Social TV, the basic process of using your smartphone, laptop, or tablet to make comments on a TV show you happen to be watching at the time, is not something that’s going away any time soon. In fact, the “second screen phenomena” show signs of doing nothing but exploding.
This blogger was compelled to write a rebuttal to Ad Age Media Columnist Simon Dumenco’s take that social TV was coming to an end and becoming just “TV.” In reading Simon’s post, I got the feeling he got lost in the forest of new tech developments and forgot his overall point. Then, when he tried to get back to it, the end result was weak. Let me make a much stronger point:
Social TV will never die because we’re presented with more and more types of second screens and people are using them to express what they see on the first screen: TV. The only way social TV will end is if you cut off fingers, and that will land you in jail.
For example, I use the Tout.com app, where you can make a 15 second video, to show Jodie Foster at The Golden Globe Awards, here:
I also used to to track when Adele won “Best Song” for Skyfall:
That Tout also becomes a Twitter tweet, and pops up on my Facebook Page, too. So now I can not just tell what I’m seeing, I can show it too. Technically, that a 3rd screen, so we might as well say that the evolution of video apps of this kind is leading toward a 3rd screen dynamic: TV, micro-video, social media.
The point is that as long as digital communications continue to advance such that we can share what we’re seeing and thinking, “Social TV” will never die, because there will be someone who comes along and figures out how to rope in the 3rd screen dynamic and measure that too. Once that’s done, there will be some other way, and again, and again.
Leave my fingers alone!
Stay tuned.
Bill Carroll