Social TV

There's a couple of interesting "social" TV apps around lately, social in the sense that you can use social media while watching TV. The two most prominent apps I am aware of are Zeebox and Fango.

Zeebox is basically a slick electronic program guide (all I use it for) with some half baked social media application interfaces tacked on which seemingly nobody uses. It's not bad but it's somewhat of a ghost town in regards to people "engaging" in social media while using it, the most tweets tend to be about live sporting events. It's not a bad little app, but I'm sure it is subsidised in some way by commercial TV networks.

"Fango" is Zeebox's retarded cousin from Yahoo 7. There is a fairly uninspired ad campaign on TV at the moment advertising Fango where a generic looking, actor feigns excitement about "engaging" in social media while watching sport and using the ipad app (by himself by the way, on the couch wearing a scarf and beanie in the team colours). This is "social TV", watching programs alone while using the internet to talk to your facebook friends and strangers about watching TV.

As if you didn't feel like a complete retard already Fango encourages you to use the service by earning "badges", the digital equivalent of that "good effort" stamp your teacher put on your year 3 writing assignment that you got a C- on. They are extremely punny, and basically do nothing, they're the equivalent of Xbox live achievements but easier to get and not something you would want to bragg about, example: "Check in to 10 reality shows to win the reality check badge". Yay.

It's an odd concept really, using cutting edge technology to "engage" with a slowly dying technology.

If you really break down TV in modern terms it is essentially a fixed playlist of aggregated content from a variety of sources, with some original content produced by the station. The appeal lies in the fact that it is easily accessible, requires little to no effort to access - just turn the TV on, watch. If you don't like the show change the channel, the main downfall being your choices are very limited, but it continues to thrive due simply to being free to access and requiring very little effort to do so.

The key to TV still being around is convenience and passivity.

This makes the attempt to get people to "engage" with TV via social media kind of stupid as the internet is itself a delivery method for video content, and a vastly superior one in many ways. The disadvantages are the relative inconvenience in sourcing free (legal) content and the effort requiring in basically aggregating your own media. It's a bit like buying a hottest hits CD vs making your own mix tape (showing my age a bit there with that metaphor).

Anyway TV will be around for as long as people are lazy, but social TV flies in the face of that. I don't get it.