Wigwam.tv
A lot of people are talking about social TV at the moment, but aside from following the current trend of tagging the word ’social’ onto everything, there isn’t really a general consensus on what social TV is. There are specific applications of course – you could build a community around X Factor for example, allowing people to chat about the contestants or vote via their TV, or Virgin Media could develop a service to let anyone on their network chat through their TV – but if your friends aren’t on Virgin, or if they’re not watching X Factor, they’re out of reach. We think there’s a lot more potential in building a service which isn’t party to a particular channel, provider, or show.
In the same way that Skype and MSN provide chat on your computer, and a variety of Facebook and Twitter apps let you access those services through your phone, Wigwam lets you chat to your friends and access your social networks directly through your TV. By building this as a standalone service, and deploying it to every connected TV platform we have access to, we’re aiming to let people experience real social TV, and be in touch with anyone else on Wigwam, regardless of who they buy their TV service from, or what channel they’re watching.
There’s a lot of potential for a service like this. The simple bits are fairly obvious – chat to your friends about what you’re watching or send a tweet about a video you just watched on MTV, but there are some less obvious ones. You could be watching one football game, and see that your mate’s watching something else – when a goal’s scored you can invite him to switch over and watch the replay with you. Or if you get bored of what’s on for the rest of the evening, you could send your friend a gift of some video on demand, and watch it together.
There are a few problems with building a service like this, and the number one problem is that people don’t like typing with their TV remote. Most remote buttons are horrible to press, or unresponsive, and on screen keyboards are very annoying to use. We’re bypassing this problem by letting people use anything else with a keyboard to to their text entry. So by deploying not just to TVs, but also iPhones, Android, Flash and the desktop, you can be watching TV, talking on Wigwam, but typing your replies into your phone. The Wigwam central server makes sure that everything stays in sync.
Another problem is that most TV and smart phone platforms currently only let you run one app at once – so if you’re in the Facebook widget you can’t be in the Twitter one. Through Wigwam you can be logged into all of those services at once, and so you don’t need to switch between every couple of minutes when you want to have a look at a different service.
At the moment we’re working on development for the first few versions of Wigwam for TV and mobile, but as we go along we’re learning a lot about developing a service that uses each of the three screens to its full potential. This is the way we see 360 development going – using the strengths of each platform properly, rather than just deploying the exact same set of functionality to each screen.
