Joe Tullio: Projects - Social Television

Investigating the Uses of Social Television

The Social TV project is a multi-phase investigation of how social interactive television is used and valued in the homes of close friends and family. Each phase of the investigation built on the previous one, generating prototypes that implemented progressively richer communications between households. By the final phase, the system incorporated both text and audio chat, presence information about what people were watching, suggestions to join programs or watch them in the future, and viewing history features to display the most popular shows or common shows among a group of friends.

One problem with social television is that it is difficult to signal who is currently participating in the system when the television is turned off. The incorporation of an ambient display provided a means of determining roughly how many friends/family were currently watching television without having to explicitly bring up a "buddy list" on the TV. In field trials, this feature was identified as a key point of entry into participants' use of the system.

In addition, the communication features of the prototype, which initially permitted sending only pre-written text messages and emoticons, were eventually expanded to free-form text chat and multi-party voice chat. Participants desired a great deal of freedom in their ability to communicate, and tended to make more use of text chat than voice.

Another finding included the relatively weak relationship between the content being displayed on TV and the topics of conversation. We expected a stronger relationship, especially during the 3rd phase of the study when we recruited a group of sports fans during the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament. However, the system was largely used for "catching up" and talking about a wide range of topics.

Our methods involved a series of field deployments with up to five households at a time. We conducted in-person interviews at the start and end of the deployment periods (4 weeks for the major phases of the project) as well as phone interviews in the middle of the deployment period. In addition, we collected daily voicemail diaries from participants during the trials, and logged all system interactions. Our qualitative analysis took the form of a grounded theory affinity composed of direct quotes from the interview and voicemail data. These notes were organized by theme and used to inform design decisions for subsequent phases.

Relevant publications

Huang, E., Harboe, G., Tullio, J., Novak, A., Massey, N., Metcalf, C., and Romano, G. (2009) Social Television Comes Home: A Field Study of Communication Choices and Practices in TV-Based Text and Voice Chat, Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2009). [ACM link]

Harboe, G., Metcalf, C., Tullio, J., Massey, N., Romano, G., Huang, E., and Bentley, F. (2008) Examining Presence and Lightweight Messaging in a Social Television Experience. ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications, 4(4), October 2008. [Local PDF] [ACM Link]

Tullio, J. and Harboe, G. (2008) Investigating the Use of Voice and Text Chat in a Social Television System, European Interactive TV Conference (EuroITV 2008). [Local PDF]

Harboe, G., Metcalf, C., Bentley, F., Tullio, J., Massey, N., and Romano, G. (2008) Ambient Social TV: Drawing People into a Shared Experience. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008). [Local PDF] [ACM Link]