CBS.com Creates Social Viewing Rooms
CBS Interactive is trying to simulate a living room ambience online with social viewing rooms where people watching shows on CBS.com can interact with each other in real time.
The viewing rooms, for shows in primetime, daytime and for CBS Classics, enable viewers to chat with each other and throw animated customized virtual objects—tomatoes at their least favorite “Survivor” personality—on the viewing screen online. Viewers will be able to see a list of all other people in the room and engage them in web dialogues during the shows.
Reality series “Survivor” and all three “CSI” series are among the prime-time shows that populate the social room micro-site.
“As users view content online, we believe there will be more and more users who want to do it in a social context,” said Anthony Soohoo, senior vice president and general manager of social entertainment at CBS Interactive.
Soohoo declined to indicate whether CBS was targeting a specific demographic group, saying that CBS was aiming the initiative at “all users who desire a more social experience with online entertainment.”
Accumulated online research shows that online viewers tend to skew much younger than those who watch TV in the traditional way. Ad-supported networks are trying particularly hard to turn those younger viewers who are consumers of non-traditional media into more traditional TV consumers, while exposing them to advertising embedded with the shows online.
CBS is obviously banking on the social network features accompanying the online streaming to extend the time viewers spend on the site.
The network intends to eventually integrate the social networking feature with other CBS Interactive properties.
CBS.com is currently drawing just over 30% of all traffic drawn by TV network websites, according to Hitwise, followed by NBC.com at 24% and ABC.com at 20%.
