Big or small screens?

Yesterday I was at 2-Screen 2011 organised by Mint Digital.

One of the key things that stood out for me was what Russell Davies said about big screens being for sharing and small screens being personal.

Big screens

Dextr, one of RIG’s ‘second screen’ projects, for example, is meant to be big; it could be a great accompaniment to what you’re watching on the telly even. It’s quite pointless if you try using it on your phone, though (I’ve tried).

As Mike said in this post, ‘TV is already a near-perfect medium. It’s utterly sublime in its simplicity. The viewer is the viewer, their job is clear in this context.’

Viewers want to view; however if they happen to have a second screen next to the TV making the experience more social without being intrusive, I don’t think they’d mind at all.

Small screens

Mint themselves had built Footnotes specially for the event, a site meant to be accessed on mobile phones by participants at the event. It was a live Twitter stream of event-related comments by theorganisers and URLs that the speakers were referencing in their talks. I quite liked it, even if I did find it distracting (but let’s face it, the age of paying 100% attention to speakers at events is long gone anyway).

Second screens: big or small?

Second screens aren’t a new idea: two of the speakers yesterday referenced Winky-Dink, a CBS show for children that included a ‘magic plastic screen’ (sold separately) over which kids could draw on the TV as the show was telecast. Bill Gates apparently called it ‘the first interactive TV show’ (it was initially shown in the 1950’s for a few years, then went on a hiatus before being telecast again for a few years and finally wound up in the ‘70’s).

So if the ‘connected TV experience isn't the web on TV, and it’s not TV on the web’ (I’m quoting Mike again), I think the first thing to do is identify what kind of experience we want to provide viewers (assuming we are): a social experience, or a personal one? A big screen experience, or a small screen one?

Answer that, and you will win the battle for the viewer’s attention in the living room.