Social TV: The Future of Television in the Internet Age
Television's influence on culture and society has been widely acknowledged for many years. On the other hand, with the diffusion of the web and of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, used in concert with television, the TV experience has become much more interactive and it is now impossible not to acknowledge that television has also become a driving force for social interaction. Furthermore, the parallel diffusion of internet videos and user generated content, fostered by YouTube in particular, has provided the population with a different approach to media and television in particular: consumers have also become producers. This work analyzes how the different technological improvements have changed the definition of television. Special attention is given to how Facebook and Twitter have influenced some of TV's fundamental properties such as liveness, character-centric storylines and flow and to what the YouTube phenomena means for television. The thesis concludes with a forecast about television's future, which confirms the main argument of this thesis: television is increasingly social. Thesis Supervisor: Michael Cusumano Title: SMR Distinguished Professor of Management
The expansion of the fictional universe of The X-Files on social TV
The social TV marks the convergence of television experience with social media. The phenomenon refers to content sharing through social networks and second screen apps simultaneously to television broadcasting. In this context, this article aims to discuss the features explored by Fox during The X-Files 10 th season to engage the interacting viewers with social TV. We analysed the dialogue between the fictional universe of the series and the backchannel through a monitoring of @thexfiles profile postings on Twitter during the exhibition of series episodes.
Anatomy of a failure: picturephone revisited
Abstract Picturephone service — a two-way, switched, video telephone system — was developed and marketed by AT&T in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The market did not respond to the service offering, and the service was withdrawn — in other words, picturephone service was a market failure, although the technology was an impressive success. This article reviews the history of the Bell System's effort to market picturephone service and presents the reasons for its market failure. The results of market research are interweaved with the author's personal experience with visual communications to support the inescapable conclusion that most business customers and residential consumers simply had little need for two-way, face-to-face visual telecommunication. The reasons for the picturephone's market failure had little to do with either technology or cost. Picturephone service simply had little incremental value compared to a telephone call — and perhaps even negative value for some users.