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Introduction
Social TV (STV) is developing rapidly around the world. The fast growth of high-speed broadband connections is enabling the creation of a smarter TV experience that delivers content directly to consumer devices in the living room. STV is one of several interesting new areas that have emerged with smart TV. It can integrate voice communication, text chat, presence and context awareness, TV recommendations, ratings and video-conferencing with the TV content either directly on screen or by using ancillary devices. Social features enhance the viewing experience by helping the viewers to find relevant content and to socialise with people while watching TV. People communicate with friends in real time and asynchronously. The social elements become a part of the content, appearing inside video players, in apps, or on second screens such as tablets or smart phones.
The era of STV is coming at a rapid pace, following the success of smart TV. Along with smart TV, it is predicted that STV will soon be at the heart of social media services and applications. However, with all the hype over STV, the question arises as to whether marketers know how consumers truly feel about it, and its presence in the typical household is probably years away. One factor that slows down the adoption of STV is the limited social interaction (Shin, 2013). Because of the primitive and limited user experience, user satisfaction seems to be low. Consumers might remember the ups and downs of similar technologies that ended up as total failures, such as Web TV, TiVo and television-commerce (Bae and Chang, 2012). While there is widespread enthusiasm for STV, sceptics consider it to be a gimmick or, at best, an immature technology.
In light of these perceptions, two related but rather conflicting factors seem to be important for the successful rollout of STV: usability and sociability (Lazar and Preece, 2002; Shin, 2013). As for any other recent technologies - such as internet TV, 3DTV, smart TV and curved TV - usability is undoubtedly the most important factor in successful rollout. However, these previous technologies have not been very successful in terms of user experience (Shin, 2014). Thus researchers began to seek other specific factors beyond usability, such as presence (3DTV), interactivity (smart TV) and immersion...