Comcast has to be given some credit for taking the entrepreneurial team that started the business network Plaxo (you know the annoying one that emails you every week and asks what you’re up to in business) and not only keep its executives on board when it acquired it two years back, but gave them their head around innovating with social TV viewing, in a new service called Tunerfish.
We’ve been hearing for years that the beauty of IPTV is that it can take TV and integrate it with other applications which also use IP based communication. The two examples everyone used to give were usually showing the telephone number and ID of the person calling you on your TV screen, and sharing with friends exactly what you are watching on TV and including them in an IM conversion while watching.
But these things never seem to come for the great bulk of us, partly because most of us don’t yet have IPTV, but also because there’s little profit available with many of these ideas.
But John McCrea, VP of marketing at Plaxo told a TechCrunch conference last week about his Tunerfish initiative, about to go into beta any day.
‘I am a huge fan of the TV series the Tudors,’ McCrea opened with, ‘but I didn’t discover this show until midway through its second season. By which time Henry the 8th was already onto his third wife,’ and he used this personal example to raise the issue that ‘there must be a better way to discover great TV.’
Like so many systems we’ve seen from middleware vendors, McCrea focused almost straight away on being able to see what your friends are watching right now or were watching last week and achieving this in as few clicks as possible.
Interestingly, this might be one of the innovations that something like Google TV could copy overnight and load into Android market, but remember this is Comcast behind this move, and Comcast is stuck with cable technology.
McCrea calls Tunerfish a ‘Social discovery engine and although it is currently a web site and an iPhone app, it will also be pushed to the TV screen, as soon as his company works out how to do that. It focuses on keying the first few letters of a TV program, and a lookup of a remote database filling in the rest of the program name. This has been built up from the metadata of almost every available US TV program.
Then in the web version of Tunerfish, you simply hit the ‘I’m watching’ button and it will immediately share this information with your friends on Twitter and Facebook (any other social network is free to extend the site to include itself).
In this way it is supposed to offer a real time stream of what all your friends are watching, and this can be interrogated over the past week where they have clicked on the ‘I’m Watching’ button. At Faultline we’ve still to work out how to use Plaxo for business, and we’re not sure how many people would care enough to click on the ‘I’m watching’ button unless it is on the edge of their TV screen as a constant reminder, but clearly that’s where this idea is heading.
The system can also aggregate viewing data from many friends based on what they are viewing now, over the past 24 hours or the last week, and provide this back as ‘trending’ data, to show overall what ALL of your friends collectively are watching (or at least the ones who are anal enough to click the ‘I’m watching’ button).
If, when you are browsing through all these trends you decide to accept one of your friends recommendations, you can also click ‘I’m watching too.’ It is this click that gives all of its appeal to the Tunerfish system because it allocates some form of reward for anyone who has been instrumental in recommending a program which subsequently gets watched by a friend. The system itself keeps track of all of the things you’ve recommended and the points can be allocated by the operator to buy VoD or download apps or anything he thinks consumers will like.
The Tunerfish system simply can also work by giving direct access to URLs on the internet, and so your friends can simply cut and paste URLs on the internet and say ‘go here for a laugh’ just as easily as recommending any TV program, so it’s fine for OTT YouTube clips.
The entire idea is to reduce friction in sharing to a single click and offer rewards for doing it.
Already it also comes as a web site and native iPhone App, and the next step is to make it into something that can be viewed on a TV screen.
McCrea makes it clear that this is an open system and the stream of recommendations can be output to other systems. It goes into a public beta in the next two weeks, but to us its biggest problem is that it is no longer a part of an unaffiliated start up, as Plaxo was. This is part of Comcast and will therefore only likely be used by Comcast and its TV implementation will likely only be for cable technology.