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Comment by oneeyedpigeon | Hacker News Reader

Noone seems to have mentioned the potential for a second screen to augment what's being watched on TV. I'm frequently reaching for phone or tablet to look up details about actors, or references I don't get, or just other related info.

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The author of the article did!

I’m often times checking the live match thread of the game I’m currently watching on /r/soccer (or on /r/baseball if I’m watching a baseball game). It definitely adds up to the basic “watch TV” experience, for better or worst. I’m also actively checking for live scores of other matches playing at the same time.

Honestly, while I'm one of the people who does this a lot, I don't think it always benefits me. I don't watch 'TV', just streamed stuff but I rarely bother to pause it when I look up these details. And that absolutely impacts my viewing experience because if a movie is plot-heavy enough, I can miss chunks of it easily why I try to figure out why that actress in a minor part seems familiar or what the song playing in the background is. Would love to kick the habit but it's surprisingly tough!

I strongly agree! I'd actually quite like a sort of end-notes equivalent for TV shows, but it would have to be tailored to me. Maybe an app that I can tell what I'm watching, that will let me just click a button to store a 'point of interest'. Then, when the show is over (or maybe during the next ad break), I can review the list; each point would tell me actors in the scene, last 10 seconds of dialogue, maybe geographical location - those sort of details.

People watching a twitch.tv stream on their tv would have the livechat on their phone/tablet. Seeing the people in the chat react can make even the dullest stream fun.

This is what amazon x-ray does, but it would be nice if you could connect a phone app with the streaming app so you could look up xray data on the second screen.

I love the Amazon X-Ray feature. I wonder if they patented it, because I’m surprised other players like Netflix or cable providers are not offering something similar. I personally find it adds a lot to my viewing experience without being too intrusive.

I wonder how they get the "actors in this scene" data. I suspect mechanical turk but maybe they have the movie scripts.

Amazon owns IMDb. They have been gathering data about actors for literally decades. They probably have well-trained machine learning models to identify actors on screen. It's really not that hard since they can run it against a narrowed down dataset with the names of the cast.

You can actually cast Amazon video to a chromecast from a smart phone, and then use the smart phone for X Ray. Works pretty seamlessly.

Noone seems to have mentioned the potential for a second screen to augment what's being watched on TV. I'm frequently reaching for phone or tablet to look up details about actors, or references I don't get, or just other related info.

A number of apps developed to do just this have come and gone, but none seem to have succeeded.

But that might not be because the use case doesn't exist; it could be just that google search does a better job than an app

TFA shows a slide w/ data from Nielson. Apparently 71% of people do.

the show "Beat Shazam" does this where you play alongside the contestants.

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