2 Screen Apps: The Idea That Would Not Die

MediaPost had a column about Digitas’ interest in iTV and second screen applications.  The idea has been around since the mid-nineties, and has threatened to launch and achieve critical mass once or twice before (I can show you the arrow marks).  Let the TV display the linear video, and send interactive content to  a second screen — a laptop, phone, or tablet.

This is all based on the simple data point that something like 60% of the public surfs on some second screen while watching television.  KPMG recently came up with that number, but that number or something like it has been around for some years. An awful lot of people aren’t fully engaged by linear TV, either because of the limitations of the quality of the content, or because (I’m about to coin a term here! I claim…whatever it is you claim when you coin something!) agency anxiety — the need to control some digital communications device after a brief period of interface inactivity.

Of course, all the people surfing while watching TV doesn’t mean that they are surfing about the show itself.  Most people are checking Facebook, their email, or whatever — nothing about the show.  In that sense, you might as well come up with an app that integrates TV programming and ironing, because lots of people do both of those things at the same time too.

But the networks actually have a more conservative goal.  They know most of their demographically desirable viewers are also going to surf.  They’re just trying to keep the consumer’s eyeballs on their content.  In that sense, two screen apps make good  business sense.  When you add the ability of the second screen user to interact with the advertising and the content, that will (presumably), increase the viewer’s emotive connection to the program and maybe even the network, and become more valuable to advertisers as well.

Ok, that all sounds reasonably logical.  However, there’s a conundrum that has prevented 2 screen apps from succeeding in the past, and is still in full force now.  To get people to log into the app (and stay there), the second screen’s content has to be compelling.  For the content to be compelling, it must have high production value and be closely tied to the content creation of the video itself.  The conundrum is that for the video program producers to care about the second screen’s content and therefore create the content or at least support it , there has to be serious money in it for them.  And there’s not.

Back in the day, I tried to do this with minimal cooperation from the program producers (see arrow marks), with very limited success.  The second screen apps I’ve completely unscientifically sampled (Breaking Bad, and a couple of others I can’t even recall) didn’t have much impact, either.

I would love to be wrong, but until this conundrum is solved, I don’t see second screen apps having much success.

 

 

 

 

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