Social TV – Boon or Bust?

by on April 25, 2012

social tv hashtagPsychologists say that people will do more to avoid pain than they will to pursue pleasure. I’ve also read that in order for that same person to want to engage in that same activity that the pleasure must be increased to a point of which they believe has masked the pain or made them forget about the pain all together.

So what the heck am I talking about? Television of course. Now, I’m not a huge TV watcher, at least not in the traditional sense. Just recently I decided to watch X-Files on Hulu; all nine seasons. What a great experience. No commercials and I watched these episodes for months. Hulu makes their money on me because I pay for Hulu plus. In my opinion its a bit like paying for a premium channel like HBO.

I would have to call this experience pain free viewing. The $8.00 a month (pain) that I pay for awesome commercial free (pleasure) viewing is well worth it. But is it? I’ve now watched all the X-Files episodes (Sniffle) and I see that none of the other programming is commercial free (pain) and I’m still paying for the premium solution (pain). Now that I’ve completed X-Files I think I will cancel my premium subscription. The pain threshold of having to watch commercials is much higher than recording something on my DVR and fast forwarding through them.

So that’s my experience. How about you? Do you pay for a service like Hulu Plus? How about this new wave of social TV? I saw a friend check-in to one of his favorite shows the other night using Get Glue. Nearly every show has embraced real-time conversation by applying a trackable hashtag to their shows. Have you found yourself enjoying shows more in real-time because of this type of social integration? I am frankly skeptical. Books like Social TV by Mike Proulx and Stacey Shepatin talk about how social is dramatically helping live TV. For me, and no offense, but if I’m going to veg out on a favorite show I don’t really want to chat with everyone on Twitter about it. Now maybe that’s because I work on my computer all day but I still remain skeptical.

Shoot me a comment below. Are you using social TV apps or engaging in the live conversations? Has this increased your pleasure of watching live TV? I’d love to know.

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About Keith
Keith is Director, Marketing & Communications for Carbonview Research. Carbonview is a full service market research company working with ad agencies, brand managers and interactive professionals. Keith's passions include marketing, measurement, social media and his family.

Comments

  1. Keturah Stanton on April 25, 2012 at 2:37 pm

    I was looking for that a long time. Can you give me a list of your references? Thanks. We all will wait for your new posts.

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