“All TV viewing will be social in the future.” It was a bold and loaded statement made by Joanna Shields, Facebook’s MD and VP of EMEA, during her keynote held at Amsterdam’s IBC. But very few at this year’s show were betting against this scenario. On the demand side, social recommendation and engagement with broadcast content is proving to be a hit with audiences and a natural evolution of water cooler conversation. On the supply side of the industry, the social graph of the audience’s implicit and explicit preferences is becoming a highly valuable asset for effective recommendation, discovery and merchandising of content. In the medium term this data has the opportunity to be productised as additional insight for advertisers to accompany the existing broadcast spot trading model, and ultimately the evolution path of broadcast ad space.

However the rapid growth of the role of the major social platforms, whether Facebook, Twitter, or local market specialists such as South Korea’s Cyworld, as a discrete or integrated component of broadcast services is forcing all parties in the media supply chain to examine what they want their relationship with the customer to be, whether they want to own a customer identity, and what option they want on future models of customer data monetization.

The integration of social media and both scheduled and on-demand premium video services is being driven by two trends: growth in the distribution and consumption of premium video content via web services and audience multi-tasking.

Audience multi-tasking
Multi-tasking, the act of using a smartphone, tablet or PC, while watching television is developing into a common behaviour observed in mainstream audiences, driven by a growing demographic penetration of iOS and Android smartphones, the emergence of the tablet segment and steady state growth in the notebook PC base. According to Ovum’s Consumer Insights survey across eight countries, more than 70 per cent of people claim to at least occasionally use a second-screen device while watching TV, with 37 per cent doing so on a regular basis.

Disconnecting eyeballs from broadcast ad inventory?
The usage of second screen devices while watching television creates an audience engagement challenge. Since the launch of Tivo, the broadcast industry has wrestled with the impact of DVR on broadcast ad engagement. Multi-tasking now presents another threat to the broadcast ad spot, as the television is relegated to the second, ambient screen. This threat is compounded by the behavioural trends of consumers using second screen devices. Two applications predominate in all markets in Ovum’s user research: casual web browsing and social media usage, handing Google and Facebook a large slice of this multi-tasking activity.

Reconnecting through companion applications
But audience multi-tasking also presents opportunities for studios, channel programmers and pay- TV platform operators to create new media products, extend their audience reach beyond the television screen and mine data about their audiences for their own content and service merchandising purposes, or provide additional insight to advertisers. An application in this context can be distributed to the end user via a browser, or via a native application store such as the Apple App Store, Android Marketplace, or as an application on a social platform, such as Facebook. The content of the application itself is bounded only by the limits of the creative, but what is clear is that companion video is one possibility.

The question is who has the right to provide a companion app-based service to the audience? Is it the studio, a sports federation, channel programmer or pay-TV platform operator?