Watching a game or a movie with friends is so much fun because it’s a richly interactive, shared experience. You stand and cheer together when your team scores or jump together when something unexpected happens. And you can rewind the good bits and share related content – all in real time.
Social viewing is a new technology that aims to reproduce the live experience online. The problem is that it’s really difficult to do. Keeping multiple video streams synchronized with millisecond accuracy, coordinating on-the-fly content licensing and sharing reactions are all formidable challenges that no-one has met. Until now.
My guest, Krishnan Rajam, CTO of Groopview, says they’ve done it. Unleashing the full potential of social viewing requires a holistic approach that relies on collaboration and optimization across the entire technology stack — from the memory inside users’ devices all the way up to the cloud and back again. Which is where Micron comes in, helping to optimize CPU, data and battery utilization to provide the best user experience possible. Teamwork is a beautiful thing.
Krishnan also says they want to become a verb. You’ll just have to watch to find out what he’s talking about.
For a deeper dive on how Groopview and social viewing are changing how we stream our favorite shows together, read this blog post from Micron's Carla Christensen.