Keynote at CollaborateCom 2010. Invited talk at OSU-CETI

1. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Can Couch Potatoes be
Collaborators?
Can Couch Potatoes be Collaborators?
Venu Vasudevan, PhD | Senior Director | Betaworks | Motorola Mobility
Adjunct Faculty | ECE Department | Rice University
MOTOROLA
and
the
Stylized
M
Logo
are
trademarks
or
registered
trademarks
of
Motorola
Trademark
Holdings,
LLC.
All
other
trademarks
are
the
property
of
their
respec@ve
owners.
©
2010
Motorola
Mobility,
Inc.
All
rights
reserved.

2. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Collaboration : about intersections in interactions
Community
Content
“Who”
“On What”
Faceted
Collaboration
Context
Computation
“Why”
“How”
.. collaborative computing and collaborative media are just facets

3. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Collaborative Computing = Orchestrated interactions
Community
Content
“Who”
“On What”
Drive
Efficiency
Machines
assist
Context
Computation
People
“Why”
“How”
to increase
Productivity

4. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Collaborative Media = Orchestrated interactions
Community
Content
“Who”
“On What”
Facilitate
Emergence
People
assist
Context
Computation
Machines
“Why”
“How”
to increase
Knowledge

5. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Collaborative Media driven by Participatory users
Social Search = Human computation
h5p://www.flickr.com/photos/briansolis/2735401175/
Social Networking = Human communications
Image
used
under
Crea-ve
Commons
Licensing,
Social Media = Human (generated) content

6. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
X-shi,ing expands Collaboration opportunities
Commercial vs. User-generated content
http://www.flaii.com/userguide/newimages/web-20-1p2.jpg
Real-time vs. Time-shi,ed consumption
Home vs. Mobile
Interstitial vs. Intentional

7. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Collaborative Computing  Information Web
machine-driven + enterprise + orchestrated
Collaborative Media  Social Web
people-driven + consumer + organic
expertise
volume
attention

8. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
What does a ‘collaborator’ look like
Depth of ‘engagement’
Diversity of participation

9. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Rest of this talk
Can TV be a collaborative media platform
Can couch potatoes be collaborators?

10. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Reducing collaboration to an Activity Format
actor
verb
target
context
who
did
what
to
what
under
what
(intent|
circumstance
relevance|
engagement)

11. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Elements of successful web collaborative media
• Lots of interesting accessible social
targets
• Enable interesting verbs (annotate | tag |
chat)
• Frictionless interaction. Make it dead easy
to ‘enact’ these verbs (e.g. tag|like)
tag
– Attention is a finite resource
• Layer.
– Expose higher level .. That arise from verb
patterns
annotate
• Tag similarity|affinity
• Expertise
• Object popularity
– Create higher level verbs around higher chat
level patterns (e.g. ask)
• Gamify. Make participation addictive
(urgency | competition | symmetry |
persistence)
ask

12. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Before
going
into
this
I
thought,
‘What
would
I
ever
use
You’re
sharing
similar
thoughts
this
for?’…
But
it
was
a
totally
different
experience
and
you’re
sharing
them
live
while
they
happen
..
actually
doing
it
so
you’re
enhancing
the
experience…
I’m
alone
a
lot.
There
are
-mes
when
it
would
be
nice
to
have
someone
to
talk
to.”
Realizable? (engineering | usability)
Relevant? (business models | adoption)
COLLABORATIVE MEDIA ON TV :
THREE STORY LINES

13. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
If collaboration is the answer, what is the question?
TV STUDIOS NEW USER
AGGREGATORS GENERATED
• Converging to IP | web | digital
• Exploding content. Fragmenting user
attention
iTunes
• New Wave Media. Old school user
search habits
Public Private
Networks
TV has a knowledge discovery
problem.
 for content
 within content
 during content
 Where collaborative | social is a
desirable approach

14. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
What is TV : Ask the people ..
• It just works.
• It turns on instantly.
• Others will have watched the same thing I watch.
• It’s episodic; structured.
• It’s not demanding.
©
2010
Motorola
Mobility,
Inc.
-­‐
Internal
5/16/11
Confiden@al

15. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
content discovery conundrums
Hot shows
Peak Moments
Inside Stuff

16. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
content discovery conundrums  varying social solutions
Hot shows 
social as filter
Peak Moments 
social as sensor
Inside Stuff 
social as router

17. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Web TV similarity
• Content
• Conversations around content (e.g. forums)
• Social Network
• Rights Management
• Monetization (Ads)
• User Interaction technologies (speech | gesture)
• User Attention

18. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Different engineering hurdles ..
Feature
Web Ecosystem
TV Ecosystem
Content
Webpage
Program ID +
Reference
URL
Offset + Duration
Interaction
Resource-rich
Resource-limited
Device
(PC + browser)
(TV + remote)
User
Individual
Household vs.
Identity
Login
Individual
Application Experience
Lean
Lean
Forward
Back
Content Access Free
Paid
Consumption Model
User-controlled
Provider-controlled

19. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Social as Filter
TVL.ICIO.US : SOCIAL
BOOKMARKING FOR TV

20. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Social Bookmarking as a value proposition
Widely adopted for web content
Proven value to discovery on web
• Improved quality, click-ability of search results
for content discovery
• Models user interests and social ties or
influences for audience discovery
Promising value to TV-centric needs in
engagement, discovery

21. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Social Bookmarking for TV – The Concept
TV viewers
TV Clips
Social Bookmark
=
Creator Identity + Content Reference + Descriptive Tags

22. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
User Benefit : Shared clips as social currency
Bob likes a “Bill Maher” joke. He clips that Alice (Bob’s friend) sees the bookmark
segment and saves it using his TV bookmarking and is intrigued. She clicks it to request
service using tags like ‘funny’ and ‘Bill Maher’
and view the clip directly on her TV.
User
Reference
Tag
Bookmark
Bookmark
Identification
Generation
Annotation
Retrieval
Consumption

23. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
TV vs Web. different medium | different challenge
Feature
TV
Ecosystem
Challenges
Bookmark
TV or video clips
“Retrospective” bookmarking
Crea@on
(dynamic)
is hard
Content
Program ID +
Affinity analysis
Reference
Offset + Duration
for discovery
Interac@on
Resource-limited
Cumbersome input for
Device
(TV + remote)
annotation
User
Household vs.
Handling
Iden@ty
Individual
concurrency
Crea@on
Experience
Lean
Attention vs. Interruption
Back
Consump@on
Model
Paid
Utility vs. Legality around
Provider-controlled
distribution

24. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Provider Need: understand acquire customers effectively
Producing commercial content is
costly  finer granularity of analytics
(clip vs. item) can help
Reduce costs by de-risking decisions
 clip activity = viewer interest
Recoup costs with targeted
advertising  clip annotations =
viewer intent

25. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Social as Sensor
TWEET TV : TWITTER BASED
‘HEAT SEEKING’ FOR TV

26. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Sports TV : the channel flippers dilemma
Keeping up with a number of
simultaneous games for knowledge |
social capital
Ebbs flows make interest level
fluctuate rapidly in real-time
Digital Herd Mentality. Being where
the action is
Media monitoring. Cognitive effort |
latency

27. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Twitter sensor for the real-world : fast AND good
• For location-based queries 43% chance that a Twitter result will be the #1
ranked
• General queries  23% chance that a Twitter result is #1
• Newest Twitter results ~4 seconds old. The newest Web results are 10x older
(41 seconds).
• A top ranking Twitter result for a location-based query  2 minutes old (vs
Web which is 22 minutes old)
• When Twitter results appear at least one of them is in the top ranked position

28. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Sports world is at least as ‘chirpy’
#superbowl
4000 tps
#worldcup
3300 tps

29. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
The trend hasn’t gone unnoticed ..

30. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
social navigation: e*pg
• Can we detect in-game events quickly
reliably by analyzing public twitter
streams?
• game event detection | user sentiment extraction |
Loc | device
• Can we overlay this sentiment on
traditional EPG grids to create credible
experience
• Can this be done without miring end-
user in unnatural amounts of profile
filling
sport
team
player
mojo
events

31. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
social navigation: e*pg
• Can we detect in-game events quickly
reliably by analyzing public twitter
streams?
– fairly accurate for football and
soccer
– Sensing latency better than web 2.0
sources (30 seconds vs 2 minutes)
• Calibrating the Twitter sensor ..
– Sensitivity | latency | response to
different game cadences |
singularity detection ?

32. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Social as Router
TV ANSWERS: QA FOR TV

33. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Web search : from automated to human
Credits.
Aardvark@slideshare

34. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Weak links : stronger than strong
Credits.
Aardvark@slideshare

35. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
TV Social Search
• Focus on user-generated queries around viewed content
• Real-world examples (from Yahoo! Answers ‘TV’ category)
• Benefits of explicit search
– Finer granularity in defining focus user interest (about “X”)
– Clearer idea of user intent (what is X  where can I buy X)

36. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
So, where’s the problem?
• Occur out-of-band today (online, in CQA
communities)
– Requires a second device (PC) for querying
while watching TV
– Imposes cognitive (recall) and descriptive
(entry) burden on user
– TV out-of-the-loop for analytics tracking
(dilutes user profiling)
Increased
traffic
from
a
Kellogg
‘Special
K”
• Tension between ‘lean-back’ and call
to
ac@on.
‘interactive’ behaviors
At
the
end
of
the
spot
the
voice
over
urged
– BUT users will search the searchable given users
to
go
to
Yahoo!
and
search
on
opportunity means
Special
K.
Spot
included
screen
shot
of
Yahoo!
Search
hWp://weblogs.hitwise.com/bill-­‐tancer/2007/01/special_k_another_tv_search_ca.html

37. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
What’s the challenge in ‘inline’ TV Search?
How to ask the question?
‘Search’ interfaces on TV are
cumbersome, limited in facets
Human questions tend to be
ambiguous, imprecise
Whom to target for responses?
Humans excel (over SE) in
visual interpretation, intuitive query
‘tuning’, collective wisdom

38. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
The “TV Answers” System
How to ask the question?
‘Freeze-Frame’ interface to capture
visual context
‘Templates’ helper to ease query
creation
Whom to ask?
‘Edge proxy’ intermediary to route
query to relevant user communities
for responses

39. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
from what to how
Evolution of TV as
Collaboration Platform
MOTOROLA
and
the
Stylized
M
Logo
are
trademarks
or
registered
trademarks
of
Motorola
Trademark
Holdings,
LLC.
All
other
trademarks
are
the
property
of
their
respec@ve
owners.
©
2010
Motorola
Mobility,
Inc.
All
rights
reserved.

40. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
TV : not so long ago ..
Content | device | interactivity
are all bundled
5/16/11

41. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
TV : here. now a bit beyond ..
content
content cuts the device cord
video interactivity bundled
device
5/16/11

42. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Interactivity Collaboration. Evolutionary thread
Branded
content
Operator
Set-­‐top
Backoffice
Internet
Content

43. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Dual-Screen TV : Incursion of couch top devices
content
separate synchronize
behind Moore’s
rendering
device
beyond
Moore’s
interactivity
5/16/11

44. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Is Dual Screen for real?
tv appification ..
on to the 2nd screen..
pervasive media multiplexing
2.2 M viewers
100 K dual screen users (week 1)
500 K plays
fast go-to-market alternatives
with promising content
 audio fingerprints
proof pts ..
5/16/11
Ref.
GigaOm.
TV
Apps:
Evolu-on
from
Novelty
to
Mainstream

45. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Benefits of Dual Screen
personalized.
private
viewer
shorter learning curve
faster technology waves.
application
content
direct-to-consumer.
‘cooler’ platforms
developer
creator
superior analytics.
advertiser
Interactivity.
superior
targeting
5/16/11

46. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
TV ‘check-in’ : a TV apps data point
• Downloadable ‘TV applications’ on
Company
Descrip@on
the smartphone marketplace
Tunerfish
Led
by
Plaxo
(Comcast
acquisi@on)
(Comcast)
team.
Includes
both
TV
check-­‐in
and
• Support collaborative operations social
rewards
that don’t require TV data GoMiso
Funded
by
Google
ventures.
manipulation
Android
|
iphone
apps
– Recommend
GetGlue
#1
in
traffic
(5M
monthly
check-­‐
– Check-in
ins).
– Chat with friends
Check-­‐in
+
recommender
technology.
• 1 yr | 15 companies | $75M venture.
HotPotato
Launched
:
11/09.
Acquired
by
Facebook
:
8/10
Startling.tv
Focus
on
broadcast
partners.
MTV
alumni
founders
TV.com
CBS
broadcas@ng
relay
(CBS)

47. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
TV ‘check-in’ : a TV apps data point
• Downloadable ‘TV applications’ on
Company
Descrip@on
the smartphone marketplace
Tunerfish
Led
by
Plaxo
(Comcast
acquisi@on)
(Comcast)
team.
Includes
both
TV
check-­‐in
and
• Support collaborative operations social
rewards
that don’t require TV data GoMiso
Funded
by
Google
ventures.
manipulation
Android
|
iphone
apps
– Recommend
GetGlue
#1
in
traffic
(5M
monthly
check-­‐
– Check-in
ins).
– Chat with friends
Check-­‐in
+
recommender
technology.
• 1 yr | 15 companies | $75M venture.
HotPotato
Launched
:
11/09.
Acquired
by
Facebook
:
8/10
Startling.tv
Focus
on
broadcast
partners.
MTV
alumni
founders
TV.com
CBS
broadcas@ng
relay
(CBS)

48. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Does more become less, or better?
studio
atomization of interest groups
mso
studio host
cast
player
friends
curation to the rescue?
quality
timeliness
diversity

49. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Other ways TV futures depart from the past
• Removing the input bottleneck
– keyboard | gesture
– and dealing with the
identity challenge
• Video symmetry
– webcam as sensor?
• Game mechanics for persuasion
– heuristics
– to science?

50. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Future of TV as collaboration platform
looking back at mobiles
Step change in platform
Collabora@on
horsepower
capabilities | trajectory
Platform as Application Magnet
New sensors (GPS)
New modalities (touch)
New networks (WiFi)
Application optimized platform
Web Enablement
Content Rights Innovation (a la carte)
(voice | messaging)
Symmetric rich media
Time

51. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Future of TV as collaboration platform
speculation by analogy
?
Collabora@on
horsepower
Platform as Application Magnet
New sensors (webcam)
New modalities (gesture)
New networks (WiFi)
Application optimized platform
Web Enablement
Content Rights Innovation (Internet TV)
(broadcast | on-demand video)
Symmetric rich media
Time

52. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
In summary ..
Can
couch
potatoes
be
collaborators?
yes
Can
TV
be
a
collabora@ve
plakorm
Already
there

53. Can
Couch
Potatoes
be
Collaborators
:
Invited
Talk
Questions?
MOTOROLA
and
the
Stylized
M
Logo
are
trademarks
or
registered
trademarks
of
Motorola
Trademark
Holdings,
LLC.
All
other
trademarks
are
the
property
of
their
respec@ve
owners.
©
2010
Motorola
Mobility,
Inc.
All
rights
reserved.