Usages of the Secondary Screen in an Interactive Television Environment

Abstract. This paper investigates a number of techniques and services around a unifying concept: the secondary screen. Far too often television consumption is considered a passive activity. While there are specific genres and programs that immerse the viewer into the media experi-ence, there are other times in which whilst watching television, people talk, scan the program guide, record another program or recommend a program by phone. This paper identifies four major usages of the sec-ondary screen in an interactive digital television environment: control, enrich, share, and transfer television content. By control we refer to the decoupling of the television stream, optional enhanced content, and tele-vision controls. Moreover, the user can use the secondary screen to enrich or author media content by, for example, including personalized media overlays such as an audio commentary that can be shared with his peer group. Finally, the secondary screen can be used to bring along the televi-sion content. This paper reviews previous work on the secondary screen, identifies the key usages, and based on a working system provides the ex-periences of developing relevant scenarios as well as an initial evaluation of them.