Social TV ?

A couple of days back 2 friends of mine called me up at night and started drunken rambling ... conversation was fun and secrets came out tumbling. In between all that fun , friend A was apparently trying to change the channel on TV and was not having any luck and started cursing and abusing the remote control. Then I heard a lot of laughter coming from friend B, who informed me that friend A was so wasted that he was trying to change the TV channel with his cellphone !!!

Now what if mobile phone ( read smartphone ) could actually act as remote ? TV viewing has changed a lot ... these days many a time I switch on the TV after being told to do so by friends. I usually get a lot of SMSes / phone calls from friends alerting me about something interesting on TV - mostly sporting events, occassionally some reality programs also - we watch the show/event and then SMS each other or call and discuss what happened.

Sometimes watching and sharing things with friends makes it a much superior viewing experience, these are the guys I used to watch these matches together sometime in life.... now what if we could connect better while watching ....

Yesterday there was this wonderful tennis match in ATP World tour final event , this was semi-final between Nadal and Murray and the match swung between both players , I watched it for a while told a few friends about the wonderful match and then switched off the TV after a while when I was sure Nadal was gonna win . I got a call from a friend telling me that match was still on and had this time Murray was leading. I subsequently texted a few other friends the scoreline. In fact I was in touch 6 friends during the match at 11 pm ... this was a non-grand slam tennis match .... during cricket matches ( esp major events ) the people you are in touch with are much higher.

I guess if my TV remote was on my cellphone and I could tell my friends about this really good tennis match going on this particular channel with match being interestingly poised ( perhaps an update on the score-line and why should tune in ) , then it would be really cool

Searched online for more on this and found this piece on Technology review website

Though they are talking about making TV remote a smart remote , though I would prefer doing away with it and having Mobile phone do the same task.

So efforts are actually on to make watching television something that viewers in different places can share and discuss. It wont be too far when your social network and television meet. That means my friend - who is a smart and successful Manager when sober - was not all that wrong when he tried to change channels with his smartphone , only problem was that he was a little ahead of time !