The 2013 Grammys and Second Screen

Last year, the Grammys were the most social single event of 2012 with over 12 million social impressions.  CBS just released their stats confirming that the 55th Grammys were the most viewed Grammy show since 1993, with over 28 million viewers on CBS.

But for second screen, I cannot honestly say we made a huge leap forward in the last 12 months.  Somethings are better, some worse, and some continue to be interesting to watch as consumer engagements around the experiences drive the market forward.

The interesting:  This was the 2nd opportunity we have had recently to really test "special purpose" apps vs. 3rd party "multi-function" apps.  CBS deployed an updated "special purpose" app for the Grammy's a few weeks ago (with updates coming just a few days before the event itself).  zeebox, Viggle, and E! Live from the Red Carpet lead the "multi-function" effort for this type of event.  As a consumer myself, I can't say the special purpose app was significantly better than the 3rd party apps--in fact, because I am now used to the UI of zeebox, Viggle, and E! Live from the Red Carpet, I actually found them easier to use.

The negative:

• It was still time delayed by 3 hours for the west coast.  While some apps (Viggle for example) tried to keep out spoilers, most second screen apps didn't--and even my CNN app kept telling me who the winners were before I turned it on.
• The broadcasting network (CBS) had a very busy UI/UX with too many spoilers (including photos of the winners) that should have been better than third party apps like zeebox or E! Live from the Red Carpet.  They seemed to have attempted to make the web and tablet experience the same (perhaps to save money), but watered down both in the process.
• Most of the focus was around the "social" aspect of second screen, with little attention being paid to the "stimulating" side of the experience (unlike the Golden Globes and People's Choice awards from a few weeks ago, which were great at both).

The positive improvements:

• For consumers looking for an enhanced viewing experience, zeebox did a great job during the event, though it could not stifle the time delay of tweets.  They were not in the US last year. 
• Viggle did a decent job of managing the time shift and offering consumers a quiz-based experiences throughout the show that was decently compelling--this didn't exist a year ago.
• The E! Live from the Red Carpet app gave great pre-show experiences, mostly improved from 2012's efforts in many ways.
• The program itself paid more attention in on-screen graphics and commentation to Social TV (mostly Twitter) and Second Screen, which I think is great for the industry in total.
• There were decent showings from Shazam and GetGlue (neither of which did much last year), though some good app experiences from last year seemed to have waned in their efforts.

What are your thoughts about "special purpose" vs. "multi-function" apps?

Feel free to comment here on this blog or on LinkedIn in our 2nd Screen Society forum.  Or just reach out to us on Twitter @S32Day or @ChuckParkerTech using the hashtag #SecondScreen.

Want to continue this discussion live?   Come see us on February 26th at the Beverly Hilton for our 2nd Annual 2nd Screen Summit in LA 1.30-6pm, with cocktails to follow.

Watching the Grammys with a SecondScreen

There were several advertised/marketed apps for tonight's Grammy's flying around the internet and on Twitter.  I thought, similar to the Super Bowl, I will do an app sampling to see how the consumer experience is improving across the board.

E! Live from the Red Carpet was an interesting app to watch the pre-Grammy show with.  For someone like myself who is not really paying attention to the red carpet, it had all of the "money shot" photos of the stars arriving in an easy to flick thru UI.  However, it behaved more like an app the assumed I was not watching TV than one that did.

The official Grammy/CBS app was surprisingly (for me at least) good.  You had decent Stimulating and Social options from nominees and winners to Twitter/chat feeds, to backstage live streaming interviews after the stars won their awards (something a real music fan would appreciate when the network is not carrying their star's post award comments).  The also packed the Social feed with "Insiders" including stars present at the award, the standard official feeds, and a wider fan feed.  They even had some decent trivia and decent polls.  As I said, a surprisingly decent UX for the consumer.

I switch over to see what Viggle and Bing's partnership was all about.  I still think their business model is interesting, but other than the Twitter feed (pretty standard in most apps today), there was not much else exciting happening in the app tonight.

I did try Miso, but could not get any Sideshows to come up and other than checking in, did not experience anything in the Social or Stimulating feature set.

So I broke ranks a little bit and gave Yap.tv a test drive since they have been improving in their UX lately.  For Social (Twitter feed, polls created by consumers, Live Chat), it does an outstanding job.

For me, the pleasant surprise of the night was TVplus.  Their show was well-curated tonight, with very relevant synchronized Stimulating events firing every 45 seconds or so.  I was actually quite captivated and hung out for awhile to see what they would choose next to try to gain my interest.

ConnecTV wasn't so hot.  Did a great job recognizing the show, but still doesn't know who my friends are and after a few minutes, SNAFU'd and showed me an ad for the upcoming Super Bowl.  A bit odd.

BuddyTV did a great job of helping me change channels but I was not looking much for their prowess in Simple and Discovery at the time (very little Social and Stimulating).

While Dijit's stimulaling features tonight continue to improve, it was Into from Yahoo that impressed me the most in terms of improving their experience from simple check-in to a more Social and Stimulating experience.

If I had to give a conclusion on the experience, I would still say there is much room for improvement. Clearly, the official Grammy app had the most relevant "official" content (to the point where I could not find Tweets slamming Rhianna's performance where I could find them in most of the 3rd party apps.  If you appreciate synchronized, relevant Stimulating content, than I think TVplus is the right answer for you.  If you like the social side, I thought ironically Yap.TV and the official Grammy app were neck and neck, thought the Yap.tv UI seemed more compelling.