Social TV – Are Some Companies Trying to Reinvent the Wheel?

• Opinion piece published in VoD professional: Big budgets are being ploughed into new 3rd party platforms and intermediaries. But do we really need them?

  Social TV has been attracting a fair amount of attention recently. We are promised big things in the coming months with new companies emerging to build new social TV solutions. Big budgets are being ploughed into new 3rd party platforms and intermediaries. But do we really need them? I am not sure we do.

  Social TV is better delivered by integrating TV with existing social media, which means using what is already out there. Facebook and Twitter have an established, and very large, user base. Why create others? They have all the APIs and interactions you need to harness social media for TV so why replicate it with "new" specialist Social TV solutions?

  As part of building social TV it makes perfect sense to integrate with Facebook's platform, allowing people to interact with your service and their friends - using 'Like' and 'Check-in' that are already available. Facebook 'places' was extended in April to include 'time' and 'place' and thus allowing check-in to TV shows.

  My point is that you can build something that's highly effective with existing social networking sites without the need for a 3rd party intermediary, as we did when we won the Samsung App competition - a simple EPG with recommendations engine integrated with Facebook on Samsung Smart TVs.

  Put social media (Facebook and Twitter) at the heart of your VoD solution, relate it to your specific content needs and your existing social media presence, not as a bolt-on 3rd party service. With this in mind we have built social media into the heart of our Connected VoD solution using existing platforms without the need for a totally new social TV solution. Why reinvent the wheel?

  To view the article published in VoD professional, please click on the link http://tiny.cc/52ljn