Connecting Couch Potatoes

A brilliant piece by Tom Coates of the BBC entitled “Social Software for Set-Top Boxes”. I love the idea of taking a technological trend that is essentially isolating (”now I have so many channels that I can sit in my apartment and veg 24/7″) and turning it into a social activity. Tom focuses on grafting social networking features onto TVs, but I would expect this kind of feature to appear initially on PCs as an adjunct to video distribution networks like BitTorrent.

Coincidentally there is also a post on the PVRblog today called “Social PVRs” discussing a research project at PARC with goals that sound very close to what Tom is proposing.

A couple of additional ideas that Tom doesn’t mention:

• Public chat rooms: The PVRblog piece refers to a blog entry by Michael Sippey in which he laments the demise of water-cooler rehashes of last night’s TV, now that everyone can watch what they want, when they want. Michael suggests the creation of “micro-communities” focused around specific episodes of popular shows. Great idea! Since I consume most of my TV on BitTorrent nowadays (the only way to get a lot of new shows here in Prague), I often feel keenly the lack of someone to chat with about the latest plot twist in Lost or funny episode of Arrested Development. This could be resolved neatly by adding episode-specific chat rooms to the interface that Tom describes.
• Matchmaking: Wouldn’t this be a great way to meet new people as well? If I’m plunking myself down on my sofa with a beer and a bag of nachos to watch last night’s Daily Show, I could register myself as available for chatting to any other lonely heart doing the same. The system could even match people up based on more extensive profile information, including the set of all shows I follow, not just the one I happen to be viewing now. And it doesn’t have to be designed to help you find your life partner, just someone (”anyone” says Michael in desperation!) to be social with while watching the tube.

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2 Comments

1. […] n relation to social software, as has Ross Mayfield and Matthew Gertner. 2 Comments » The URI to TrackBack this entry is: http://impe […]

   Pingback by Imperica :: Squeezing life out of set-tops :: April :: 2005 — 4/8/2005 @ 3:18 pm

2. […] renting. Even more ideas are to be found on the website Peer Pressur ein an article called connecting couch potatoes. I haven’t had the time yet to read all of it, and there are some more links […]

   Pingback by Social ITV » More ideas on social itv applications!! — 4/8/2005 @ 4:54 pm

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