TVs are turning into interactive, ‘Social TVs’ these days - a step many TV-makers, app-developers & service-providers are consciously adopting to play catch up in the world
Poonacha Machaiah, founder and director of Above Solutions India, helps his son with his homework for an hour a day no matter which part of the world his work takes him to. While waiting for his flight at Shanghai airport, he pulls out his smartphone, takes a video clipping on the solar system from YouTube and asks his son to join him on his smart TV from Bangalore.
Once the connection is made, through a platform - tangofx.com - which his team had developed in India, he explains the solar system to his son. The white board on the side of the screen helps Machaiah make notes which his son can see on his TV. All the while, the original YouTube clipping remains unharmed.
The chat bar on the side helps him converse with his son. They end each day watching a cartoon video together...throwing popcorn and tomato widgets at each other when the scenes get exciting - facilitated by the widget library which this platform offers.
Televisions are turning into interactive, 'Social TVs' these days - a step many TV-makers, app-developers and service-providers are consciously adopting to play catch up in a world which is going to be dominated by the likes of the recently-announced Amazon Kindle Fire HD with its spread of exciting features.
"Social TV is all about creating more engagement with TV content through the use of multiple devices like mobile phones and creating a social community which shares ideas and comments through the use of Facebook, Twitter, Google chats, smartphone, PCs and so on," says one of the evangelists of the 'Social TV' concept, Dr Marie Jose Montpetit, researcher at MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics and a lecturer on Social TV at the MIT Media Lab.
Montpetit's students at MIT are working on many projects on Social TV that go beyond usual social media interactions. One of those addresses the veracity of the political advertisement of US presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. It checks out the credibility of the ad with known fact-checking sites. "It is a form of crowdsourcing that is used to evaluate the truth of an ad. The student's application compares the actual facts with the ad, allows viewers to rate the ad and eventually the results can move to the social media like Facebook or Twitter," she says.
Back in India, television-makers and app-developers are making TVs turn as interactive as possible. Start-up tangofx.com, for instance, has created a platform similar to Google's hangouts, where an entire community can watch a video clipping on a TV or mobile phones simultaneously. Users can share a video clipping or watch programmes like a Formula 1 race along with friends from across the globe and exchange comments.
"We enable users to interact with media through 'second screen' without altering the media being watched. There is a provision for audio/video/text chat and extensible widget library," says Satish Tembad, CTO, Above-inc.com.
Service-providers like Airtel and popular tutorial chain, Aakash Tutorials, are taking interaction through TV a step further. Aa-kash Tutorials, which has a tie-up with Airtel, helps Plus-2 students prepare for medical entrance exam 2013, through television, by paying a fee of Rs 7 a day to access content 24x7. "Tests are given on TV. Students can answer objective-type questions by choosing the right answers with the TV's remote control," explains Aakash Chaudhry, director, Aakash Educational Services.
"We are working on an application which can provide the same services on a mobile phones also," he says. The service, which was launched in July-end, has been seeing a modest registration of 20-40 students a day, says Chaudhry. "Students have to pay only around Rs 1,500 per year for TV tutoring services compared to actual class tutoring charges which would be Rs 30,000-70,000," he says.
A new wave of digital video services is expanding globally. Globally, players like Hulu and Netflix are giving consumers a crossplatform mechanism to watch content whenever they want. Similarly, the recently launched BoxTV.com, which is in invitation mode only, is giving Indian users access to Hollywood and Bollywood content at any time, much of which is not available on TV.
The value proposition of such services is compelling today, and the levels of interactivity and social features, deeply embedded into the services, give them a value proposition that traditional television did not offer.
The recently-launched Ditto TV, which runs on the over-the-top technology, the first of its kind in India, provides television content on mobile phones or any device which has 3G connectivity. Aimed at providing TV content for the NRI population, especially in the UK and the US, Ditto TV services has seen almost 3 lakh downloads since its launch in February 2012. "Viewers in the UK can watch their favourite TV serials in realtime where you can get 30 mbps speed for around £25," says Vishal Malhotra, business head, New Media, Zee Entertainment Enterprise.
With TV content available for as low as Rs 49 for 3 channels a month, Malhotra says his company has been seen a lot of takers among the office-going crowd in India who view TV programmes on their PCs at work. "About 60% of the users watch Ditto TV on their desktops. This is used a great deal by the working crowd," he says. "Video-on-demand (VoD) and Catchup TV will be our next area of focus after an analysis of users," he says. While this is still a niche area now, Malhotra expects "a crowd of players by the year-end".
Another player, Videocon, has introduced its latest line of LED TVs which runs on the Digital Direct Broadcast (DDB) platform and does not need a set-top box. "Viewers can access Facebook and Twitter on their television sets while watching their favourite channels," explains HS Bhatia, chief marketing officer at Videocon.
"These LED TVs can double up as a computer in houses which do not have one. People who work in offices can work and store the matter in the cloud and access it when they come back home on their TVs," he says.
These LED TVs, ranging from 32-inch to 58-inch screens, are available in the Rs 40,000 to Rs 2 lakh range. "Since this is a cloud-based service, the size of the TVs is thin as there are no bulky hard drives installed in it," says Bhatia, who expects 30% of all the LED TVs sold by his company this Diwali season to run on the DDB platform.
Synchronising a service across platforms and heterogenous mediums can be challenging, says Satish Tembad. Creating a bridge across multi-modal technologies can keep TV viewing an engaging experience. "People are there on chat to respond and share their ideas... an art which President Obama has excelled in," says Poonacha Machaiah.
via economictimes
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