On Friday, XBox One began to roll out its final major release of 2014 and it includes some major social TV updates.
XBox One owners in the U.S., U.K., and Canada will now see a “Trending” tab in OneGuide that features the top 20 most-watched TV shows. The list will be filtered to display the shows available to users based on their permissions. The trending list is updated every minute so that users can see which shows are popular in real time.
More, XBox One owners in the U.S. will be able to see this trending list based on which shows are being tweeted about the most. When watching shows, U.S. users will actually see tweets associated with the shows displayed across the bottom of their screens – along with the relevant hashtag – so that they can join the conversation.
XBox One as an over-the-top (OTT) platform (as opposed to just a gaming system), is far ahead of Roku, Android TV, and Amazon Fire in terms of how it integrates social. We were expecting a major announcement from Apple TV about how it would begin to integrate Twitter, but it never came.