Show of hands: how many of you keep a phone or tablet at the ready when you're watching television?
I do. I imagine TV execs get giddy at the thought of fans Tweeting and Facebooking and otherwise "engaging with the brand" but I'm mostly scouring Wikipedia to figure out what old actors are up to nowadays.
The "technical" term for my tablet here would be a "second screen" device. There are plenty of third-party apps and services that'll work all sorts of dark magicks, analyzing audio streams and the like from our television sets in an attempt to serve up episode guides and contextualized social networking fluff. But thus far, if you're looking for extra info whilst binge-watching from your preferred streaming service it's far easier to just pop over to Google.
But a curious thing happened on Monday in the world of Second Screen. Amazon announced Kindle Fire OS 3.1, and Sling Media upgraded its SlingPlayer app to version 3.0., and buried in those announcements both services added or revamped their "second screen" support. This with the express purpose of letting couch potatoes web search or blather socially within the walls of the Kindle or Sling ecosystems.
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