Mobile and interactive social television

Services that were traditionally designed for a static environment can now be implemented into mobile devices. At the same time, services with traditionally passive-consumption-oriented paradigms are moving toward participative and interactive services. One such service is mobile and interactive social TV (MIST), which allows geographically dispersed people to meet in a virtual shared space and watch TV while being able to interact with each other. This service allows users to create an experience of watching together by providing its participants a common shared context. We present two novel architectures of a MIST system. In both of the architectures, the interaction is represented by rich audio-visual media, allowing users to hear and see each other. In the first architecture, the mixing of the TV content with the interaction media is performed at the server side. In the second architecture, the mixing is performed in each client device. There are many questions that arise from the consumer perspective regarding a radical change in experience when compared to traditional laid-back TV watching. Mobile and interactive social TV is relatively new when compared to the concept of traditional TV watching in a static context. To develop understanding of the consumer experience with the MIST concept, a focus group study approach was conducted. The study revealed that the feeling of social presence of people of interest when watching content with them was considered to add value to the viewing experience. The key system requirement is the ability for selective enabling/disabling of individual interaction features as per the user preferences and context. The context was considered to be influenced by both the relation with other participants and the content being consumed.