Miso and the Social Television Age

Social television (also social interactive television) is a general term for technology that supports communication and interaction in the context of watching television, or related to TV content.  It also includes the study of television-related social behavior. Social television systems can for example integrate voice communication, text chat, presence and context awareness, TV recommendations, ratings, or video-conferencing with the TV set. Social television is an active area of research and development. Most existing social television systems are on a conceptual stage, or exist as lab prototypes, beta or pilot versions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_television

This month, “the San Francisco company’s app is called Miso and applies location-based startup Foursquare’s model to movies and TV. Users “check in” by saying what they’re watching, then win badges based on their viewing activity. It just launched a Miso Web app for participating from your laptop or desktop computer. And an iPad version is supposed to be coming soon.  Bazaar Labs already announced its seed round a week ago. (Disclosure: One of the company’s backers is Georges Harik, who also invested in VentureBeat.) Joe Kraus, the Google Ventures partner who previously cofounded Excite.com and Jotspot, made the new investment.

Google itself is looking at other opportunities around television with the planned launch this fall of Google TV, a system for accessing the Web on your TV.”

Marie-José Montpetit, an invited scientist at MIT's Research Lab for Electronics, has been working for several years on social TV--a way to seamlessly combine the social networks that are boosting TV ratings with the more passive experience of traditional TV viewing. Her goal is to make watching television something that viewers in different places can share and discuss--and to make it easier to find something to watch.

Carriers, networks, and content producers hope that making it easier for viewers to link up with friends will help them hold on to their audiences rather than losing them to services like Hulu, which stream shows over the Internet. And opening TV to social networking could make it easier for companies to provide personalized programming. 

Behind closed doors in offices from the media centers of New York to the entertainment capital of Hollywood, content programmers and code jockeys are no doubt trying to figure out how to marry traditional television with social networking.

Does the lean-forward experience, inter activity and backchannel chatter of social net works have a place in the tightly con trolled, lean-back world of tele­vision? I’m among those who believe the two will wed in a satisfying way, though we’re likely five to 10 years from that happening. I blogged about Intel and Yahoo’s experiments with the Cinematic Internet (or Widget Channel TV) last year, and I’ve written over the years about the largely discredited experiments with “interactive television.” 

Have any ideas or comments about Social Interactive Television?  You are welcome to enter your observations here.