Creating stickiness with social TV applications.

Research conducted in the UK by Digital Marketing Agency Digital Clarity earlier this year revealed that 72% of the under 25s surveyed use social media apps, such as Facebook and Twitter, on their mobile phones to comment on shows while they are watching them.

These statistics call the model of the passive “viewer” into question; instead the industry would be better placed to regard significant numbers of TV audiences as “users” who want to take advantage of their companion devices to engage with their favourite shows through the use of social TV applications.

Television has always been a social activity, whether this is families gathering around the big screen in the living room to watch a film or individuals talking about the latest episode of X-Factor at work.

Connected TVs and companion devices present new ways for people to engage with TV content, however, operators still need to address the pain point around the lack of interoperability. Pay TV providers can therefore add value and build stickiness into their subscription packages by integrating social TV in a user-friendly way across all of their users’ screens.

Users are already adept at shaping the online experience to suit their own needs and preferences and by deploying hybrid multiscreen services, there is no reason why this cannot translate to a television context. Therefore services providers should be thinking creatively about how they can take advantage of social TV to better immerse customers with their service packages.

Initiatives such as DLNA offer opportunities for a certain level of connectivity, however, there is no single standard that works across all Consumer Electronics products. The array of incompatible operating systems on the market makes the development and deployment of social TV apps both time-consuming and expensive. Multiple versions need to be built for each OS and then transcoded for delivery to different devices from the headend. Therefore, the successful integration of social TV into a subscription package means deploying a more comprehensive networking technology to ensure the process is seamless and coherent across devices.

Netgem believes the most cost-effective answer lies in using a smart hybrid and smart set top box as a home multimedia server to redistribute broadcast content, as well as broadband delivered content and apps, to every companion devices around the home.