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• Link-and-pause (...plus bookmarks)
  ...A new paradigm for flexible TV+Web media multitasking in the age of DVRs
• Sample CoTV™ Usage Scenario
  ...showing Link-and-Pause

Blog:  Reisman on User-Centered Media

 
CoTV™ links Web browsing to TV viewing
– pushing links to your browser that relate to what you are watching on your TV.

CoTV™ exploits the fact that many users now watch TV on a large screen, while multitasking on a wireless laptop, phone, or other mobile device.

• It presents a huge opportunity to enhance the user experience by coordinating access to cross-device content that makes use of both screens
• It creates highly profitable cross-device advertising opportunities that link the TV to direct response on the Web – and that makes ads more relevant and useful to consumers.

Just imagine that Google – or any other Web service – knew what you were watching on TV...

All of this can be done in software, without any special new hardware – using ordinary TV and Web content – and without requiring cooperation of TV content or distribution providers.

• Cross-device convergence is now a reality. The ability to get digital content on different devices at different times – using devices ranging from TVs to PCs to mobile phones – is creating a new era in media and entertainment.
  
  
• A growing mass of users are already “coactive” on their own initiative – using multiple devices/screens to watch TV while simultaneously using the Internet [see FAQ]

Coactive media multitasking – using multiple devices in coordination – is the next step to radically enrich how people use media. 

Coactive Web services enable the viewer's PC to automatically coordinate Web links with any television viewing – and vice versa.

• CoTV™ software enables a variety of cross-device, multi-screen applications – usable for all content sources.
  • Co-viewing: program-related information of all kinds (commentary, news reports, sports statistics, casts, etc.), including ad-related interaction and shopping.
  • Pre-viewing: richly intelligent and interactive "media concierge" services – program guides, VOD/IPTV catalogs, and other discovery services, along with DVR scheduling and RSS feed management.
• CoTV™ services can act like a special Web search engine that is continuously and automatically driven by TV-viewing context. 
  • Coactive TV Web service software can automatically harness the context of whatever a viewer is watching on any TV, to push related Web links and content to their PC screen.
  • That adds a power-assist to TV-Web multitasking – it directly links use of TV and the Web, to enhance both content and advertising (automatically following the viewer across channels and time-shifting.)
  • This direct linkage of TV and the Web can be done externally (just as Web search is), independent of TV programmers and distributors.
• Coactivity can be very simple or very advanced – as the user desires.
  • It can work with existing TVs and PCs, and with existing TV and Web content.
  • It includes mobile phones + TV – as well as coactivity with music, radio, or other audio.
  • It is based on a core platform software service that enables coordination and flexible viewing across multiple devices and sceens, and leverages the power of rich, open PC/browser user interfaces and open Web services. No special hardware is needed.
  • It is adaptable to a full range of deployed and emerging platforms – wireless PC laptops, PDAs, phones, set-top-boxes, media gateways/servers, DVRs, DVDs, WiFi, and more. 
  • It can fully exploit any combination of devices – letting the user decide which screen(s) to work with, and when to context-shift between one-screen and two-screen modes of use, depending on the task.  It can also remain unobtrusively in the background.
• Coactive services catalyze an entirely new media business ecology – creating major new, high-margin revenue streams.
  • New ways to use content + new ways to make associations between content from any source
  • New ways to contextually link TV advertising to direct response on the Web + other new cross-device advertising services
  • New cross-device platform services (that enable coactive content and context services)
  • All of this energized by the open network/software/service platform of the Internet

• Link-and-pause (...plus bookmarks)
  ...A new paradigm for flexible TV+Web media multitasking in the age of DVRs
• Sample CoTV™ Usage Scenario
  ...showing Link-and-Pause