But over time it became apparent that the usage patterns for the iPad are very different than for iPhone, at least at this stage of the device’s evolution. By and large, people leave their iPads at home — they don’t take them to work — so it’s really difficult to get someone to engage with the network during the course of the day. You lose tons of opportunities to get him or her to interact with their graph, and that’s basically like starvation for a new social network.
When the user gets home, they pick up their iPads and spend a few hours with it. That’s part of the beauty of the device; it’s very, very immersive. The underside of that quality is that, given a few hours after dinner and before bed with such an immersive device, most people will open just a few apps and spend lots of time in each (versus the dozens of sites they might visit with a laptop and a browser). If you’re one of those apps, that’s great, but if you’re not, you’re in a much more difficult competition for users’ attention. - Khoi Vinh of Mixel
One of the better apps of this type is yap.TV. The 19-month-old startup aims to serve as a sort of TV Guide of the future, offering an hourly lineup of television shows but with a ton of interactivity built on top of it.
But the thing that is sticking out the most is the nature of the products being launched. Out of the 39 companies presenting on the record today, 15 are mobile-first by my count.
This shouldn’t be surprising, I suppose. Study after study is showing that feature phones, iPhones and Androids combine to reach millions more people than the web. And lots of top technologists are declaring that the companies of the future are going to be mobile before they hit the web.
The study reported mixed results. As noted in Mercer’s Strategy Analytics blog, one of the app’s most popular features was one of its most basic, namely: to remind users when the TV show was about to start. On the downside, within 10 minutes of the show starting, viewers lost interest in the app, shifting their attention instead toward a “single-screen experience.”
Strategy Analytics also found that some users encountered technical difficulties with audio synchronization. Raising the volume on the TV is one way to improve audio synchronization, but one viewer found the noise overpowering. Losing the connection between multi-screen devices not surprisingly leads to dissatisfaction.
Tablet TV is Social TV — The rise of social television has had a huge impact on linear broadcasting. While there are plenty of people liking and tweeting from their phone or laptop, tablets will continue to impact trending topics and industry buzz in the coming years. Social TV app GetGlue also functions as a content discovery engine. When media companies leverage the social graph, they increase organic discovery on leading social networks and gain valuable insights into the habits and tastes of their most loyal viewers.
To learn more about a TV show you’re watching, you can turn to so-called second-screen apps on your smartphone or tablet. But it’s still unclear how many viewers will want to use them.
So far, second-screen apps are dwarfed by the popularity of the social media giants Facebook and Twitter. “Television is social,” says Elizabeth Shaw, an analyst at Forrester Research. “We’ve always talked offline with others about what is going on in our favorite shows. Now it’s moved online. Networks know this and are trying to figure out how to move these conversations to their own Web and mobile properties.”
