Toward multiscreen social TV with geolocation-aware social sense

The increasing popularity of social interactions and geotagged, user-generated content has transformed the television viewing experience from laid-back video watching behavior into a 'lean-forward' socially engaged experience. This article describes a multiscreen, social TV system integrated with social sense via a second screen as a novel paradigm for content consumption. This new application is built upon the authors' cloud-centric media platform, which provides on-demand virtual machines for content platform services, including media distribution, storage, and processing. The media platform is also integrated with a Big Data social platform that crawls and mines social data related to the media content. Specifically, this new social TV approach consists of three key subsystems: interactive TV, social sense, and multiscreen orchestration. Interactive TV implements a cloud-based, social TV system, offering rich social features; social sense discovers the geolocation-aware public perception and knowledge related to the media content; and multiscreen orchestration provides an intuitive and user-friendly human-computer interface to combine the two other subsystems, fusing the TV viewing experience with social perception. The authors have built a proof-of-concept demo over a private cloud at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. Feature verification and performance comparisons demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach in transforming the TV viewing experience.