Social Media Usage Combined with TV/Video Watching: Opportunities and Associated Challenges

This paper provides an overview of the impact and opportunities provided by Social Media and other social interaction tools when watching TV/video content. The analysis has been conducted from the viewpoints of both individual and shared media experiences between remote users. On the one hand, many possibilities provided by Social Media when each user is concurrently consuming multiple related media content, either on a single device or on different devices (e.g., in multi-screen scenarios), are described. On the other hand, the potential of Social Media and other interaction tools when multiple remote users are concurrently consuming the same media content (e.g., in Social TV) is discussed. In addition, the paper highlights some remaining challenges and open issues that need to be addressed in the near future to truly provide augmented, interactive, personalized and shared experiences, combining Social Media usage and TV/video content consumption. Finally, as a real use case, the social interaction, presence and privacy mechanisms provided by a media sharing platform under development, called Wersync, are described.