Social Media Television in Today's Cable Systems

The communication tools of the Internet and community tools of social networking have begun to transform the viewers' interaction with television. While many of these changes are seen as exclusive to Web video and direct to consumer television service offerings, these features can be supported on traditional cable television infrastructure. The cable television infrastructure offers the opportunity to deliver this experience to 25 million homes by the end of 2010 [1]. This paper presents a multiplatform architecture to deliver a social media television experience to viewers. Some elements of the architecture have been deployed while others are currently in trial. We describe what social media television has to offer and explore the contributions of television, Web/personal computer and mobile components to the overall experience.