NEW YORK – Comcast is making a play to own part of the virtual watercooler where people gather to share what they're watching -- whether on one of its own cable channels or the web
Comcast's Tunerfish web and mobile app, set to launch in private beta within the next two weeks, includes its own database of television shows that autofill the text of your entries after a few keystrokes, making it easy to comment on shows to your friends (importable from Facebook or Twitter). These links and comments can stream via Tunerfish to the social networks of your choice as well, and trend analysis tools let you see what videos and shows your friends are picking up on -- as well as the ones they're starting to ignore.
The upshot, from Comcast's point of view, is not only that people will watch more television if they use something like this, but that as viewing habits shift online, Comcast would own part of that conversation too. In addition to whatever you're watching on your big screen, you can paste URLs into Tunerfish from YouTube, Vimeo and other sites. If the video is embeddable, you and your friends can watch it within the Tunerfish system, and if not, you can still share it. In addition, Comcast hopes to integrate the service directly into online video sites so that even if people aren't watching Comcast's television programming, they'll still share what they see using Comcast's tool -- in part to gain reward points.
"People are really passionate about their favorite TV shows and eager to share that passion with others," John McCrea, founder of Tunerfish (and vice president of marketing for Plaxo -- upper right) told a crowd Monday afternoon at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in downtown Manhattan. "There must be a better way to discover great TV."
To help, McCrea says Tunerfish will let people see what their friends are watching now, view trends about what they have watched or share shows and comments about them, all the while gathering "influence points" when their opinions change other people's viewing habits so that socially-powerful people accumulate points faster. Users will be able to redeem those points for as-yet unspecified rewards as part of Tunerfish's game system.
These updates about what people are watching feed into a real-time, Twitter-like stream on the right side of the web interface. Due to the system's open architecture, these feeds can link out to your Google Buzz, Facebook, Twitter, and other accounts, so they can coexist on Tunerfish and whatever you normally use, if anything, to tell your friends what you're watching and what you think about it.
Still, some people don't need another feed to monitor.
"Real-time streams are powerful, but sometimes it's hard to get the signal from amidst the noise," said McCrea. "That's why we created the trending view, that takes that exact same data [that's in the real-time feed] and displays it in a way that makes it really easy to see what's rising and falling in popularity amongst your friends, right now, over the last 24 hours, or over the last seven days."
If this works, it will help Comcast weather the storm as viewers shift more of their hours to online streaming video and away from their cable subscription – a trend that will only be accelerated by the launch of Google TV.
In fact, the potential clearly exists for Comcast to integrate Tunerfish into the set-top box through an app running on Google OS or something like it, in order to remove the separation between the big screen and the small screen and allow people to share what they're watching and see feeds without down looking at their laptops, smartphones or tablets. Its competitor DishNetwork is reportedly in talks with Google, and we wouldn't be surprised if Comcast were too.
See Also:
- Report: Google Working With Intel, Sony on TV Project
- Google, Dish Network Reportedly Test Android-Based Satellite TV ...
- With FTC's Blessing, Google and Apple Poised to Dominate Mobile ...
- Use Twitter Like a Television Network
Photo: Eliot Van Buskirk
