TVloop Blog

There has been a lot of chatter across the blogosphere this week about socializing around TV.  Most of it began when Hulu announced that it was adding a variety of social features so that users could share their TV-watching habits with their friends.  The reviews are mixed so far as building a community doesn’t appear to be integrated very well into the user experience and seems to be a bit of an after-thought.  In the end you’ll probably see Hulu take advantage of Facebook Connect and other existing communities to allow users to more effectively share what their watching.

But aside from that, we wanted to find out whether users really want to socialize while their watching live broadcast television.  Keep in mind that we totally get that TV is a prime area for socialization or we would not have built 200+ TV applications for Facebook and MySpace while also building our own destination website, TVLoop.com.  But we’ve seen that most users visit our communities to interact around their favorite show before or after an episode airs.  They want to talk about the past episodes, answer trivia questions, and take quizzes.  They don’t want to chit chat online while the show is going on.  That doesn’t mean there isn’t a market for that as Twitter has proven that real-time conversation is viable in certain scenarios and for certain shows.  But how prevalent is it?

When asked “Do you multi-task while watching TV?”, our poll shows that 49% of TVLoop users say no - when they’re watching TV, they want to watch TV.  Another 33% say their online in some form or fashion while the remaining 18% say they’re on the phone or texting with friends.

These results are mixed in my mind.  It’s basically a 50/50 split between those that only want to watch TV and those that want to have conversations (online or offline) while watching TV.  It’s a topic that we’ll definitely keep an eye on as it could have big impacts on our product roadmap and overall user experience. We tested real-time chat in the past and it did not do well within our applications. But that doesn’t mean that door is closed forever.