Real-time nonverbal opinion sharing through mobile phones during sports events

Even with the rise of the World Wide Web, TV has remained the most pervasive entertainment medium and is nowadays often used together with other media, which allow for active participation. The idea of connecting non-collocated TV viewers via telecommunication technologies, referred to as Social TV, has recently received considerable attention. Such systems typically include set-top boxes for supporting collaboration. In this research we investigate if real-time opinion sharing about TV shows through a nonverbal (non-textual) iconic UI on mobile phones is reasonable. For this purpose we developed a mobile app, made it available to a large number of users through the Android Market, and conducted an uncontrolled user study in the wild during the soccer world cup 2010. The results of the study indicate that TV viewers who used the app had more fun and felt more connected to other viewers. We also show that by monitoring this channel it is possible to collect sentiments relevant to the broadcasted content in real-time. The collected data exemplify that the aggregated sentiments correspond to important moments, and hence can be used to generate a summary of the event.