Getting the Couch Potato to Engage in Conversation: Social TV in a Converging Media Environment Raimund Schatz, Lynne Baillie, Peter Fröhlich, Sebastian Egger Telecommunications Research Center Vienna – ftw. A-1220 Vienna, Austria {schatz, baillie, froehlich, egger}@ftw.at Abstract In this paper we report on our findings from two user studies on stationary and mobile Social TV. Given the results, we propose that in a converging media environment, mobile devices such as multimedia phones are essential elements of the next generation of Social TV services. They are established social connectivity providers, personal media interfaces, content capture and sharing tools, and thus complement stationary interactive TV setups very well. We also found that TV content itself has a significant influence on users’ readiness to engage in mediated social interaction. Consequently, content and mobile interfaces should form part of a future Social TV 2.0 agenda. Introduction Research into Social TV is of increasing interest to both industry and academia. However, most investigations so far have focused on Social TV in stationary contexts. With only a few notable exceptions such as Harboe et al’s (2008) work on Ambient Social TV, the focus has been on set-top box (STB) or media-centre PC based interfaces that connect remote viewers in remote living-rooms in order to emulate the joint watching experience. Although such “Social TV 1.0” systems have been evaluated by users in the lab and in the field with positive results, their widespread adoption in the marketplace is still to take place. We think that one promising approach to address this issue is broadening the scope of Social TV towards mobile devices and use cases, for two major reasons: Firstly, the current proliferation of Mobile TV technologies and services enables a growing number of people to watch on the go, creating a new opportunity space for Social TV. Secondly, the current trend of multitasking in front of the TV has resulted in a growing population that already enacts Social TV utilizing various devices and interfaces at hand. In the light of these developments and given the current momentum of Quadruple-play services (video, voice, data, and mobile) in telecommunications, we suggest rethinking Social TV as a pervasive service driven by convergence rather than as a purely home based phenomenon. Mobile and Stationary Social TV Study Results To this end, we conducted two controlled experiments within the framework of indoor/outdoor paired user studies (session length: 2 hours) in order to investigate user perceptions and behaviours in different Social TV contexts and setups. In order to sample a sufficiently large variety of user types and backgrounds, we recruited 30 pairs of friends in total, gender-balanced and aged between 14 and 72 years. We used the set-top box based AmigoTV system for evaluating stationary living-room Social TV (Baillie et al, 2007) as well as our interactive Mobile TV smart- phone client (Nokia Symbian phones) for the pervasive scenarios (Schatz & Egger, 2008). The feature range included common Social TV 1.0 functionalities for connecting remote viewers: voice- and text-chat, presence, emoticons, invitation messages and synchronized zapping. Surprisingly, we found that when engaging with Mobile Social TV, participants had a fairly similar user experience to that of stationary Social TV in terms of key measures such as Social Presence, Joint TV Experience and distraction (cf. Schatz & Egger, 2008). Furthermore, our study participants rated the Mobile Social TV user experience positively at levels equal to the set-top box based system. The reason for these results was the fact that collocated TV watching actually happens “shoulder-to- shoulder”. Therefore, peripheral awareness among co-viewers is largely sufficient and can be provided via low-bandwidth channels that provide a generic sense of connectedness among remote users (Oehlberg et al, 2006; Baillie et al, 2007). Such channels can be equally provided via mobiles. Furthermore, we observed the following mutual influences between content and communication: Influence of content. Having exposed participants to various content genres, we found that in both setups, stationary and mobile, the type of TV content has a significant influence on communication. For example, we observed that News and Lifestyle TV (formats deliberately designed to function as social currency) significantly encourage communication activity. Accordingly, our subjects rated the chat-suitability