Second Screen Blues

Why Second Screen won’t work for dramatic TV

Why Second Screen won’t work for dramatic TV

Flickr image by Roo Reynolds

I’m out at Digital Entertainment World, a conference in Hollywood. A lot of people here are talking about “second screen” applications—the idea that while you watch TV, you’ll have your iPad on your lap and be interacting with content related to the show you’re watching.

I hope I’m wrong—because being wrong can be pretty awesome when people surprise you in amazing ways—but I don’t think Second Screen is going to amount to a lot. I think it’s a trend that’s driven more by a hunger to generate new categories of advertising revenue than it is by any authentic desire to create value for fans. I’ll grant that there are some interesting second screen applications in certain categories (sports and news come to mind)—and maybe there are some entirely new types of viewing experiences that will leverage second screens in interesting ways—but when it comes to dramatic content, I hate the thought of pulling someone out of the storytelling dream-state of great TV so that they can be fiddling with another device at the same time. Do I want to be reading character profiles about House Stark while I’m watching events unfold on the screen during Game of Thrones? I don’t, and I don’t think others do either.

On the other hand, I see a huge role for making content available on different types of devices and then building a continuum rather than an interruption of new experiences to indulge in. HBO Go and Netflix are the way of the future—letting me snack or binge on content, wherever I want, whenever I want and on whatever device I want. And by making content available this way, it opens up a lot of opportunities to create linkages between great media content and new forms of interactive content that expands my relationship with a story or deepens my involvement with a community. These type of interactions are going to be largely asynchronous and social, and not tied to real-time collective viewing experiences (how could you ever create a real-time social TV experience for something like House of Cards, given its distribution model?) Games are an obvious way to deepen the experience, given that they monetize better than any other type of online content and provide a way to reengage between episodes and between seasons—but I’m sure there are plenty of other great social applications that would also bring me into a deep community experience that nobody has thought of yet.

The key is focusing on where content itself is moving: asynchronous, on-demand and consumer driven—and building social experiences to that build communities around this shifting market reality.