rapid transition of navigation to the second screen via audio ngerprinting and control of TV devices by mobile tools and the naturalness of social interaction there sets the stage for an destabilizing scenario: an end run around the current business model of linear TV. Audio ngerprinting allows any company to be able to create and distribute a second screen application that is capable of identifying TV shows, movies, music, and sporting events. This content can be historical, like old episodes of I Love Lucy, or a current TV show, like Mad Men. It is not impossible to imagine that a company say Facebook, Google, or Shazam could be audio ngerprinting TV shows in real time, as they are being broadcast. And most importantly this can be done without the agreement of the producers or networks. As a result, if that second screen application had a large number of users, the second screen company could sell advertising, sponsorships, or offer up e-commerce opportunities to partners, and the developers, networks, and cable companies would not get a cent of those revenues. Such a second screen application would not be misusing copyrighted material, and would not rebroadcast TV content. They would simply be providing a social service through which the users would be interacting, and most of the time they would be talking about TV. My bet is that one or more of the social TV players will adopt this business model in the near term, and this could have an impact on TV production and distribution that would be something like the Craigs List impact on US newspapers. Advertisers will shift their money from ads embedded in TV shows to ads running in parallel on the second screens.

Social TV and The Second Screen

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Networks and TV production house should be working to create their own second screen applications, or at least experimenting with them. Do Game Of Thrones and Mad Men have enough of a dense and rich community to support their own second screen apps, with carefully choreographed content? My bet is yes, but aside from a few partnerships, the established TV players arent moving fast. Which is why I am betting on the 800 lb gorillas like Google, Facebook, Apple, or new startups to be the source of massive market disruption in TV land. The second screen will be 100 times more disruptive to the ad model of old TV than DVR ever was.

The second screen will be 100 times more disruptive to the ad model of old TV than DVR ever was.

Social TV and The Second Screen

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Social TV Innovators
In this section, I take a quick look at the innovators in the Social TV market, and conjecture what is likely to take place in the next few years.

Twitter
Twitter has become a major element of TV: hashtags are everywhere on TV, and Twitters management is actively working to get Twitter streams integrated into programming. In March 2012, Trendrr reported that

In March 2012, Trendrr reported that Twitter is dominating the social activity occurring around broadcast TV, at 80%, compared to 8% for GetGlue and 7% for Facebook.

Twitter is dominating the social activity occurring around broadcast TV, at 80%, compared to 8% for GetGlue and 7% for Facebook.

Facebook
Facebook is a default second screen application for many Facebook users, simply because it is central to their social identity. Look to the partnerships and possible acquisitions that Facebook has structured with Netix, Hulu, IMDb, Flister, DirecTV and Miso.

YouTube
YouTube (part of Google) reported over 1 trillion views in 2011. 60 hours of video is uploaded to their servers every minute, and 3 billion hours of video are watched per month, at the time of writing this report. $3.1 billion is projected for online video in 2012, and YouTube is likely to gain the majority of that money. In March 2012, Google announced that Google TV Channels had a 60% growth since December 2011, and the company plans to spend $100 million in new content production. Google is clearly planning to become a vertically integrated player in web TV, with production and direct distribution (and the worlds largest dark ber network). Historically, the companys social technologies have been disasters, but YouTube has been a huge success.

Social TV and The Second Screen Netflix

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Netix is repositioning itself as a competitor to HBO as a way to develop more partnerships with cable operators, instead of being viewed as an over-the-top competitor to the cable companies. It is still being bottled up by major networks, and studios are still pushing their Ultraviolet technology, trying to get users to buy DVDs and upload them to digital lockers. Ultimately though, connected users do not want DVDs. Like HBO, Netix is developing original programming: series like Arrested Development and Lillyhammer.

Hulu
Hulu has released Hulu Plus unlimited streaming for $7.99/month and is moving onto a wide variety of set top boxes and TV. Hulu has the highest level of engagement after YouTube at 3.2 hours/month. Hulus partnerships with Facebook includes the ability to leave a comment for Facebook friends at a specic point in a show.

Amazon
Amazon Prime Instant Video is a streaming service that competes with Netix and Hulu Plus. The service is a $79/year offering, and provides a number of other features, like 2nd day mailing on all Amazon purchases. Amazon has not created any second screen offerings, and its Kindle hardware is a distant fourth in users second screen social activity, after phones, tablets, and PCs.

Hulu Facebook App

Social TV and The Second Screen Apple

19

Apple is the highest valued company of all time, and is sitting on a very large pile of cash. The companys iPhone and iPad are the dening hardware of the current era, and the company is well-positiong to dominate the next era of TV. However, the company hasnt done much in the social web. The social network implemented in iTunes, called Ping, has been widely criticized and has relatively low usership. In the recent Steve Jobs biography, Walter Isaacson cited the founder of Apple as starting that Apple had recently cracked the code of TV: Id like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use. It would be seamlessly synched with all of your devices and with iCloud. It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I nally cracked it. The analysts generally agree that Apple will be releasing a new integrated solution, including an Apple TV device, sometime in late 2012 or early 2013, and it will seamlessly work with other Apple devices. Clearly, Apple is in a position to offer a iPad and iPhone integration that would dazzle. Considering Apple manages to get 70% of the prots of the entire smartphone market, will they be able to do the same in TV hardware? Consider the use of Siri as a navigational element, as just one anticipated feature. Apple iTunes was built around the model that the natural uint of music is the song (at 99). The natural unit of TV is the episode (at 99), the movie ($1.99), or the game ($2.99), not a bundle of channels for $80/month.
Apple iTV mockup

Apple will change everything. Again.

Social TV and The Second Screen Shazam

Shazam started as a music recognition service, based on audio ngerprinting, but the company has extended the technology to recognize TV and movies. The company raised new money in late 2011 from Kleiner Perkins, and is involved in a lot of network projects, like HBOs How To Make It In America.

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The company is planning to get more involved in advertising and coupon distribution, and is one of the smaller player best positioned to become a major second screen application. Shazam is an extremely likely acquisition candidate by any major with an interest in advertising models, like Google, for example.

thePlatform
thePlatform is a Comcast company, basically grappling with the big data in TV use. The company has a new initiative for its TV Everywhere offering, marketed to cable operators, slicing data to create better packages of channels. They have also provided capabilities for mid roll ads which was difcult for competitors to get working.

Shazam is an extremely likely acquisition candidate by any major with an interest in advertising models, like Google, for example.

GetGlue
GetGlue is a pure play second screen application, and is enjoying very fast growth: 800% increase in check-ins in the rst half of 2011, and 2 million users joined in 2011. The company raised $12 million in January 2012. GetGlue has integrations with social platforms Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Foursquare, and with DirecTV.

Miso
Miso is another pure play second screen application, and has been working on developing partnerships with cable operators like AT&T Uverse and DirecTV.

Social TV and The Second Screen

Miso has created an innovative feature, called SideShows, so that additional content can be

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synchronized with TV content, like trivia contests, or point to additional information online. Partners using SideShows include Showtime, FOX, Food Network, DIRECTVs Audience Network, Halogen, Science Channel and CBS Television Distribution. This capability is extremely interesting, and is likely to be widely copied.

Umami
Umami is another pure play second screen application, employing audio ngerprinting, and offers a Freezeframe feature, where users can share a still image captured from a show. The word on the street is that Umami is having a difcult time making partnerships with networks and
IntoNow display with sports stats

cable operators.

IntoNow
IntoNow is a Yahoo company, another pure play second screen application. IntoNow uses propreitary Soundprint audop ngerprinting to identify shows, even if it is the rst broadcast: Yahoo must be crunching all shows being broadcast in realtime. As bets a major media company, Yahoo has integrated streaming news headlines, and very deep stats for sports. Looks like the best sportsoriented second screen app. IntoNow has integration with twitter and Facebook, and Tme magazine rated it the best smartphone app of 2011.

Social TV and The Second Screen

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Final Observations
TV is changing very, very quickly as a direct consequence of being absorbed by the social web. This involves both the actions of very large internet players Google, Apple, Facebook, and Yahoo and the innovation coming out of small social TV startups, like GetGlue, Miso, Shazam and others. The players in the established linear TV model production houses, networks, and cable operators are likely to be increasingly threatened and marginalized as their control of Old TV is destabilized by the huge investments the internet behemoths are making. New advertising models ones that are much more aligned with web advertising models are already emerging on the second screen, and these will lead to a rapid decrease in the protability of the Old TV model as ads playing on the dumb TV device are displaced by ads and other forms of participative sponsorship on the second screen: on users smart phones and tablets. The ability of the internet giants to invest in new production, and to circumvent cables scarcity-based distribution chain, means that in only ve years or so, the landscape of the TV marketplace will be very very different. We can also anticipate a game-changing move from Apple, whose iTV is likely to roll out in late 2012 or early 2013. At the very least, an Apple solution that disrupts the industry the way that the iTunes/iPod combination disrupted and remade the music business would push many Old TV brands out of business, and open the doors to a new normal for TV. New TV will be built strongly on and embedded in the social web that has changed modern society in the past 10 years, and we can expect a dozen or so new startups to become the Facebooks, Twitters, and Instagrams of this new era, and some others to become the Tower Records, Blockbusters, and Circuit Cities, as well.

TV is changing very, very quickly as a direct consequence of being absorbed by the social web. This involves both the actions of very large internet players Google, Apple, Facebook, and Yahoo and the innovation coming out of small social TV star tups, like GetGlue, Miso, Shazam and others.