When the most-awaited trailer for Spider-man: No Way Home dropped recently, while my son was the most excited, we were all keen to watch it because we’re fans of the Marvel content experience. And when we all want to see something together, we turn to the TV and not pick a laptop and huddle around it.
I have installed the YouTube app on the Fire TV stick connected to your not-so-smart Sony Bravia and that becomes our gateway to watch content together that is otherwise not made-for-TV!
Now, YouTube is not a social media platform in the strict sense, but there are actual social media platforms that are making a beeline to the TV experience!
TikTok announced that the app was available for Google and Android TVs in the UK in February 2021. More recently, TikTok made a similar announcement in the US – the TikTok TV app is available via Google, Android, LG, and Samsung Smart TVs!
TikTok is not the first social media platform to be made available on a non-mobile device other than the laptop/computer or tablets. Facebook launched the Facebook Video/Watch apps for TVs back in 2017!
The question is: why do social media platforms want to make themselves available on a device that is decidedly created for passive, one-way media consumption?
Even though TikTok is now banned in India, a reasonable number of people already know how the platform looks and works given its popularity before the ban. TikTok, unlike the larger Facebook experience (and not just Facebook Videos/Watch) is simply an endless stream of short videos. Does that fact—that it is just an endless series of videos, short or otherwise—make it appropriate enough for a TV screen?
Interestingly, imagine our own behavior on TV before OTT platforms invaded our TVs. We switched the TV on and went to a channel. Then we quickly moved to multiple other channels to see what is playing on them and settled on one that seemed most interesting at that point in time. And if there was an ad break on that channel, we quickly switched channels again!
Doesn’t this behavior seem very similar to how we swipe between videos on TikTok? The only difference is that the mobile device was close to our eye and we used the device’s touch functionality to swipe, while on the TV, given that it is away from us, we used the remote control to switch between channels. The action was the same, though!
The length of the video content was different too. TV does not do 15-second videos – it is meant for long-form video consumption punctuated by advertisements. But, is the mobile device meant for short-form video only? Hardly! We do watch the same OTT platforms on mobile devices as well! So, why can’t the reverse apply to TV too?
But there are severe constraints in this idea too.
The most obvious one is the orientation – the mobile phone invented vertical video. It was mocked at when it was new, but now, it is the default on the device. A TV, by default, is horizontal! So, TikTok or Facebook videos may end up playing the vertical video in the center of the large TV screen, wasting a lot of space! It makes for a very poor experience in terms of content consumption. When you stumble on a normal (aka horizontal) video on your mobile phone, you simply turn it around, but that’s not possible with TV 🙂
The next would be around content personalization. Much of social media’s selling point is around content personalized to you based on how you behave and react to what you see. The algorithm is supposed to learn from your actions, though in reality, we have seen that they simply reiterate your preexisting biases and the so-called AI is quite dumb by throwing at you more of what you saw/read without understanding what your feeling was when you consumed them unless you told the platform through a digitally recorded action.
The third constraint is related to the second – mobile phones are usually personal, individual devices while TVs are not individual; they are used by more than one person in the family. That muddles the social media platform’s algorithm further!
And then there is the constraint around two-way engagement. While most TVs have a rudimentary and cumbersome text input mechanism with an on-screen keyboard, you still need to use the direction keys in your remote control to navigate them. This is hugely annoying. A way around this would be voice input, and most smart TVs are equipped with this already. I believe these TV-centric apps don’t allow for comments yet, but the search function could do well with voice input.
Obviously, TV does not offer content creation possibilities, but that has always been the facet of TV, as a passive, one-way device meant only for consumption.
Even as this very idea seems bizarre, with most social media platforms making enormous investments in video-based content, either producing them or working with influencers to produce them, it makes sense to offer the video stream of their timelines via TV.
TV, as a device, is not merely for long-form content alone, even though that is what the device started with. It may seem ridiculous to watch ultra-short, 15-second clips on a TV screen, but the relatively longer 1-2 minute videos on say Instagram or Facebook is not such a bad idea after all barring the orientation problem. The way our attention has already been broken is evident in how we keep searching for what to watch on conventional TV even as OTTs have changed that behavior by avoiding the appointment-based consumption pattern.
The biggest problem for these platforms’ ambition of also making the videos available on TV is that we are usually seated in front of the TV with the phone right next to us! So, the content made available on the via-TV app versions needs to be something that takes advantage of the TV’s advantages – created in a horizontal orientation and makes use of the TV’s immersive sound system.
That’s an opportunity at the intersection of social media and OTT streaming! Think of the YouTube experience on TVs – we turn our phone horizontally to suit the YouTube video, but that content would be ideal for the TV anyway!