Second coming: the evolution of the companion screen » Digital TV Europe - 0 views
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shared by Carri Bugbee on 23 Apr 14
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The huge growth of both the smartphone and tablet markets in recent years has brought with it a profound shift in viewing habits. According to recent Nielsen stats, 84% of US smartphone and tablet owners now say they use their devices as second screens while watching TV – looking up information about programmes they are watching, researching or buying goods and interacting with friends.
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Recent months have seen the consolidation, and even closure, of some of the first crop of dedicated second screen services.
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McDonnell claims that industry, and industry watchers, have been distracted by the buzz around so-called ‘second screening’ – “misinterpreting the audience behaviour and missing the point that it’s just all about making the TV show better.” He claims that part of this “distraction” has rested with the consumer-facing startups, eager to grab attention from broadcasters and monetise this space independently. “They’ve generated a lot of hype and have largely failed to capitalise on it,” says McDonnell.
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While Zeebox may have initially been focused on live, second-screen participation, Rose says that the service is now more focused on the social experience around the TV shows themselves. A recent major update to the app added MyTV, a personalised content feed based on the shows a user follows, with targeted recommendations, fan-community TV rooms and aggregated articles, news, and information. Zeebox is now even syndicating its production tools, synchronised show enhancements and TV chat rooms to its broadcast partners – including Fox, Discovery, NBC and Viacom.
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likely part of the appeal for Shazam when it comes to TV is the possibility of tapping into the massive pre-existing broadcast ad market, offering multiscreen and interactive extensions for campaigns.
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“Having one app that is able to do slightly different things for shows is probably a good place to be for anyone who’s investing in the technology side of it, but also for the viewer, because it’s something that you’re familiar with. There is different stuff to do in each show, so you come back for different shows that you like, and it’s a slightly different experience,” says McHugh.
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“My belief is that broadcasters should take more ownership and control of that [second screen] space –
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“It’s always been a quandary for broadcasters – do you partner with a cross-channel, cross-platform app such as Zeebox, do you make something for your own channels, or do you make an app for each show,” says Rose. “When it comes to second screen, I think the pendulum started with broadcasters creating an app for each show. We’ve seen in the US some broadcasters have made more than 200 apps and it’s now widely referred to as the app graveyard – these apps from several seasons back. They’re not maintained, they don’t work often, they’ve got old content, some post was last updated 185 days ago. It’s not good. So that then moved to broadcasters sometimes creating their own channel-based apps. But I think it’s hard to get traffic to a channel-based app. People don’t just watch one channel, they watch multiple channels, and so the pendulum kept swinging towards the more general-purpose app.”
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“It’s always been a quandary for broadcasters – do you partner with a cross-channel, cross-platform app such as Zeebox, do you make something for your own channels, or do you make an app for each show,” says Rose. “When it comes to second screen, I think the pendulum started with broadcasters creating an app for each show. We’ve seen in the US some broadcasters have made more than 200 apps and it’s now widely referred to as the app graveyard – these apps from several seasons back. They’re not maintained, they don’t work often, they’ve got old content, some post was last updated 185 days ago. It’s not good. So that then moved to broadcasters sometimes creating their own channel-based apps. But I think it’s hard to get traffic to a channel-based app. People don’t just watch one channel, they watch multiple channels, and so the pendulum kept swinging towards the more general-purpose app.”
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“My argument to broadcasters is don’t bother making a dedicated second-screen app. Just look at the simplest user-journey possible, and that’s through the web-browser,” McDonnell says. He claims it’s already “very well proven” that sending an audience to an interactive, mobile-enabled site will drive more traffic than forcing users to download a native app.
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The word we're using is 'repatriate' - we feel that TV is generating a lot of online activity and it's going elsewhere. We'd like to bring it back into the TV space if we can. What we try to do is almost replicate what people were doing online while they are watching TV and pro-actively serve them a whole lot of this extra information," he says