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TV-Time: A Chinese Start-Up Aims to Make Watching TV More Social

Watching TV is almost always an anti-social activity – but one Chinese start-up wants to change that, and is building a social network on discussions around popular TV shows. The TV-time SNS – with newly-made apps for iPhone and Android – aims to fuse China’s love of online discussion boards (BBS), with a fully-fledged mobile social network that encourages either fun or expert analysis of what’s on TV. The TV-time mobile apps break things down into three searchable segments: what’s playing now on TV; ‘hottest’ TV series; and program listings. Using any one these, users can find the shows they like, and then read and/or engage with other viewers in the apps, in the form of comments or starting new discussions. As with BBS, which are so popular in China – especially in the form of Baidu’s (NASDAQ:BIDU) Tieba, or the indie MOP.com – TV-time encourages expert users to lead the way, and thereby make the service into a more insightful watching companion than general news or showbiz websites.

Annoyingly, TV-time demands a separate sign-up, with no third-party login – eg: via Weibo, or Kaixin – yet available. Similar TV-oriented social media sites have taken off in the US, such as GetGlue.

The only trouble I can see with this TV-time is that – in its current, limited form – it’s easily replaceable. If Chinese TV stations were to get a bit more with it and think up hashtags for some popular TV shows – as is now common in the UK and the US – then viewers could engage with each other more easily on Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) or Tencent (HKG:700) Weibo instead.

Check out the TV-time website to sign-up and get mobile downloads.