Social TV in the Short Term (Please)
Tom Coates at plasticbag.org has a new post about how to make TV more social using Tivo or other PC-based PVRs. He has great ideas about what kind of benefits you can get by adding a buddy list to your TV, and he has thought a lot about the kind of social interaction can be fostered if you add video conferencing into the mix.
But the interaction that I think can be immediately valuable and the most compelling as a springboard to get this type of thing going is something he mentions at the very end: automatically recording the shows that the people in your social circle watch. And I want it, on my Tivo, SOON. It’s basically the best way you could manage to improve the “Tivo Suggestions feature of Tivo. I don’t want to get “Blue’s Clues” or “Meet the Press” automatically recorded because lots of people who watch “Two and a Half Men” have kids and lots of people who watch “The West Wing” are older and watch MSNBC. I want to watch what my friends are watching on a weekly basis. If my buddy list had 15 people, and 12 of them were watching “Lost” and I’d never heard of it, I would definitely want to get with the cool kids.
It’s the way Netflix has started to work with your friends list. If you and your list of Netflix friends choose to share your movie choices and reviews with each other, Netflix will give you ratings and reviews from your friends about what movies they’ve liked recently. At the most extreme (I’m pretty sure they don’t do this), Netflix could potentially add your friends’ favorite movies to your queue. For Netflix that wouldn’t work, but automatically Tivoing your friends favorite shows is free as long as it doesn’t overlap with something you’re already recording.
And it could (almost) be implemented as a Tivo application using the new Tivo SDK. Here’s a feature list: let people set up a buddy list of their friends who also use Tivo. Let people see what the most common Season Passes are among their friends. Let people see what shows their friends are Tivoing that aren’t very commonly recorded by Tivo users. Let people comment on individual episodes so that they can argue with their friends over whether that episode of “The OC” was the best one ever and whether the creepy rocker guy on “American Idol” needs to be voted off.
It’s a start, and it would be social, and I think it could grow from there.
