Friday, May 28, 2010

Social TV – the answer it is (yes Yoda)

I am working on computers since 1982 almost every day. I had my first internet connection in the early 90es (I used in the 80es chats over acoustic coupler to connect to a kind of chat system). Since 1994 I am more or less in the online marketing. I tweet, I bing, I facebook, I wrote books. But I never ever wrote my own blog.

I never thought I need to, but too many people are telling me I should share my thoughts with others. Here we go, almost when blogging outside of a social network is not in anymore, I start. By the way you might think my English is weird. You are right, my origin is Germany and it took me 35 years till I decided to move to the states and to talk or write mostly in English. Please excuse any uncommon grammar or orthodox spelling.

Following the last couple of decades I learned that we all like to communicate, to express our self in any type of way, even if we have nothing to say. How often did we call 1minutes from home away our spouse to tell we are almost at home? How often did we look in the 80es on our beeper if somebody did left a message?

Now beepers are almost gone, and we are used to our cell phones, that we don’t do anymore useless “honey I am home” calls. Now we socialize through twitter or facebook. Do we really? I think we only like to tell everybody that we do things and we like to know gossip, we like to know who is doing what with whom.

However, we call it socialize, and I will call it socialize. But the big question is what is next?

Social TV – the answer it is (yes Yoda)





Sony, Google, Apple all big players are going to more interactive TVs. Years ago we tried it already but did not really work out. The idea was interactive advertisement on TV. It was too early. Internet speed too slow and consumer not used to such high tech things. Time changed. Now even 2 years old can handle ipad at ease (at least my son. He does not know how a TV works but can videos on my ipad).

With google developing cheap setup boxes and Panasonic or Sony having TV’s with internet connection Social TV is right in front of us.

In 2 to 3 years everybody is (when watching TV) looking who of their friends is watching the last episode of “Lost the reborn”, or sending during watching TV text to another friend that they should switch their channel to Food Network.

And it makes sense, don’t do we want to know what our buddies are doing?

ABC will announce they will within 12 months 25 Million followers for their Nightly news.

Nielsen is not needed anymore, because now advertisers and TV stations have live statistics. Omniture will be the biggest online TV statistic provider.
And even till then most of the big companies have figured out how to read internet statistic and how to utilize them they hire more metrics and statistic experts because nobody understands how to get the best TV statistic.

NBC will have a big lawsuit because they accidently collecting data from TVs which were mounted in bathrooms and would be unlawful data collection.

70% of divorce will claim that one reason of the divorce is too much female buddies in the social TV list.

But at the end we are all happy. We finally can see on our TV who is watching our favorite show and how many did like it.