Category Archives: Social TV

Posts about Social TV

Analyzig audience and opinion on live events for Social TV

By the end of June, we took part in the TVX 2014 international conference on interactive experiences for television and online video with a demo entitled “Numbat – Tracking Buzz and Sentiment for Second Screens”. On it we showed our work and expertise on social media analytics applied to television and live events, combining semantic analysis technologies and real-time data processing to get metrics on social audience and opinions about each feature of the live program or event.

Social TV is not only a continuously growing area, but also a thoroughly mature one, with dozens of companies interested in user interaction and social marketing. Social media are giving particular importance to this interaction between users and TV broadcasts. To realize how far the social conversation about international events goes, you could take a look at Twitter’s recap on FIFA World Cup 2014 group stage.

cristianoDuring the conference we could see the ways industry and researchers are taking to make their point on Social and Interactive TV. For example, second screen applications allow viewers to have a deeper understanding on what they are watching, providing additional information related to the broadcast (usually ad hoc and synchronized for a better user experience) or through automatic trends discovery. Other approaches try to help users finding the right TV programs by studying their habits and behaviors when watching television.

For our demo, we chose to visualize two World Cup matches being played at the same time: United States – Germany and Portugal – Ghana.

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Semantic Analysis and Big Data to understand Social TV

We recently participated in the Big Data Spain conference with a talk entitled “Real time semantic search engine for social TV streams”. This talk describes our ongoing experiments on social media analytics and combines our most recent developments on using semantic analysis on social networks and dealing with real-time streams of data.

Social TV, which exploded with the use of social networks while watching TV programs is a growing and exciting phenomenon. Twitter reported that more than a third of their firehose in the primetime is discussing TV (at least in the UK) while Facebook claimed 5 times more comments behind his private wall. Recently Facebook also started to offer hashtags and the Keywords Insight API for selected partners as a mean to offer aggregated statistics on Social TV conversations inside the wall.

As more users have turned into social networks to comment with friends and other viewers, broadcasters have looked into ways to be part of the conversation. They use official hashtags, let actors and anchors to tweet live and even start to offer companion apps with social share functionalities.

While the concept of socializing around TV is not new, the possibility to measure and distill the information around these interactions opens up brand new possibilities for users, broadcasters and brands alike.  Interest of users already fueled Social TV as it fulfills their need to start conversations with friends, other viewers and the aired program. Chatter around TV programs may help to recommend other programs or to serve contextually relevant information about actors, characters or whatever appears in TV.  Moreover, better ways to access and organize public conversations will drive new users into a TV program and engage current ones.

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