The need of a TV to be in sync with a second screen is minimal today but I see a short future from now where it could be viewed as a great feature. The biggest influence on my thinking is what Facebook has recently done with the frictionless sharing of media consumption by users.

Several months ago, Facebook started pumping into the News Ticker songs, articles and movies (not in USA) that your friends were consuming and recently introduced a new class of apps called Timeline Apps which brings more verbs to Facebook. I’m sure you have noticed this as it’s hard to avoid on Facebook – the News Feed algorithm seems to give a greater weight to these stories as well and this is starting to change how people can discover music. No longer do people need to rely on experts, blogs, Billboard and magazines they can just tap into Facebook and see via the Music app which songs their friends are listening to in real time. This isn’t to say experts won’t have value; I’m not in that belief camp, but that people may begin to expect to receive real-time media recommendations from friends’ passive behavior. Music will change the quickest as it’s already happening and the barriers to joining are very low.

I think the same experience will become expected of TV viewing. I believe we are not too far away from where we tune into our favorite show and a status update gets sent to Facebook that “Noah is watching 60 minutes” with a little button that says “Join Him”. I expect this status update to be seen on my friend’s second screen devices where they would then have the option to click “Join Noah” on their second screen device and then start watching along with me. This is one of the scenarios I believe that really ties the screens together. A stretch for today but seeing examples of how Apple TV and Xbox can act as an intermediary between second screens and TVs, I’m optimistic!

Further, I believe TV is on the verge of a social infusion like this as the organization of content on TV makes sense only to the cable providers. People for the most part find new content on TV by channel surfing, something we are forced to do since we are at the mercy of how cable providers believe channels should be organized. This random assignment of channels to numbers makes no sense to the end user. For example, what reasons make sense to an end user that Comedy Central makes a good channel 704? It’s amazing we still have this. There are of course some topical categorization that’s being done (movies, sports, music) but for the most part it’s the most unintuitive system to navigate which is why I believe an overhauled solution is not far away.