Chat around TV?
Between May 2003 and March 2005 the BBC piloted an online chat service
(called BBC Connector) which enabled visitors to certain parts of the
BBC website to instant message other users viewing the same page as
them. Referred to internally as 'chat around content', the concept was
arguably ahead of its time / the available technology (the same could
be said of MyBBC - a forerunner to the personalised startpage, live on
bbc.co.uk between 2000 and 2003).
Fast forward a couple of years and the notion of chat around content
seems to be undergoing something of a renaissance, although this time
it's video rather than webpages (Gabbly, weblin et al. excepted) which
is the content in question. Stickam got the ball rolling with the
launch of its Media Chat service in August 2006, followed by Lycos
Cinema in the November and ClipSync in the December. Also in December,
YouTube started offering YouTube Streams via its ideas incubator,
TestTube. February this year, Lycos added Lycos Mix and in August,
Skype launched a new version which enabled users to download videos
from Dailymotion and Metacafe and add them to their 'mood', inviting
other users to chat around them. In November, Joost revealed Meebo was
to provide its chat widget and then just last week Userplane announced
tie-ups with Channel 4, The CW, Fuel TV and IFC (although it's not yet
clear whether the company's popular IM and chat tools will be directly
deployed around video assets or not).
Of course, not all users haven't been waiting around for media owners
to join the dots and many have been hacking together their own chat
around content experiences for years. One of my favourite BBC Radio
Player anecdotes concerns multiple users communicating via Instant
Messaging to coordinate a simultaneous press of the play button on
listen again programmes, to ensure a synchronous (and therefore
shared) listening experience. If its been done for radio, it's a safe
bet that the same has been happening around live and on-demand
television as well, at least in pockets.
What hasn't yet been established is to what extent users would make
use of chat around television functionality were it to become more
widely available. Microsoft demonstrated a TV chat interface as far
back as 1999, which singularly failed to take the world by storm
(although recently leaked screenshots suggest 'Chat whilst watching
TV' may be appearing as an option on suitably IPTV-enabled Xbox 360s
in the not too distant future).
One argument is that even in this age of continuous partial attention,
online chat is too intrusive an activity for most television viewers
(although I'm not sure how much water that holds when you consider
that talking over the TV is practically a national pastime). Whether
viewers will use chat applications to discuss the on-screen
programming or not is perhaps a more pertinent question. I also can't
help feeling it won't be long before advertisers are asking for IPTV
chat apps to be disabled during ad breaks because viewers are ignoring
their ads in favour of chatting to their mates (solution: makes your
ads interesting enough that people want to talk about them).
Regardless of the absence of demonstrable user-demand, chat
functionality is likely to feature on the roadmap of many IPTV
companies, looking to use the potential of a network to gain a
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