CBS Viewing Rooms Make Online TV Social

The network hopes to emulate the experience of sitting in a room watching TV with your friends with its new Social Viewing Rooms.

The Internet may have enabled old friends in different cities to catch up every day, fathers to see their newborn sons from 5,000 miles away, and competitive rivals to shoot each other up in multiplayer games without harming a fly, but there’s one social experience it hasn’t yet replaced: watching TV with your friends. CBS hopes to reign in that potential market, though, with its new Social Viewing Rooms, an online application to bring distant friends back together over a virtual boob tube.

The rooms will feature programming from CBS’ primetime, daytime and classic line-ups, and give friends a chance to watch any of the shows in sync, with an interface that allows them to chat, comment, and even throw virtual objects at the screen during the show. The goal: replicate the experience of walking into a room with others and sitting down to watch TV with them.

“The CBS.com Social Viewing Room is a next-generation social media platform that lets users engage with each other and the content they are watching in a fun new way, while at the same time giving advertisers an opportunity to connect with this engaged audience,” said Anthony Soohoo, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Entertainment at CBS Interactive, in a statement.

Intel will serve as the program’s launch sponsor, with advertising for its Centrino 2 processors heavily integrated into the viewing experience. Twenty-eight shows are available immediately for free viewing at CBS.com.