Device Convergence vs. Concurrence

Back at Speedera, in the Spring of 2003, we won a contract to deliver the website and streaming files for a very popular TV show (still bound by NDA, so I can't name it). We had been delivering sites and video for networks and studios for years by that point, but in the Spring of 2003, we noticed something we had never seen before.

For the years prior, when a TV show aired, we would see a perceptible increase in traffic to its website during the airing, but that traffic was never too significant. In fact, visits to a particular show's Internet site were often higher during the morning of the next workday when bored employees would close their office doors and surf to their favorite show sites.

That all changed in early 2003. With this particular show, when the show came on back East at 8EST, traffic to the site would spike. But, even beyond that initial spike, these visitors stayed at the show's website during the entire show!

Were they abandoning their television sets and running into the den to surf? To the contrary, they were feverishly clicking right there from the comfort of their couches while continuing to watch the show. Sure enough, when the hour was up, traffic to the site steadily fell off over the next thirty minutes until reaching its lows.

So what was different about 2003? Why hadn't this happened before? Why was it that all of a sudden web surfers were hitting these TV show sites during the show itself? Our guess? Home WiFi networks.

That was a huge year for proliferation of residential WiFi. With WiFi in the home, the computer moved out of the den and into the family room. Now untethered, users, particularly kids who were used to multitasking throughout the rest of their lives, could now bring those laptops to the couch. They had already been SMSing with each other while tubing out, so it seemed only natural they would break out the full browser experience at the same time. These were just our speculative musings, and I never had any data to back it up. 

So, it was with a chuckle that I read the notes from a colleague who just got back from the MipTV Conference in Cannes, France. They noted that everyone in the content creation business is now talking about creating content for multi-platform / multi-screen (TV, PC, mobile, iPod, etc) and enabling simultaneous interactivity between them all.

My colleague mentioned that we should keep our eyes peeled for a new show on the BBC called the Wannabes in which the web will provide a realtime interactive experience that complements the broadcast view providing viewers with alternative perspectives and viewpoints on the big screen action.

Before, all the talk used to be about convergence. Pundits predicted each of our devices would be merged into one for all of our communication and entertainment. However, it looks more and more like what will really emerge is the concurrent use of many devices optimized for the time, place, network, activity, and the person using them all.

( . . . while I type this on my laptop and churn SMS messages on my Blackberry and watch a DVD on the TV.)

Comments

[anon]

I remember MTV doing a show with a company called Spiderdance. Their webRiot show allowed viewers to play online with the tv show, and high scoring internet players would have their names broadcast on TV.

It was a short lived show, but a great concept.

[abercrombie and fitch uk]

Well said, such a person should be a good sentence, or the future will be more rampant.

[abercrombie & fitch london]

I read this sentence out loud to a group of engineers from my team at lunch the other day and they cracked up like I did.
It touched off such a wave of nostalgia for the first machines we all used and when we first discovered the Internet. We all felt so old and yet so lucky.

[abercrombie fitch]

It is hard to say such a thing is clear.

[gucci.uk]

Valentine's Day is the roses and a basin of aloe, but two dollars. She hugged the Lying-in basin of aloe, contentedly sitting behind his bike. "Hey in front of him: hey, she angrily," in the back ", "unshaven bell. Their hearts are reunited other softly. After getting married, he still as spoil her baby. Every night when he asleep to break down a small balcony aloe Vera, wash the epidermis, tear of cool and refreshing green transparent evenly coated on her face.