#second-screen

McDonald's Fruit Match - DDB Stockholm.

To launch its frozen smoothies, McDonald's in Sweden and agency DDB Stockholm found a way to engage second screen viewers during TV commercials, creating a mobile game tied directly to the TV ad.

In another form of second-screening, Fujitsu have launched a new technology that allows users to receive digital coupons by pointing their phones at the TV.

The process only takes a couple of seconds, and because it's digital, the human eye can't even detect the data as it flickers on the screen.

It's an excellent method of utilising multiple devices, and because there are no physical codes to scan, it just feels like a really cohesive, seamless process.

Mercedes use hashtags to control TV ad

In a time of second screening, Mercedez Benz have created a TV ad that allows the viewer to vote for what happens next.

At the end of each section of the ad, users are asked tweet, which decides how the ad progresses.

It's a reasonably simple idea, but what makes it great is that such a big brand has decided to experiment with second screen behaviour.

This is a short follow up post to my previous article : New Ways to Consume Video in which I touch on the importance of the shared experience.

Olympics Schmolympics

I was fascinated not so much by the Olympics itself, but by how much fun people were having sharing the experience. During the live broadcast of the opening ceremony my tweet-stream took on a life of its own - providing more entertainment to me than the event itself and judging by the reactions of others, I wasn't alone. The problem was that for many not watching the event - this frenzied Twitter activity was -- I presume -- a little bit annoying.

Lunatics and Asylum

Yesterday I got caught up with the events outside the Ecuadorean embassy where Julian Assange was currently holed-up and awaiting the decision from Quito on his asylum status. I have to admit to being somewhat distracted for an hour or two as I watched events unfurl live on the occupynewsnetwork channel.

A great addition to the experience was the comments coming in live, reactions and additional perspectives of people watching the same thing at the same time! I say great but there was a lot of crazy noise among the signal, but it still added to the experience more than it took away. It was also interesting to clock the ever-fluctuating number of users watching the stream.

The Second Screen is Already Here

So excitingly the potential seems to be there to create very compelling and engaging experience, sure it needs a little refinement and I'm confident changes are being considered to allow you to mute tweets with certain hashtags in Twitter and mute noisy people on UStream's open chat. Actually UStream includes Twitter comments hashtagged appropriately. Although it remains to be seen how long that will continue to be possible.

For all intents and purposes we are already there. Twitter provides us with a nice decoupled way of using the second-screen but perhaps something like app.net is more suited. Crucially it appears to allow you to take full advantage of its API with few restrictions and subtly but perhaps importantly allows you slightly more characters. Note: app.net is a paid-for service.

We're Only Human

There's something about being human that means we love to share certain experiences. Cinemas and live music events are still very popular and I think that if we provide an opportunity for people to watch something together, they will, especially if you allow them to interact with each other. Good odds then that what Apple will do if they get the rights to stream cable TV content through their Apple TV is try and implement some live commenting system.

I'm wondering how we can activate peoples mics upon hearing laughter or applause and add that to sound, but that path is a little fraught.