TV clips: using social bookmarking for content discovery in a fragmented TV ecosystem

The explosion in content availability, coupled with the diversity in consumption devices, has fragmented the market. Users need new mechanisms for content discovery and navigation, while providers and advertisers need new ways to analyze and monetize usage. In this paper, we advocate 'social bookmarking' as a solution, given its proven utility in enabling affinity-based discovery online. But, adapting such web-centric ideas to rich media consumption raises technical and business challenges. With TV Clips , we introduce a system that tackles these concerns for broadcast television with extensibility to 3-screen usage. We describe the initial architecture and prototype, and discuss its evolution to support product-centric requirements like scalability and rights management. A secondary goal is to share our experiences in developing this prototype for a commercial environment (i.e., TV) and motivate further research in adapting 'social search' strategies to such media-rich domains.