Introduction
In this half day workshop on social interactive television, researchers and practitioners discussed issues related to different aspects of social television, such as social television program genres, implementing social features, designing for and evaluating sociability, the impact of the home context on social interactive television, etc.
Besides short presentations and group discussions, the participants engaged in a design activity to create a novel social interactive television concept.
The workshop was held on May 23, 2007 at EuroITV2007 in Amsterdam.
UPDATE: the introductory and summary presentations of the workshop are now available online
Description of topic
Interactive television (iTV) opens up a lot of possibilities for enhancing the viewing experience. One of the strongest ways for iTV to improve TV is to support the social uses of television. Interactivity is being implemented and used on an older medium that is inherently social. Even in this internet age, when one supposes that television is being used less and less, and with multiple television sets in several households, which might indicate a more individualized use, there is evidence that watching television is still a family activity and co-viewing is still the dominant practice. This means that applications designed for interactive television will have to take this social context into account, but also that this medium holds a lot of promise to let people remotely communicate, form communities, or collaborate with each other. Like the emergence and apparent success of ‘social software’ on the internet, concepts for social software for interactive television are already being propagated e.g. by Tom Coates, or in prototypes like AmigoTV or Personal Broadcaster.
Several interactive television systems are currently being developed that enable viewers at different locations to communicate with each other. These systems include multiple features to enhance interaction between households. There is however a growing need to understand how these systems should be developed, evaluated and implemented, from a technical point of view as well as from the perspectives of HCI and the social sciences.
This workshop seeks to address the issues of social television by bringing together researchers and practitioners from different domains, but with the same concern for social interactive television.