Social TV
I haven’t spent much time in front of the television in the last few years. Lately though, when I am watching something, I’m also sitting with my laptop, a digital camera, and my iPhone.
Carlos De Machis wrote about this yesterday. Stowe Boyd followed up with a post today.
So I though I’d take a quick look at my media engagement during last night’s election coverage.
The channel of choice for me was CNN (All your holograms are belong to us). Love or hate Wolf (I’m no fan), CNN had a solid approach to running the numbers as they came in, a diverse panel of pundits, and oodles of money to spend on ridiculous toys like holograms.
Online is where the real action was though. I had tabs open for twitter.com, cnn.com, news.google.com, facebook.com, cspan.com, nbc4i.com (keeping up with Ryan, Denise and other co-worker’s hard work), and Twitter via twitterfox, a Firefox extension.
My browser history for the night also shows numerous hits on:
- nytimes.com
- vox.com
- dailykos.com
- arlingtonva.us
- fivethirtyeight.com
- flickr.com
- msnbc.com
- foxnews.com
- google.com/reader
- many, many searches on Google
...and a host of hits to random sites that were linked to via people I follow on Twitter.
The Twitter and Facebook community add an incredible dimension to the TV viewing experience. It’s like hanging out in a big chat room with all your friends—commenting, connecting, laughing, debating, and in the case of the wine bloggers I read, a lot of drinking. Add to that mix one’s access to other information sources and the overall experience gets incredibly rich.
As Stowe correctly points out, “smart entrepreneurs will be chasing this pretty fast”. In fact, some companies already are. Microsoft releases their New Xbox Experience (NXE) on the Xbox 360 on November 19.
You can watch Larry Hyrb (aka Major Nelson) showcase the new Parties feature here.
Connect with your favorite people and enjoy more games and entertainment online than with any other device connected to your TV. Welcome to the New Xbox Experience. Jump in.
While I suspect NXE’s usage will focus primarily for gaming, Microsoft intends it to be used for movies and more.
Pretty frickin’ cool, if you ask me.
Social media is about to take on a whole new meaning and that just may put me back in front of the television more often.
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