Asynchronous Communication: Fostering Social Interaction with CollaboraTV

With the advent of digital video recorders and video-on-demand services, the way in which we consume media is undergoing a fundamental change. People today are less likely to watch shows at the same time, let alone the same place. As a result, television viewing which was once a social activity has been reduced to a passive, isolated experience. CollaboraTV was designed to address this new mode of television viewing by directly supporting asynchronous communication. We demonstrated its ability to support this communal viewing experience through a lab study and a month-long field study. Our studies show that users understand and appreciate the utility of asynchronous interaction, are enthusiastic about CollaboraTV’s engaging social communication primitives and value implicit show recommendations from friends. Our results both provide a compelling demonstration of a social television system and raise new challenges for social television communication modalities.