Will 2010 be the Year of Social TV?
By Tim Difford on January 4, 2010
Could 2010 be the year that Social Media and Television finally get it together?
Fans of specific TV shows from different timezones around the world are saving the latest episodes of their favourite shows on their personal video recorders (PVRs) and then arranging common viewing times with their friends to watch the shows whilst discussing the action together on Skype, reports the New York Times.
Users are creating their own social TV experiences ahead of the broadcast networks who are testing real-time interactive systems, but are yet to make them publically available.
In 2009, Fox undertook a limited trial with Twitter during reruns of sci-fi series ‘Fringe’ in the US, running into criticism almost immediately from the show’s fans by swamping the screen with tweets from the cast and crew of the show, thus obscuring much of the action.
In the UK, high profile post-apocalypse drama, BBC’s ‘Survivors’, launched alongside an innovative stream of tweets from ’survivors’ supposedly trying to get messages out to a world in which most of the population had been wiped out by a mystery virus.
Sadly, these tweets had petered out by Episode 2 as the production team seemed to lose faith in an idea which must have sounded great in the caffeine-fuelled brainstorm-session. Twitter-using Survivors fans were left with nothing but the official #wearesurvivors hashtag to link their bemused conversations together.
With the second series of Survivors due to hit UK TV screens on 12th January, fans of the show will be eager to see if the show’s producers will reintroduce any social media elements to the enhance viewers’ experience of the show.
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