Understanding Secondary Content Practices for Television Viewing

Abstract

Secondary content experiences related to television viewing have been a frequent topic of study in the TVX community. While many new interfaces have been created and studied in the small scale, we are not aware of any larger quantitative work to study current practices now that many secondary content experiences are publicly available. We conducted a survey with a broad sample of the American population to explore current secondary content use. We report on our findings, including that 80% of these experiences occur before or after viewing the primary content, and not as simultaneous experiences, and that social posting about television content remains quite low, even for one's favorite show. We conclude with implications for the design new secondary content systems based on our findings.