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troubleshooting is necessary. In this way, one
operator can easily and reliably monitor all
video streams, even those destined for
delivery via Web portals and mobile services,
from a single system and interface.
Euromedia: Social media is becoming an
important component of the TV viewing
experience. Is it just a case of ‘plug and play’
or is integration more complicated to ensure
seamless operation?
ADB: We don’t see a great deal of value
in a simple Facebook or Twitter app on
TV. For a start, it’s a personal experience
that you don’t necessarily want on the
big screen. For reading updates and
timelines your personal devices
(smartphone, tablet) make much more
sense than a TV screen. What might be
interesting is being able to send a link to
a TV show to your friends, filling in data
from the TV metadata – reducing typing
to an absolute minimum. The interaction
between devices is key. This needs a
different level of integration, including access
to all appropriate metadata on the TV –
something that is hardly possible in an appcentric TV experience.
Agama: Social media can be involved in the
overall TV viewing experience in many ways
– everything from being a content
component to discussions and ratings of both
operator and content itself. It’s also an
opportunity for customer care, marketing
development and quality follow-ups. From a
quality assurance perspective, social media
can bring new possibilities into
understanding the customers’ total
experience.
Bridge: There are solutions that offer the
ability for some degree of social media
integration, but it remains to be seen
whether that is really going to be an
important component of the TV experience
or whether TV operators are just attempting
to borrow some fashionable momentum from
social media use. It may be that social media
integration can’t really add anything of
significance to the TV viewing experience,
and canny broadcasters will be watching
recent indications that younger audiences are
using some social media sites less than they
used to.
DTVL: It’s early days with regards to
integration, and ‘social media’ participation
is very much a second screen experience
currently. Solutions are needed for
synchronisation of broadcast content with
the second screen and for easily discovering
and launching compatible applications on
the TV from the second screen and viceversa. Standards are key to this and the DVB
Project and HbbTV are working closely
20 EUROMEDIA
together to provide solutions in the
upcoming HbbTV v2 standard. For seamless
operation across platforms and to drive
innovation, agreement on and
implementation of unique content identifiers
are required, such that it becomes much
easier to share, recommend, comment on
content, and even drive cross-platform event
recording.
Edgeware: The next-gen CDN needs to
deliver the service provider’s own, managed
content along with OTT content generated by
services such as Instagram or a YouTube
video. Once again, delivery will be from
unified servers and monitoring from a
unified management system.
Farncombe: To leverage the full power of
the social media experience requires careful
user experience design and thorough testing
of the end-to-end experience for the viewer
to ensure a seamlessly integrated
environment where the viewer is drawn to
interact in social media as part of the TV
experience. One technical challenge is
keeping the video, audio and data on devices
in synch with the TV broadcast signal.
JDSU: You can make a strong argument that
social media is ‘plug and play’ in every
environment in which it’s introduced.
Regardless of the device, all that is required
is a front-end that connects to the Internet
and room for a small software footprint. The
interfaces back to the world of social media
are fairly straightforward. The beauty of
social media is that it’s wholly driven by the
users. As long as the subject matter is
engaging and thought-provoking, or rather,
conversation-provoking, and you make it
easy for the users to engage that
conversation, you’re off and running. I think
the challenge arises on the back-end of a
social media integration, when the operator
tries to figure out how to create value from
the data they’ve gained.
Mariner: Social media, like companion
applications adds another level of complexity
to ensuring that the end user device—
whatever screen that might be—delivers the
best consumer experience. Once again,
though, this comes back to the need to
develop software defined networking
solutions that can be readily adapted to
monitor the quality of the content across the
network while understanding the needs of
the end device screen.
S3: We see it as inevitable that today’s
Internet-based social media networks will be
integrated into the TV experience further.
Early experiments which obscured or
interfered in any way with the basic
content viewing experience failed
dismally and understandably.
We see great potential for more subtle
and less invasive integration of social
networks with the imminent arrival of 4K
displays and larger physical screen sizes.
Even with up to half of the central
portion of these displays used for 2x upscaled HD video, satisfying the need for
unobscured basic video delivery, there is
still a significant amount of screen real
estate free to surface social network
content to the viewer. Doing this smoothly
will require either more complicated set-top
box CPE or more capable cloud-UI
generation (or some combination of both)
but will not be simply a case of plug-andplay.
Triveni: Some approaches rely on simple
plug-and-play functionality, while others
integrate the social experience in some
fashion. A very important consideration in
this context is the distinction between
primary and secondary screens. Many
content providers don’t want any interactive
experience — social or otherwise —
corrupting the high-quality content displayed
on the primary screen. At the same time,
monitoring interactivity on the second screen
while assuring high-quality content is
definitely a complex process due to the need
for ad verification, playout confirmation, and
complete social media tracking.
Witbe: There are no technical issues in
integrating a Facebook or a Twitter app on a
TV. As there are no technical issues in having
video on mobiles or tablets. The problem is
to bring value add so that customers use it.
We have to forget the so-called ‘first screen’
and ‘second-screen’ concept and start
considering that a TV is just a screen
amongst others. The issue is to synchronise
content across all these screens so that social
media interactions with video content bring a
seamless QoE.
Wohler: Social media must be integrated into
the TV viewing experience because social
media tools have become many people’s
primary means of communicating with one
another. Given the importance of this element,
there is a lot more to it than ‘plug and play’.