The Interactive Consumer-Viewer: The Social TV Promotion Collective, Ratings, and Advertising

This chapter describes a massive two-day interactive television event before taking a step back to describe why its authors considered interactivity to be the right approach to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of television. It explores how television viewing in Japan transitioned from being a communal to a private activity, and how measuring ratings has (and has not) changed to account for transforming modes of viewership. Fieldwork among a group of industry insiders called the Social TV Research Collective captures their anxiety about competing forms of media and their effects on television ratings. It also chronicles their debates about how to measure engagement with TV content using new forms of interactive technology rather than relying on legacy tools to estimate and monetize viewership.