Tech Tuesday: the two-screen experience on one screen

Many in the digital media realm talk about the "second screen experience," or even the "mulit-screen experience," to talk about people who are using social media while watching a traditional broadcast or cable program. Some programs try to integrate social media into the first screen by placing hashtags on the screen as a second bug, running a crawl of tweets on the bottom of the screen, or by showing social media posts as part of the main program.

"SimulTV" has a single screen solution. SimulTV is a subscription fee website with multiple channels. Each channel offers traditional video content and social media on a single page. I saw some of the people behind SimulTV pitch their product at the SXSW V2V conference in Las Vegas in 2013, and I wasn't very impressed, for the simple reason that they don't seem to understand content generators and providers. Their system is based on users coming to a SimulTV channel. Content providers, like broadcast networks and cable channels, are used to, and expect, users to come to THEIR web page for content. Instead of trying to get end users to pay to subscribe to one of their channels, I think these entrepreneurs would be better off licensing their technology to content providers.