News
07/05/2010
Improving the user experience on free TV/video sites
Social Video
Social networking tools for improving the user experience on free TV/video sites
In late April, WAT.tv, the video site operated by French TV broadcaster TF1, rolled out an upgrade that included sharing, recommendation, rating and Facebook streaming tools.
"Thanks to these new features, Wat has expanded the social dimension of its service and is offering users a richer and more engaging experience by capitalizing on the popularity of the globe’s biggest social network (more than 400 million members),” says IDATE senior consultant, S. Girieud, while pointing out that, “this partnership with Facebook should help attract and keep new users and/or generate more traffic on the online video platform, and so help boost the ad-based monetization of its inventory”.
The data portability solutions developed by the top social networking sites (Facebook Connect, MySpace Data Availability and Sign-in-with-Twitter) allow free online TV and video services, such as TV networks’ websites, VoD services, video websites, etc., to incorporate tools from the most popular social networks (e.g. Facebook Live Feed, Twitter feed, etc.), which will help build and keep users and generate more traffic, and so improve their ad revenue potential. Incorporating the core tools from the most popular social networking sites allows free online TV and video services to offer a richer user experience and so to build its audience (increase the number of users and traffic, time spent on the site, page views, etc.), and so to improve its ad space sales.
By integrating a major social network’s most popular tools (Facebook’s Live Feed, Twitter’s tweets), free online TV/video services such as TV channel Web sites, VOD services and video sharing platforms can offer their users a richer viewing experience. Better experiences in turn help create and retain audience and/or additional traffic (more visits and visitors, more time spent, more page views) and thereby generate more ad revenue from a site’s inventory. This is also a way for sites to continue to develop their services, to innovate and to fulfill their users’ potential desire for interactive and community features. Social tools are seeing more and more demand from Web users and are gradually moving from “nice to have” features to “can’t live without” necessities.
IDATE has published a report, Social Video, addressing these questions, presenting key figures for the social networking and online video markets and describing the major innovations spawned by the meeting of social networks and video. The challenges and strategies of the players on the field are detailed in case studies. For more information click here
Project Leader
Sophie Girieud
s.girieud@idate.org
