From 2BeOn Results to New Media Challenges for Social (i)TV

Abstract

This chapter focuses on traditional and emergent challenges for the Social (i)TV area focusing on explaining the development and evaluation of one of the first Social iTV prototypes and looking at the challenges new media is introducing to this research field. The authors begin by explaining the conceptualization, development and evaluation process of the 2BeOn system and continue with the most important results from it’s evaluation with a particular focus on the results that can be important when developing any Social iTV platform. In the last part of the chapter recent developments in the broadcast of TV and Audiovisual content, namely considering the Internet as a medium, are addressed. In this scope authors propose a categorization of emergent online distribution platforms along with a set of social activities users perform on those platforms. Taking in consideration some of the challenges surrounding the presented scenario the chapter ends with the conceptualization of UMCA, a system that could increase social interaction activities performed during the consumption of online AV/TV content. SoCIAL (I)Tv: PRogReSSeS And ChALLengeS Interactive television platforms that promote services aimed to support socialization practices around TV viewing, acting as a kind of “social glue” (Light, 2004), are at the core of Social (i)TV research (Harboe, 2007). Despite the introduction of the first iTV systems with real time communication services being considerably recent, it is interesting to notice that a considerable amount of research as been done in this area. Since the year 2000, with AOLTV being the first commercial iTV system integrating an InDOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-656-3.ch013