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Comment by flir | Hacker News Reader

"Good idea but before it's time" crashed so many mobile startups pre-iPhone.

I worked for a company that allowed you to play along with jeopardy on your brew/Jme device in real time as you watch the show live on tv. You could compete with your friends in real time, leaderboards, chat etc. The company eventually went under but I can’t help but think if it had been ported to iOS when it came out it would have been a hit. I’ve still never seen any technology like it.

At the time, "second screen" was the term I heard used for those types of experience. The only prominent example I can think of these days is kahoot, which is only sort of the same idea.

Ah yes, I'd forgotten about the phrase "second screen". It was going to be big thing until people realized that no one wanted to look at 2 screens at once.

FWIW I do this all day at work now :)

Teenagers now have a third screen (TV + phone for friends + tablet for watching a streamer)

That's not my experience. There's a constant background hum of "what else have I seen him/her in" in my house.

Not so much "lets all talk about this in realtime!" I admit, but there seems to be a subset of people who use Twitter/Reddit like that when watching politics or sports.

I'm one of them, for example eurovision or euro'20 in a few weeks. Memes and stuff it's literally better than watching it. It just become a base to make memes of

Nobody could have anticipated that YouTube poop would be more compelling than professionally produced television.

The Jackbox series of party games also does this very well.

This was a prototype app we built circa-2012 for a rapid app dev class. Due to time constraints though, we took the less interesting path and ran off pre-time & answer coded data files.

The best thing to come out of the project was the "advertising" video featuring YT casually answering every question correctly. Which is a thing you can do when you've watched the same episode 15 times to record second-level timing!

It always confused me why Jeopardy never pushed anything official.

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