Tuesday at the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Nashville, Tenn., IBM plans to launch the Watson Engagement Advisor, aimed at helping consumer brands better recommend products to customers and provide better customer service at scale. Yes, that’s right. This is a technology that can recommend treatments for cancer will be used to help sell people more products.

Why we need Watson-level AI for customer service today.

Still, customer service is a legitimate and complicated problem, especially in an era where social media meets our desire for a personalized and instant response to any inquiry or service issue. Firms have to engage with customers via phone calls, tweets, Yelp, Facebook posts and for all I know, angry letters. And many of those customers using new media don’t want to wait for a response. Companies that can offer good service quickly in a variety of mediums have an advantage. And Watson would allow them to do this at scale. Imagine offering Ritz Carlton service at Holiday Inn prices.

Brands who buy the Engagement Advisor software will get access to a much smarter virtual agent that can sift through massive amounts of information to respond to users’ questions quickly. As someone who was totally schooled at Jeopardy by Watson, I cannot emphasize enough how fast it is.

The IBM release notes that the Engagement Advisor software is designed to help existing customer service personnel answer questions quickly or it can be deployed via the brand’s mobile site where customers can interact with Watson directly. As IBM’s release says, “In one simple click, the solution’s “Ask Watson” feature will quickly address customers’ questions, offer advice to guide their purchase decisions, and troubleshoot their problems.”

It’s possible this will remind users of Siri, Apple’s chatty personal assistant on the iPhone and iPad. However, instead of being deployed on a device, Watson is embedded on a brand web site.

It can greet customers by name, however and offer to help them via a chat window on the company site or via a mobile push alert, that will appeal to people who want to tweet or text their customer care questions without having to stay focused on a single web page. In the ideal case Watson will have access to customer records plus the data stores it was trained on, and will be able to use both in giving a customer a recommendation or help.

The business of Watson is a big one

Instead of naming customers directly IBM writes that brands including ANZ, Celcom, IHS, Nielsen and Royal Bank of Canada are, “exploring how the Watson Engagement Advisor can help them engage with their customers.” This may be phrased this way because the initial pilot projects involving Watson require a lot of training of the computer before it becomes valuable. During Watson’s “apprenticeship period,” IBM in some cases hasn’t charged clients, or charges them lower rates.

But it’s no secret that Watson is a big business bet for IBM. At last year’s Structure conference, Dan Cerutti, IBM’s VP of Watson Commercialization, explained IBM’s ambitions for Watson, including delivering the machine as a service over more and more devices. IBM sees Watson as a new type of computing and plans to build out new business models to support it, as Cerutti detailed in our chat almost a year ago.

Along the way Watson not only impresses with its ability to filter through reams of data to correctly answer a natural language question, it also has been able to do this as it shrinks in size. Since its television debut, Watson has seen a 240 percent improvement in system performance, and a reduction in physical requirements by 75 percent. The whole system can now be run on a server that takes up the size of four pizza boxes from a giant machine that took up an entire bedroom. Smart, svelte and delivered as a service. Get ready to meet Watson in more roles and in some surprising places.

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Pilot partners include Fox, NBC, ABC, Univision, Discovery and A+E. AOL is the only digital video company participating in the pilot; Hulu and YouTube aren’t participating yet. The tool will open up to others this fall.

The tool can’t be used yet to track viewing on mobile devices, though Nielsen said that capability is coming, and because it does not include many online sites, it can’t give advertisers and networks a full view of how viewers are watching TV online.

Nielsen also announced in February that it plans to add cord cutters to the households whose TV watching habits it tracks.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Mehmet Dilsiz

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If Twitter succeeds in building a smart music discovery tool with the #Music app — one that tells me what to listen to based on my past listening data and personal suggestions — it could define social music discovery for the mobile user in a way no one else really has. And that would open up a whole new source of revenue for the company.

But these are still really big if’s.

Twitter #Music is a social discovery filter laid on top of paid internet radio. You can log into Twitter Music on either iOS or through a desktop browser, and you’re immediately greeted with four tabs: Popular (Pitbull, David Guetta, and the like), Emerging Artists (random, lesser-known artists), Suggested (artists the app thinks you might like), and #NowPlaying (which displays what your Twitter graph is listening to, with corresponding Twitter avatars.) Under each tab is a grid of songs by different artists, and you can tap individual songs to play them. You have to log into Spotify or Rdio or purchase songs on iTunes to listen to the full tracks.

From a design perspective, the app is beautiful. It’s easy to scroll through music previews and tap to play them, and it doesn’t look like every other Facebook-esque feed app out there. You can see the artist’s image, and follow artists you’re interested in.

But there are several reasons why building this new app an effective music discovery tool will be an uphill battle.

It’s a discovery app, not a listening app

Twitter #Music dramatically and intentionally limits the music that you can listen to in full. The app requires either a paid Spotify or Rdio subscription, or telling a user to download songs via iTunes; it seems most users won’t be listening to full tracks on the app.

A Nielsen study of American listening habits in August 2012 found that 64 percent of teenagers listen to music through YouTube, which is free — but it’s not a listening option on Twitter #Music. And neither is Soundcloud, another free streaming option. Of American adults, only seven percent said they listen to music through Spotify. And of Spotify’s 24 million registered users, only 6 million pay for the service. In other words, we’re not talking about a significant number of Twitter’s 200 million monthly active users.

Twitter friends doesn’t mean music friends

While Twitter’s premise is that you can listen to music your friends are listening to and get music suggestions from people you follow, there’s absolutely no guarantee that my Twitter graph and my ideal social music graph would intersect. Right now, when I open the app and tap on the #NowPlaying tab to see what my Twitter friends are listening to, it’s obvious that while they might have witty 140 character insights, I wouldn’t necessarily attend concerts with them.

What I've learned from Twitter music: The internet has horrible taste in music.—
Josh Petri (@joshpetri) April 18, 2013

The Twitter social graph might be vaguely useful as a rough starting point for Twitter to build on, but it won’t suffice as a long-term solution for the app. Twitter will need time to collect data on the music I’m listening to and previewing through the app to determine which parts of my friends’ musical selections I do like, and the type of music I appear to hate. Then the company will need to serve up a new algorithm for me in the Suggested tab, essentially using cues from me to create the perfect suggestions. Until then, I’ll continue to get suggestions to listen to Hilary Duff, and I’ll have no reason to check out the app. Plus, competitors like Pandora have been working to perfect the perfect music suggestions for years, and remain strong alternatives if I want to stream music while I’m on my computer at work.

Why it could work

However, while I’m a pretty lazy person when it comes to music discovery, I like to know what songs are cool right now. So if Twitter improved the quality of suggestions on the app, and it could actually serve as an app that told me about popular songs, it could be better than anything else out there for average users who aren’t curating Spotify playlists.

Right now, 48 percent of Americans still discover music through the radio, and ten percent discover it through family and friends, according to Nielsen. And while only about 16 percent of internet users are on Twitter, this will undoubtedly grow.

And for Twitter itself? If the move works out, it could be genius from a business perspective.

As the company noted in its press release, music artists are some of the most popular users on Twitter right now, catering to their rabid fans who want information on the artist’s every move. The monetization opportuntiies are almost endless: concerts, tickets, music-specific advertising, deals with Spotify or Rdio, and more.

But the key to this success lies with discovery — the app has to surface good enough suggestions to keep me coming back. And back. And back.

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The Nielsen news was first reported on Wednesday by The Hollywood Reporter, which said that by September 2013 “Nielsen expects to have in place new hardware and software tools in the nearly 23,000 TV homes it samples.” Nielsen confirmed the news on Thursday, with Nielsen SVP Pat McDonough telling the New York Times that the company’s definition of “television household” will now include “those households who are receiving broadband Internet and putting it onto a television set.” According to the AP:

“This will add roughly 160 homes to Nielsen’s current sample of 23,000 houses nationwide with meters monitoring viewing habits.

More significantly, Nielsen will return to its sample to find homes that have cable or broadcast, but also separate TV sets hooked up through broadband. This will add an estimated 2,000 more broadband sets, significantly increasing the sample size.”

The company is also working on ways to track viewing on smartphones and tablets.

Separately, Billboard has begun including official YouTube music video views (from the U.S.) in its rankings. “All official videos on YouTube, including user-generated clips that utilize authorized audio, will now factor into how a song’s popularity is determined,” YouTube said on its blog. Billboard’s charts have included digital download and streaming data, tracked by Nielsen, since last year.

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As Eliza Kern described in her post on the rumors, Bluefin’s technology allows broadcasters — and more importantly, brands — to see where and when their content is being discussed on social networks and elsewhere on the web. The company was founded by MIT scientist Deb Roy, who began by collecting every sound his young son made during a 3-year period and then used algorithms to detect patterns in that data (Bluefin’s CEO will be speaking at our paidContent Live conference in New York on April 17).

Television is where the money is

Twitter’s decision to concentrate on TV-related features and partnerships isn’t that surprising. As we’ve described before, the company has been coming under increasing pressure to generate meaningful amounts of revenue in order to justify a market value that is estimated to be in the $10 billion range, based on recent sales of its shares on the private market. And while Twitter has been building up its “promoted tweets” and other advertising-related features, the most obvious and lucrative source of revenue is still television and other video-related content.

Twitter's true strategy? If they are 2nd screen for TV, and take over TV audience measurement, they control both social and TV advertising?

—
Nova Spivack (@novaspivack) February 05, 2013

Twitter’s moves in this direction started with partnerships for specific events like the Academy Awards, where it helped broadcasters filter and aggregate tweets about the content, and then expanded with deals related to things like NASCAR and the Summer Olympics, where the company created customized portals or hubs and had its own staff of editors curating content related to the event. After the Olympics, the head of Twitter’s media partnerships bragged about how much traffic the service drove to NBC’s programming, and it’s clear the company wants more of those kinds of relationships.

Even the launch of Vine, the six-second video app that Twitter recently acquired, can be seen as another extension of this focus: while most people have been using the app to share short clips of their cats and other ephemera, there have already been advertisers and brands taking advantage of the new format — including The Gap — and it’s easy to see how those clips could become mini-advertisements.

Our 2nd @vineapp experiment: stop motion 1969 denim. What should we #Vine next? vine.co/v/bJ6QQYKuDgz

—
  (@Gap) January 28, 2013

It’s not just a desire for revenue that has driven Twitter into the arms of television, however. As Eliza noted in a post about the use of Twitter during the Super Bowl, the fact that the network works as a “second screen” for such events has been obvious for some time — and it makes sense for Twitter to capitalize on that in whatever ways it can. And as Peter Kafka pointed out at All Things Digital, adding analytics to its video-related partnerships via Bluefin would allow Twitter to make a better case for why brands should care (it also has a partnership with Nielsen).

Twitter should be about much more than just TV

So what’s wrong with Twitter getting into bed with NBC and other broadcasters, or becoming a handmaiden to traditional television? A couple of potential pitfalls showed themselves during the Olympics: one was the fact that Twitter’s content hub was unavailable to non-U.S. users because of geographic restrictions that its partner NBC was subject to. By now, we’ve grown used to Twitter content being unrestricted — except in special cases such as Germany’s request to remove Nazi tweets, when changes have to be made for legal reasons. A geo-gated Twitter just seems wrong.

Acq of Bluefin Labs by Twitter feels like their equivalent of the "offline cookie" - how to close the loop w advertisers re: effectiveness

—
Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) February 05, 2013

The other incident that occurred during the Olympics was Twitter’s decision to shut down a journalist’s account after he criticized an executive at NBC and posted what the company said was a private email address. Twitter later admitted that this was mis-handled, but it raised the question of whose interests the company would be likely to protect if push came to shove: will the needs of broadcast partners take precedence over the needs of users? In some ways, they already have.

For me at least, getting into bed with television broadcasters and defining success as driving traffic to their programs is not as interesting a use of a global, real-time information platform as something like the “networked journalism” we saw during the Arab Spring and other events. Obviously, Twitter can still do things to help encourage that kind of activity as well, but if it doesn’t generate the same kind of revenue as a TV deal, how much attention will it get? Not much.

I am as much a fan of discussing shows like the Super Bowl on Twitter as anyone, but I don’t really need another way to find out about the latest NBC sitcom or reality show. I would much rather Twitter focused on filtering and curating the broader universe of discussion around important issues than boosting the viewership numbers of The Biggest Loser. Unfortunately, that’s where the money is.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Dmitris K

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We watch a lot of TV on accident

The average American watches upwards of four hours of TV per day. So while people love to moan about their cable bill, or that there aren’t enough shows on that interest them, clearly it’s hard to complain about TV watching as an overall experience. After all, you turn on the set and about a second later there’s a show playing. No menus to navigate, no buffering, no selection – no work. Many claim that TV is about entertainment, and while that’s certainly a sizable component of it, the best word to describe the value of the TV experience for most people is “escape.”

Once you think about TV as an escape, a lot of things start to make sense. Reality TV shows glorifying what one could consider “moving trainwrecks” get some of the highest ratings, and while they provide entertainment, they also provide much-needed escape – a portal into viewing how someone else’s life can be so much laughably worse than one’s own.

Another point in favor of escape is actual watching behaviors. For instance, research has shown that about 96 percent of TV watching is not deliberate. In other words, most people tend to pick the “next” show during the show they are currently watching, which is well supported by the fact that on average a TV watcher checks his/her program guide about four times per hour.

The era of the infinite channel lineup

But all of this is changing. While many are waiting for “the moment” when TV as we know it will be disrupted, the case can be made that this already happened in March of 2010, when Apple launched the original iPad. Combine the freedom of the iPad with the services offered by the 55 streaming “TV everywhere” apps (and growing) and we are already living in a world where, for a few bucks a month, a person can watch nearly any TV show or movie, on any device they want, in any location of their choosing.

This is the “infinite channel lineup” era, where a virtually endless array of content is available – so long as a user has the patience, interest and means to find it.

But now combine this lean-back TV-watching mentality – designed to let people escape whatever’s going on in their lives – with the dawning requirement that TV watching be about selecting content from seemingly endless arrays of menus and catalogs. Suddenly it looks like there could be a problem brewing.

The end of passive viewing

The first issue is related to the “paradox of choice” conundrum, wherein having near-limitless choice in our viewing options is likely to lead to confusion, frustration, and an ever-increasing sensation of choosing  the wrong show or movie.  While it’s easy to browse a Netflix or HBO GO user interface, and it’s hypothetically easy to choose something, in reality the endless scrolling only decreases the probability of having a satisfying viewing experience.

As the likelihood of a la carte services is only increasing, this is likely to worsen as consumers feel burn-out from wasting money on shows they don’t enjoy.

Secondly, content fragmentation is already leading to a virtual coffee table of TV viewing apps, where each channel or network offers its own, exclusive method of watching shows. Aggregation services such as Hulu were created specifically to decrease the chaos and improve discovery experiences. But with a consumer market showing decreasing loyalty to networks and increasing loyalty to shows, consumers will be faced instead with the obstacle of sorting through catalogs of apps to find which shows they want to watch.

A third factor is the increasing trend of binge or marathon viewing, where a consumer watches a series of a show from start to end (or in order to catch up to the current live season of a show).  Now, to be clear, this is a great new way to experience many shows for consumers, but it, too, is fraught with challenges. The most important underlying issue though may be that the entire concept of the “hot” new show is itself imperiled–after all, why bother waiting a week between episodes when you can watch the whole season on your own schedule, and commercial free, in the very near future?

The curse of plenty

It’s that effect that will inevitably lead to lower ratings for even quality shows, which will ultimately decrease the likelihood of them ever getting hot in the first place. It snowballs from there. High-quality shows could also experience a decrease in their budgets, resulting in an increase in low-cost productions such as reality programming, game shows, etc. This particular nuance could well be the key factor in any disruption of the traditional TV industry – only the consequences do not portend well for TV fans.

It’s hard to imagine that the illustrious freedom of watching any show anytime, anywhere could lead the industry on a path toward worse content that’s also harder to find and enjoy. But it seems fairly inevitable based on current TV trends.

Regardless of the shows people watch, from soap operas to reality TV, the more “work” is required to watch TV, the less it will contribute to the (highly necessary) escape moments that everybody needs on a recurring basis. So what will replace it? Perhaps by 2020 the “hot new thing” will be to pick up a book and read, as it certainly seems easier to escape into a novel than into a frothy sea of apps, menus, channels, networks, streams and shows.

Jeremy Toeman is the CEO of Dijit Media, the startup behind the social TV Guide apps NextGuide and the Dijit Remote. Follow him on Twitter @jtoeman or read his blog at www.livedigitally.com

Photo courtesy of Dave Clark Digital Photo/Shutterstock.com

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The average number of installed applications has jumped to from 32 to 41, which is a 28 percent increase. So why hasn’t the amount of time using smartphone apps jumped nearly the same amount?

Right off the bat, Nielsen says the top 50 apps commands up to 58 percent of all app use. The overall top five apps — likely to account for a good chunk of app usage — are the same as the last time Nielsen offered up its “State of the Appnation” view: Facebook, YouTube, Android Market, Google Search, and Gmail. Four Google apps may sound like much given the popularity of the iPhone, but Android does account for more smartphone market share than iOS.

This heavy usage of the top 50 apps — even though it’s lower than a year ago — doesn’t leave much time for a developer to grab attention from smartphone users, even though overall app installations are up. Putting Nielsen’s numbers in another light: Consumers are spending less time with each app on average.

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