Second Screen

Geoff here again with the final part of how video/television is changing right in front of our eyes (literally). I’ve talked about On-Demand and Streaming services previously and now I’m going it’s Second Screen time.

In a technological sense On-Demand is really just an extension of more accessible DVD/Blu-ray collections and Streaming is the natural evolution of broadcast tv, and of course Second Screen is a step up from turning to the person beside you on the sofa and asking questions about people in the movie or what has happened in a previous episode of a series.

I find myself a majority of the time sitting on the sofa watching a film and some background character appears and I get a feeling of “I know their face” and instantly I start to look up the film on IMDB to find the list of actors and then boom, my hunch is confirmed. I will sometimes then start on a massive journey to read about other movies that they are also in and from there find out about other films all whilst forgetting about the film I was initially watching.

This is a rather passive form of Second Screen and in the last few years there have been some great pushes to really create an active experience when it comes to television. One service I use regularly is GetGlue. It essentially “game-ifies” watching tv/movies, reading books, playing games and listening to music. I check in to what I am watching, see how many others are watching and also see what others are saying about the shows. It’s good but I also find that it’s not that great at starting and continuing a full conversation.

Another application that I have used are Disney’s Second Screen experiments. These are fairly good but I do feel like they are really just an attempt at interactive DVD commentaries. This fed content to me felt stale and I could find so much better content online through film fanatic forums. Saying that, it really is still first generation of Disneys implementation and will hopefully be better in the future.

Over the next year though it’s going to be very exciting time as really usable technology is going to be coming out into the mainstream. NBC are going to have a second screen app just for the 2012 London Olympic Games [link]. It allows users to get multiple angles on the event their watching, see what other events are taking place and join the conversations happening on Facebook and Twitter.

Earlier this year Microsoft announced SmartGlass for Xbox 360. We blogged about it at the time and you can read it here. This is usually second screen frameworks in numerous ways for video, music and game content. This I find very exciting especially for the likes of open world adventure games that may need a map to traverse and I would be able to glance and know where I am in split seconds rather than pausing and going through a menu.

If you can’t tell from these last few posts, I am a complete movie/tv fiend that also LOVES the web and where the mediums are colliding right now. When technology like mentioned above and even a few other like wywy become mainstream video is most definitely going to become fun again. If you’re as excited about me I’ve included a keynote speech by Josh Sapan, the President & CEO of AMC (the network behind Mad Men and the Walking Dead) to really help get an idea where the “old media” frame of mind is when it comes to these new technologies. Enjoy.

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