June 23: TV GOES SOCIAL at CE Week

Event Registration Online for June 23: TV Goes Social

What IS Social TV?

This is the report from our TV Goes Social iBreakfast on Feb 9 during Social Media Week.
Speakers include: Simon Applebaum, Tomorrow Will be Televised • Bonnie Sandy Sterling, 28 Squared • Scott Varland, Social Bomb

This iBreakfast opened the door on what many think may be the next really big thing. The CEO of Endemol thinks so. So does Wired, Fast Company and so on.

But what is it?

There is a hardware and software component and a history.

The hardware is that TV will show up anywhere and may come from any source. Your flat screen will soon integrate TV, YouTube and Facebook and anything else you want from the web. Your mobile device and laptop will do much he same. Companies will soon offer really effective whole house servers that let you get the full experience on all your TVs and your smart phone will probably double as a smart remote. If they don't do this hackers are already doing it for them.

Simon Applebaum

On the software side, we are seeing communities form around TV - the content, the actors, the recommendations and so on. Marketers will try to create an ecosystem around their shows. Speaker Scott Varland of Social Bomb does this with an integrated platform they developed to help viewers develop a conversation with the shows they watch. Bonnie Sterling does this on 28 Squared with Brooklyn and African artisans who can share and sell their goods through this visual transaction medium. There is also a coding standard for cable systems that will enable the launch of App markets etc.

Alan Brody

The iBreakfast founders are already involved in doing this on the creation end - helping schoolkids develop their own network using social media tools to develop content and then promote it afterwards. Our first coup was their interview with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg's Dad which got picked up by 700+ news outlets around the world. SNNews.org

The real magic is that the teens know how to use these tools for development and communication - more importantly, they know how to use it for social and academic gain. They get noticed by friends and eventually, college admissions officers. This is presumably a blueprint for way adults will eventually adopt Social TV. We just have to figure out which gatekeepers they want to impress.

According to Varland, TVs many gatekeepers have made investors fearful of entering this space - Social TV in all its forms may just be the means to getting around them!

As for the History - Social TV has become the new flagbearer for elusive quest for Interactive TV - and therein lies the minefield. Everyone gets the social community and communication angle - they even get the idea of communicating with visual references etc. They don't get the dangerous side - that viewers don't want their TV experience interrupted. In other words, they don't want their vegged out mental state disturbed. This is our national meditation time.

A key reason Interactive TV failed is they did a good job of disturbing viewers - with the exception of their amazingly successful caller ID on the screen feature. This was great precisely because it saved you from getting up from your chair to screen your call. If only it could handle the call itself - so you won't have to be bothered with it at all!

With these themes in mind and a million more questions - we will be running a number of additional panels as well as a TV Goes Social blog.

If you have any ideas of your own please share them with us at soctv@ibreakfast.com and we'll post them.

Additional Report on IPTV Evangelist
 
Want your Twitter TV? - read about it in Fast Company.

Report from the July “Exploding eBook/iPad iBreakfast”

Ana Maria Allessi, VP Publisher, HarperMedia
Andy Weissberg, Managing Partner, Digital Publishing Partners
Anthony Antolino, Senior VP, Copia
Mike Shatzkin, Founder, Idea Logical Co.
David Steinberger, CEO, comiXology


The mix of exhilaration and trepidation that once swept through the music world may be shaking at the foundations of the once staid world of book publishing.

One thing that is clear the public seems to have taken to the iPad and to a lessr extent, eBooks with an enthusiasm that caught many visionaries off-guard.  Apple announced over 3 million units sold and Amazon reported they had sold more eBooks for the Kindle than print editions.

Yet many readers say they still love the feel of a book. So what do digital books bring to the table that are somehow different from a plain old print book? What exactly is the paradigm shift taking place and how will publishers, resellers and content creators react. Most of all, what will consumers pay for?

According to Dave Steinberger of Comixology, the big word coming out of ComicCon – where comic lovers coexist with digital commix and moviemakers – is Transmedia: Content exists across media. It also seems to help explain which media belongs where – some media like comics belong as static or as movies but not as moving comic pages and so on.

Certainly, according to the publishing futurist on our panel, Mike Shatzkin, of the Idea Logical Company, with digital books, everyone can be published and have instant distribution from their websites. This is a game changer for everyone! Mike was also recently quoted in the New York Times, pointing out that the surpassing of print by eBooks (on Amazon only, of course) was inevitable.

But who, said Andy Weissberg of Digital Publishing Partners, really knows because measurement at Amazon is not, pun intended, an open book. More importantly, if eBooks eliminate so many stages in the publishing process – like retailer and to some extent the old publishing houses, where do the big publishers fit in? Ana Maria Allessi, of HarperMedia talked about publishers as really being developers and marketers of authors. Which begs the question of whether publishers will start to look more like record labels that now have 360 degree deals with their artists so they now get a piece of their live appearances and merchandise sales.

The Transmedia paradigm shift is easy to understand in some areas but more complicated in others. A famous training author might generate profit with the application developed by the publisher to help deliver and test the readers (e.g. a voice coach whose iPad product can listen to the readers voice and judge it). In thrillers and romance novels the background details – like the extras in a DVD could be plus. Vook does this with supporting videos (the Slash book has Guns & Roses interviews and concerts). The best seller on the iPad right now, according to Shatzkin is Elements which give the viewer the full story with pictures and videos of all the elements on the periodic table. Is this an anomaly or simply the non-fictional romance novel of geekdom or is it more - a clue about 360 degree novels about the future?

It’s hard to tell – these are tantalizing clues to which you need to add the next element. As they say, if Henry Ford asked people what they wanted, it would have been a faster horse. The translation of that today, is a Mustang.

One of the interesting possibilities is that iPads and eBook devices will become portable book clubs simply by plugging into community. Why read your book alone? Why wait for the book club to meet?  As Antolino pointed out, you don’t buy what the best sellers tell you, you buy what your friends recommend.

The consensus is that the party is just getting started – if it is a party – but the full picture is only just emerging. The rules are only now being written and will probably be rewritten a few times too. This is an emerging world that is likely to change the publishing world forever, and with New York at its center it means that many more conversations are coming here before we get a true measure of the changes taking place.

To listen to the podcast click below. 

eBook/iPad iBreakfast Podcast Part 1

eBook/iPad iBreakfast Podcast Part 2

Click to take part of our survey.

Interactive TV Reinvents Itself - Nov. 20 iBreakfast

Welcome to the world of the SuperDVR - getting the show you want when you want it. It is really the convergence of IPTV, what speaker Shelly Palmer elaborates in his book TV Disrupted (version 2 is coming out shortly) in what he calls the migration from Network TV to Networked TV.

Mark Risis, TiVo; Alan Body iBreakfast; Shelly Palmer, Advanced Media; Gary Lauder, Lauder Partners

In its simplest form it just means that any video anywhere – whether Network TV, Cable, Pay-per-View or any YouTube or Internet Video can be retrieved and called up on your TV. This is where the giant screen TVs and those increasingly elaborate set-top boxes will really earn their keep.

Moreover, as you see this evolve, the convergence with mobile both as a kind of smart clicker (that’s where Bluetooth really kicks in) and as a remote viewing device for what you have overcaptured. There is also an emerging video conversation that young people are already engaged in over the internet, is as we can see from TiVo, moving on to interactive TV.
This is where TiVo is getting interesting.

For all the early hype, there is really only one company that has brought us a successful form of iTV and that is TiVo – wich is really just a vision of making a TV work like a VCR thanks to some cool software and a big hard drive. So their next steps into the future are compelling – now they are offering a convergence with broadband so you can start doing what kids everywhere are doing, looking at YouTube videos, but on your giant TV instead of a laptop. To pay for it, and all the commercial zapping that takes place with commercial TV, they are getting advertisers to offer special TiVo friendly versions of their ads that send out a banner message as they are being skimmed.

This in turn is another new frontier of the TV experience, enabling viewers to get a video shorthand of all the material they are now amassing……and this, along iwht the mobile component will be the topics we revisit when we do iTV Reinvented Part II.